Deadly Animals, Marie Tierney’s brilliantly plotted debut mystery, introduces readers to Ava Bonney: a 14-year-old English girl obsessed with decomposing bodies.
Deadly Animals, Marie Tierney’s brilliantly plotted debut mystery, introduces readers to Ava Bonney: a 14-year-old English girl obsessed with decomposing bodies.
John Straley’s nonstop, high-octane Big Breath In introduces the unforgettable Delphine, a 68-year-old cancer patient-turned-investigator.
John Straley’s nonstop, high-octane Big Breath In introduces the unforgettable Delphine, a 68-year-old cancer patient-turned-investigator.
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Beneath the suspense-filled action of a homegrown terrorist plot, Nicholas Petrie’s debut novel, The Drifter, follows the compelling story of one former Marine’s struggle to reacclimate himself to civilian life while honoring his commitment to a fallen soldier. That alone is reason to keep reading, but Petrie amps up the stakes in surprising fashion, creating a story that is moving, thrilling and satisfying on every level.

Like Lee Child’s Jack Reacher, Peter Ash is a loner with an uncompromising sense of honor and duty. A soldier home after deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, Ash is already battling personal demons in the form of a “white static” that constantly threatens his ability to function. The condition, a byproduct of post-traumatic stress, manifests itself whenever he enters confined spaces, forcing him to eschew the modern conveniences of hearth and home for uneasy nights spent under the stars or in his beat-up pickup truck where the wide windows ease his troubled soul.

Upon learning that one of the men he commanded overseas has committed suicide, a guilt-ridden Ash leaves the relative safety of his new lifestyle to aid the widow the man left behind. In the process of rebuilding the woman’s porch, and his own life, Ash finds his former soldier’s mangy dog standing guard over a suitcase filled with $400,000 in cash and four blocks of C4 explosives. Ash sets off on a trail of discovery, both internally as he learns to cope with his affliction and externally as he attempts to determine the origins of the money and the purpose for the explosives—all while trying to keep the widow and her children safe from the men who actually killed her husband.

Petrie’s meticulous research into the effects of PTSD on the nation’s returning veterans and the internal war many of them still fight as they try to resume their normal life brings an added dimension to his main character, but without being preachy. The result is an intimate story of personal discovery as well as an obsessive pageturner of a book.

Beneath the suspense-filled action of a homegrown terrorist plot, Nicholas Petrie’s debut novel, The Drifter, follows the compelling story of one former Marine’s struggle to reacclimate himself to civilian life while honoring his commitment to a fallen soldier. That alone is reason to keep reading, but Petrie amps up the stakes in surprising fashion, creating a story that is moving, thrilling and satisfying on every level.

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Just after well-known British mystery writer Ruth Rendell died in May of this year, at the age of 85, her life and talents were described in the media with words like “brilliant,” “discomfiting” and “challenging.” Readers who’ve long been gripped by Rendell’s imaginative crime fiction, however, knew that already. From her popular Chief Inspector Wexford series with such hallmarks as the top-notch An Unkindness of Ravens and Not in the Flesh, to standalone classics like A Dark Adapted Eye (as Barbara Vine) and A Judgment in Stone, right up to her last, Dark Corners, the author’s unsettling prose has always attracted legions of readers.

Rendell’s final novel, her 66th, achieves the same high quality of work and complexity of character that have been typical of her fiction. Dark Corners indeed visits the dark corners so familiar in her other works: an eerie creepiness disguised as something plain and innocuous; a dark character or two who ominously invade the reader’s consciousness; that page the reader almost doesn’t want to turn.

Carl Martin is a newly published writer with a lovely woman in his life, and he has just inherited a home in an upscale London neighborhood. Who could ask for more? But Carl makes a big mistake—he decides to take in a tenant for the upstairs flat. It sounds harmless, at least to Carl, but renter Dermot is anything but. In true Rendell style, the everyday and innocent gets pushed into the dark and disturbing, as Dermot’s invasion into Carl’s life is relentless, turning it—and the reader’s comfort zone—prickly and unbearable. What follows is a descent into blackmail, murder and drunken oblivion. As one character quietly tells Carl: “I can see you’re suffering, but there is a way to end this, and you know what that is.”

Other writers might have ended with the story duly resolved, with the circle of crime and punishment neatly closed. But Rendell’s clever nightmares usually have something trailing off after the proper ending, so we aren’t quite finished. So it is with Rendell’s last engrossing novel.

Just after well-known British mystery writer Ruth Rendell died in May of this year, at the age of 85, her life and talents were described in the media with words like “brilliant,” “discomfiting” and “challenging.” Readers who’ve long been gripped by Rendell’s imaginative crime fiction, however, knew that already. From her popular Chief Inspector Wexford series with such hallmarks as the top-notch An Unkindness of Ravens and Not in the Flesh, to standalone classics like A Dark Adapted Eye (as Barbara Vine) and A Judgment in Stone, right up to her last, Dark Corners, the author’s unsettling prose has always attracted legions of readers.

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In 1952, Barcelona trembles beneath the oppressive, tyrannical regime of Franco’s fascist party. Ana Marti, a young journalist sick of detailing debutantes’ fashions and high-society scandals, gets her big break when socialite Mariona Sobrerroca is brutally murdered in the exclusive upper part of the city. Ana’s shocked to be assigned such an important case, but she holds her ground while working with Barcelona’s finest detective, Isidro Castro, despite his misogynistic grumblings about working with a woman.

The police announce that the murder was nothing more than an intruder and an incident of unfortunate timing. Ana concedes her curiosity—until she uncovers a bundle of love letters that insinuate a much different story. To meld the pieces of the real account together, Ana enlists the help of her languages-savvy cousin, Beatriz. Ana and Beatriz must tread lightly, as their family is already ill favored for their sympathy for the Republic, and Beatriz has even been ostracized for her writings. As they disentangle truth from lies to nullify the original statement, the two women expose political hypocrisy that will ultimately threaten their lives.

Rosa Ribas and Sabine Hoffman are the writing team behind the pseudonym Sara Moliner. Drawing from Ribas’ experiences of growing up in Francoist Spain and Hoffman’s education in philology, the two authors create a powerful voice that thunders with cultural wit and historical fact. Setting the scene takes a while, but the reader’s patience is rewarded as the historical-political plot sears with sensational revelations implicating the dictatorship’s influential leaders. This is Ribas and Hoffman’s first time working together and surely not to be their last, as The Whispering City is already highly acclaimed in Spain and has been translated into several languages.

In 1952, Barcelona trembles beneath the oppressive, tyrannical regime of Franco’s fascist party. Ana Marti, a young journalist sick of detailing debutantes’ fashions and high-society scandals, gets her big break when socialite Mariona Sobrerroca is brutally murdered in the exclusive upper part of the city. Ana’s shocked to be assigned such an important case, but she holds her ground while working with Barcelona’s finest detective, Isidro Castro, despite his misogynistic grumblings about working with a woman.

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Violinist Julia Ansdell is the troubled heroine of Playing with Fire, a haunting new literary suspense novel by Tess Gerritsen, the best-selling author of the Rizzoli & Isles series and a number of standalone thrillers such as The Bone Garden and Harvest.

On a trip to Rome, Julia finds a strange piece of anonymous music penciled on a loose sheet tucked inside an old book of gypsy melodies. Upon returning to Boston, she plays the piece on her violin, only to find that the music seems to spark violent behavior in her 3-year-old daughter, Lily. Though no one believes her about Lily’s odd violent episodes, Julia becomes increasingly concerned and finally returns to Italy to seek out the music's strange origins.

Alternate sections of Playing with Fire flash back to another story, that of a young Jewish violinist named Lorenzo Todesco in World War II-era Italy, a time of horror and cruelty when fascists come to power and anti-Semitism reaches its apex. This parallel narrative weaves its way toward Julia as she searches for the music’s composer and the origins of its evocative yet disturbing melody.

Gerritsen, a former practicing physician as well as a talented amateur musician, dramatically evokes the strange, stirring melody that imprints itself in the past and present. The author created the musical piece titled “Incendio” that simmers at the heart of Playing with Fire. The melody simply appeared in her head one morning, and immediately she knew the book would center on “the power of music to transform.”

Accurate historical details about an Italy on the brink of terrible war raise this story well above that of an ordinary thriller. Tension rises from readers’ historical hindsight and the sad knowledge of events that will soon unfold. As Playing with Fire reaches its stirring conclusion, the two stories combine into one melody, bringing to light the terrors of past events, the beauty of an innocent love and one young man’s courage that transformed and transcended history’s inerasable marks.

Violinist Julia Ansdell is the troubled heroine of Playing with Fire, a haunting new literary suspense novel by Tess Gerritsen, the best-selling author of the Rizzoli & Isles series and a number of standalone thrillers such as The Bone Garden and Harvest.

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One of the joys of reading a good mystery is feeling like a dope at the end, knowing that the answer was there in front of you from early on but the writer cleverly hid every single clue. Kate Morton’s The Lake House isn’t one of those books. This reviewer figured it all out by chapter 32, and even the book acknowledges that there are a few too many coincidences. Still, the story Morton tells is engaging.

The mystery involves a disappearance from a stately old home on the Cornish coast. But instead of a wayward wife, we have a little boy barely into toddlerhood. Theo, the much longed for son of Eleanor and Anthony Edevane, born after a trio of girls, vanishes during raucous Midsummer celebrations in 1933. For 70 years no one seems to have the foggiest idea what happened to him. Was he spirited away by gypsies? Was he murdered and his body buried somewhere on the grounds of Loeanneth, the ancestral estate? If the story were set in New Zealand, the reader might be tempted to think a dingo got him.

The timeline swings, mostly, between Theo’s disappearance and 2003. By then, Alice Edevane, the second of the sisters, reigns as an octogenarian author of best-selling mysteries and Sadie Sparrow, a young detective, has been relieved of duty for overzealousness. With time on her hands, Sparrow takes up the cold case that involves the long abandoned manse close to the home of her beloved grandfather. Alice, prodded by guilt and curiosity, helps her out.

Another pleasure of the book is Morton’s take on the aftermath of the First World War, which wiped out countless thousands of young men and left survivors like Anthony Edevane traumatized shells. Her other theme is family relations, particularly some characters’ experiences of motherhood. For Eleanor Edevane, motherhood is the fulfillment of her life. Alice Edevane is childless. Other women have had to give up their children, while others will do anything to have one. Anything at all.

Such contemplation of maternity gives this mystery novel a rare tenderheartedness. Whether you figure the puzzle out late or early, it is Morton’s compassion for her characters that keeps you reading.

One of the joys of reading a good mystery is feeling like a dope at the end, knowing that the answer was there in front of you from early on but the writer cleverly hid every single clue. Kate Morton’s The Lake House isn’t one of those books. This reviewer figured it all out by chapter 32, and even the book acknowledges that there are a few too many coincidences. Still, the story Morton tells is engaging.
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Several years ago, after researching his true crime book The Serial Killer’s Apprentice, James Renner was diagnosed with PTSD. It’s not uncommon for journalists to suffer such effects after witnessing trauma for a story, and Renner’s 10 years of hunting serial killers and writing about unsolved murders caught up with him. Fiction provided an unexpected safe haven, and his genre-bending time-travel thriller, The Man from Primrose Lane (2012), was a crime he could finally solve. His latest thriller, The Great Forgetting, digs at a much larger mystery, one with more questions, no generic answers and therefore plenty of room for an imaginative author to play. The result is a mix of conspiracy theorist paranoia, alternate history and cross-country adventure.

The story begins with an epilogue—our first clue that nothing is as it should be—which provides several bizarre nuggets of information: Fourteen years after 9/11, the coroner who oversaw and organized the remains of Flight 93 returns to the crash site, where he finds a severed monkey’s paw, clasping a man’s watch that reads, “RIP, Tony Sanders. 1978 to 2012.” And on the monkey’s palm is tattooed a bright red swastika.

In 2015, Jack Felter has returned home to Franklin Mills, Ohio, to help care for his father, who suffers from dementia. Franklin Mills is a place Jack would like to forget—especially his former love interest Sam, who immediately enlists Jack’s help in finding her husband (once Jack’s best friend), Tony Sanders, who has been missing for three years. Tony’s trail leads Jack to an institutionalized teen named Cole, who promises to reveal Tony’s whereabouts if Jack listens to Cole’s story—and begins boiling his water to counteract the pacifying effects of Fluoride. Jack soon learns about the Great Forgetting, a vast conspiracy that conceals the true events of World War II, contradicting everything he knows about history, science, the government and even time itself.

The Great Forgetting explores humanity’s desperation to forget the worst things that happen to us and the worst things we do to each other. It never loses speed as it reveals large-scale histrionics and builds to a zealous reveal. However, in Renner’s attempt to exorcise our prejudices and transform history, he risks alienating his audience, as many readers may find themselves defensive of their living memory, holding tighter to their real history. Perhaps some things can’t be rewritten, even for fiction’s sake.

Several years ago, after researching his true crime book The Serial Killer’s Apprentice, James Renner was diagnosed with PTSD. It’s not uncommon for journalists to suffer such effects after witnessing trauma for a story, and Renner’s 10 years of hunting serial killers and writing about…
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In real life, British author Peter James rides regularly with the Sussex police on their rounds. This fascination with police procedures and the milieu of law enforcement is amply displayed in his best-selling Roy Grace crime novels, now in its 11th installment with You Are Dead.


A young woman named Logan drives into the darkness of her apartment’s parking garage and disappears into thin air. Before her cell phone goes dead, she screams to her boyfriend that someone is lurking near her car. At almost the same time, local construction workers unearth female human remains while digging through the pavement at a nearby building site. The 30-year-old skeleton that’s uncovered turns out to have strange similarities to those of Logan as well as to another missing young woman. Detective Superintendent Roy Grace and his Brighton-based crime team begin the detailed and painstaking work of uncovering and linking the common elements in these missing persons cases, revealing evidence of the abduction and murder of several young women going back decades. The investigation takes an eerie turn when the forensics team discovers evidence of a tattoo or brand marked on the excavated human remains, reading “U R Dead.”


The book’s most engrossing chapters follow the criminal task force as they search for the small details that may identify the killer. In more grisly chapters, we see aspects of the killer’s methods from another viewpoint, that of Logan, imprisoned in the dark and awaiting horrors she can barely imagine.

You Are Dead is an accurate, unsettling and sometimes mesmerizing depiction of the ways in which a crime squad carries out what seems an impossible task—identifying a killer starting with nothing more than a blurry footprint and unidentified, decades-old human remains. The task force detectives’ work makes readers feel immersed in the detection process from start to finish in a way not often related in such detail in crime novels. Occasionally there’s an “oh, please” moment, as when Grace moves into a hot-button danger scene alone rather than waiting for his on-scene backup. We know it builds suspense, but it’s a jarring note in this otherwise realistic story about meticulous and careful policing.

In real life, British author Peter James rides regularly with the Sussex police on their rounds. This fascination with police procedures and the milieu of law enforcement is amply displayed in his best-selling Roy Grace crime novels, now in its 11th installment with You Are Dead.

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British teen Stella Park (known to all as Spark) needs to escape her widowed mother’s constant neediness. Spark’s brother, Dan, has been successful in distancing himself, finding an internship across the pond in New York City. When Spark learns that Dan’s benefactor, John Stone, is seeking a summer assistant to help organize his papers, she jumps at the opportunity.

When Spark arrives at the grand Stone estate in rural Suffolk, she soon realizes that this is hardly an ordinary summer job. Why does Stone possess incredibly detailed firsthand accounts of life in the 17th-century Versailles court? And why are those written in the same handwriting as more contemporary papers? Spark begins to grasp the truth behind Stone’s complicated history—and to suspect that she may have her own role to play in his story.

Linda Buckley-Archer, best known for her acclaimed Gideon trilogy, combines a historical narrative with a modern-day mystery and a liberal dose of fantasy to create a richly textured novel. Readers will enjoy exploring Stone’s papers alongside Spark, developing their own theories and making their own surprising discoveries about past, present and future.

 

This article was originally published in the November 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

British teen Stella Park (known to all as Spark) needs to escape her widowed mother’s constant neediness. Spark’s brother, Dan, has been successful in distancing himself, finding an internship across the pond in New York City. When Spark learns that Dan’s benefactor, John Stone, is seeking a summer assistant to help organize his papers, she jumps at the opportunity.
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There’s trouble among the upper crust of 1930s London society, and in Ashley Weaver’s absorbing second mystery, Death Wears a Mask, the lovely and aristocratic Amory Ames is once again at the ready. She unmasked a murderer in Weaver’s 2014 debut, Murder at the Brightwell, and now a wealthy acquaintance has sought her help in ferreting out a thief.

Amory attends a dinner party at the Barrington residence, where Serena Barrington sets the stage by confiding to Amory that someone in their circle is making off with her favorite pieces of jewelry, including a ruby earring, an emerald ring and a bunch of sapphires and diamonds, all of which disappeared during social gatherings at her home.

As with detective stories of this genre, the suspects are all present at the dinner, where Serena privately asks Amory to keep her eyes and ears open for clues. The two even hatch a scheme to expose the perpetrator at the next party, a costume ball where once again all the suspects will be on hand. We know, of course, that something will go wrong at the masquerade ball: A shot rings out, and the body of Serena’s nephew, complete with tiger mask, is discovered, shot with his own weapon.

Weaver is a master of clever drawing-room repartee, and readers will have a pleasant time unraveling the mystery, which involves not only robbery and murder but several characters with distinctly unsavory pasts and modes of operation.

As with the first book in this series, Death Wears a Mask revolves around various fraught relationships, front and center being Amory’s ongoing duel with her super-attractive husband, Milo, whom she suspects of various indiscretions with the opposite sex, sometimes captured by gossip columnists and avid photographers at apparently inopportune moments. This theme of romantic doubt, a staple of many mysteries and romances, is clever at first, but our heroine’s wounded innocence begins to chafe once we see that Amory—who receives the attentions of notorious rake Lord Dunmore—is doing pretty much the same thing.

Hopefully this tiresome back-and-forth will be resolved by book number three, as the couple are clearly meant to be a clever crime-fighting duo, 1930s-style, and are much more intriguing and fun when they pursue criminals together.

There’s trouble among the upper crust of 1930s London society, and in Ashley Weaver’s absorbing second mystery, Death Wears a Mask, the lovely and aristocratic Amory Ames is once again at the ready. She unmasked a murderer in Weaver’s 2014 debut, Murder at the Brightwell, and now a wealthy acquaintance has sought her help in ferreting out a thief.

Review by

For nine months The Girl on the Train has been lauded as the best thriller of 2015, but it has some real competition with the arrival of The Killing Lessons, a dark, violent novel from British author Glen Duncan (The Last Werewolf) writing under the pseudonym Saul Black. Set in San Francisco and Colorado, it’s a cross-country race to catch two serial killers that channels the atmosphere of Scandinavia’s celebrated TV noirs with female heroes like “The Killing” (Forbrydelsen) and “The Bridge” (Broen).

Rowena Cooper is baking Christmas cookies for her children when two men appear in her home in the mountains of Colorado, one holding a shotgun, the other a knife. Though they murder Rowena and her son, her 10-year-old daughter Nell manages to escape into the woods. Meanwhile in San Francisco, a team of investigators has been hunting these murderers for months, after they abducted, raped and murdered seven women in different cities before transporting their bodies to another state. The men leave objects inside their victims as a signature—a balloon, a fork, a museum flier. Lead investigator Valerie Hart isn’t sure if they’re meaningful or random, but she’s not sure of anything anymore. Once driven and naive, Valerie has become jaded, resigned and dependent on a drink ever since she “killed love” in her own heart. Though Valerie soon makes a long overdue break in the case, the only person alive who can help her identify the serial killers is young Nell, still missing in the Colorado mountains, who may have escaped one grisly fate only to meet another.

Violent but never gratuitous, Duncan’s first crack at a thriller is a master class in suspense. Phrases like “page-turner” and “it kept me up all night!” get thrown around a lot in the book business, but The Killing Lessons is hands-down the most compelling, addictive novel I’ve read this year.

For nine months The Girl on the Train has been lauded as the best thriller of 2015, but it has some real competition with the arrival of The Killing Lessons, a dark, violent novel from British author Glen Duncan (The Last Werewolf) writing under the pseudonym Saul Black.

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The dead man’s ID says his name is James Putnam. The unfortunate victim of a motor vehicle accident, Putnam was killed instantly on the highway when an oncoming car jumped the divider and plowed head-on into his Porsche.

The problem is that James Putnam has been dead for 15 years.

The aptly titled The Guise of Another, the second thriller from Allen Eskens, shifts into high gear as police detective Alexander Rupert of the Minneapolis Frauds Unit begins a search for the real story: not only for the real James Putnam, but for the reason someone has been impersonating him. The detective uses a cache of letters to discover the imposter’s name, and then tracks both “Putnams” to New Jersey and their former incarnations as college roommates. Alexander works with his brother, Max, a fellow police detective, as the case spirals out from identity theft to a convoluted maze of corruption and crime at the highest levels.

Alexander connects the case to a 15-year-old event involving blackmail and murder aboard a corporate yacht. But uncovering this violent event sends Alexander down a dangerous path. Drago Basta, a powerful assassin working with giant defense contractor Patrio International, is intricately involved with the yacht explosion, and he emerges from the shadows to follow the detective’s every move.

Alexander is no simple character himself, as he tries to counter charges of police corruption leveled against him as well as his police colleagues, triggering his move from narcotics to fraud. And there seems to be no lack of trouble involving the women in his life: Desiree, his faithless wife; Billie, a savvy New York cop whose initiative puts her in jeopardy; and Ianna, who possesses the means to overturn the criminals’ advantage.

Poor editing and lapses in style hinder a smooth read, but The Guise of Another moves at top speed, and although it’s a skin-deep thriller, there are enough plot twists to keep readers absorbed, right through the surprising epilogue.


The dead man’s ID says his name is James Putnam. The unfortunate victim of a motor vehicle accident, Putnam was killed instantly on the highway when an oncoming car jumped the divider and plowed head-on into his Porsche.

The problem is that James Putnam has been dead for 15 years.

Review by

In Art in the Blood, author Bonnie MacBird revives the favored and famous detective Sherlock Holmes and the indispensable, recently married Dr. Watson.

In the aftermath of the Ripper cases, Holmes is riddled with defeat and has regressed to his old cocaine addiction. But when a mysterious perfumed letter arrives addressed to Holmes, along with the happenstantial news of the Greek Nike statue’s baffling disappearance, he’s soon up to his old tricks of disguise and inquiry. This complicated case has Holmes and Watson tearing through the streets of London and caught in the shadowed corners of Paris’ elicit cabarets, where the absinthe might put you in a daze but isn’t nearly as hallucinogenic as the seductive chanteuses serenading from the stage.

Art in the Blood blends the industrial and archaeological developments of the late 1800s with the avant-garde urbanity that tipped the scale and poured life into a booming 20th century. MacBird illustrates the energy leading up to the turn of the century, giving the reader a tantalizing taste of the art and sensuality that defined Bohemian culture, set in high contrast to the seedy side of industrialization and its exploitation of child labor and the corruption of money. And weaving in and out of all this chaos is Holmes, with his astute, hypersensitive observations and clever, sharp-tongued witticisms that only get him in trouble. This is a smashing, fast-paced page-turner that shines.

In Art in the Blood, author Bonnie MacBird revives the favored and famous detective Sherlock Holmes and the indispensable, recently married Dr. Watson.

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Few writers seem to understand the difficult balance between historical detail and suspense better than Edgar Award finalist Matthew Guinn. His second novel, The Scribe, is a master class in historical mystery.

The time is 1881, the place is Atlanta on the eve of the International Cotton Exposition. Post-Reconstruction, the city is ready to present itself as the avatar of the new industrial South, but a string of murders puts all that in jeopardy. Thomas Canby, a former detective who left his job in disgrace, might be the city’s only hope. He must team with Atlanta’s first African-American police officer, Cyrus Underwood, to solve the gruesome crimes, both to appease the city’s elite businessmen—known collectively as “The Ring”—and to save a city still filled to bursting with racial tension.

Guinn brushes in the perfect amount of detail, from Canby’s own experiences with the racial turmoil of the city to the Ring’s power-driven view of the new society they’ve helped to create. This is the South in transition: Everyone wants to rise from the ashes, but the powerful still dictate how and when that happens. It’s a city bent on prosperity, but the divisive views still create a particular kind of powder keg.

The Scribe is a powerful, elaborate page-turner, perfect for fans of everything from Caleb Carr’s The Alienist to Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.

 

This article was originally published in the October 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Few writers seem to understand the difficult balance between historical detail and suspense better than Edgar Award finalist Matthew Guinn. His second novel, The Scribe, is a master class in historical mystery.

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