It’s Private Eye July at BookPage! This month, we’re celebrating the sinister side of fiction with the year’s best mysteries and thrillers. Look for the Private Eye July magnifying glass for a dose of murder, espionage and all those creepy neighbors with even creepier secrets.

They say that writers write about the things that preoccupy them. Our personal interests, our politics, our take on the individuals in our lives. It all has a way of sliding into the story we are writing whether or not that is what we intend. And isn’t that a good and necessary thing? How boring novels would be if there wasn’t some mystery to the making of them. Some alchemy that takes place inside the author’s head that even the author isn’t fully privy to.

So what is the recipe? What proportion of the whole is intellectual effort, and what proportion organic? How much of the leavening energy comes with that first seed? I don’t know. I doubt if even the most analytical writer has that degree of insight – so much of writing comes from instinct, from the love of the story as it is spun through your fingers. But it is always possible to point to certain specific elements, to a scene or a character that we have drawn from life.

Much of The Ruin is inspired by real life, and I’d like to tell you about one experience in particular. About something odd that happened when I was very young.

I was born in Ireland in 1976. It was pre-Celtic Tiger era, there wasn’t a lot of money, and if there had ever been an Irish upper class it had largely retreated, leaving behind little more than remnants of ruined country houses, traces of formal gardens gone to seed. My brothers and sisters and I (there were seven of us) had a happy, ragamuffin childhood. Our parents were loving and hard-working and much too busy to worry about how we entertained ourselves. Every day after school we would dump our schoolbags in the hall and make for the front door, the only limit placed on us that we should return by the time it got dark.

Our parents’ lack of vigilance was largely rewarded. Our games were innocent—hours spent playing rounders in the small park at the top of the street. We played using a steel baseball bat someone’s brother had brought back from America, and tennis balls when we could find them. We played tip-the-can and 40-40-all-free. Our home was one of many in a housing estate located at the edges of suburbia. We were surrounded on three sides by agricultural land, and the fields were a popular playground for the more adventurous among us. The land was a patchwork quilt of small fields, hedgerows, copses and ruined houses. Heaven for a child with an overly active imagination. A narrow river ran through the farmland about four fields down from the edge of our estate. We swam in it once or twice—more for the dare of it than anything else. The river could be crossed easily by walking over the rocks at the top of a small waterfall, but we stayed on our side of the river. Until the day the odd thing happened.

It was sunny the day we crossed the river, though it was a pallid sort of sun that left a chill in the air. We were aimless explorers, making for whatever landmark caught our eye. We found an abandoned farmyard. It had a cobblestone courtyard, some outbuildings with intact walls and roofs. There was something a little bit creepy about the quietness of the place, but we were explorers, so we pressed on. We fell silent as we made our way out into a driveway long gone to seed. Tree branches met and twined overhead, blocking the meagre sun. Halfway down the drive there was a left turn and we took it. It brought us to a house, and the house was in ruins. Part of the roof had collapsed. There were no windows, not even broken glass, as someone had removed the window frames. The doorway gaped dark and open.

We stood stock-still. No one took a step further, there was no teasing, no daring. There was something about that house. Something dangerous, as if it had the power to reach out and grab us, pull us into its depths. We were frozen in place, immobilised by a creeping sense of dread, a sense that we had stumbled into something adult, something dark and perhaps, just perhaps, the door was about to close behind us. The silence was broken by a sudden, loud bang, like a single beat on a base drum, though the reverberations were less perfect, less sonorous. The noise worked like a starter’s pistol on our feet. Every one of us turned and ran back the way we came.

The odd thing was waiting for us in the courtyard. The gateway to the fields beyond, which had been empty when we passed through minutes before, now held a single, rusting barrel. The barrel was upside down, dropped there probably, the sound of it falling into place almost certainly that loud drumming bang we had heard. Running down the left-hand side of the barrel was a fist-sized drop of flesh-coloured, gloopy fluid, as if someone had put five kilos of steak into a smoothie-maker, then upended it on the barrel before the smoothie was quite ready. A fleshy, glistening globule. There was no one there that we could see. We were caught, the four of us, in the middle of the cobbled courtyard. Beyond the barrel lay green fields, the river and home. Behind us lay the dark driveway and the ruined house. The bravest of us made her decision. She ran for the barrel and we ran with her. With every step I took I could feel a phantom hand reach for my shoulder. Surely whoever put the barrel there had plans for four trespassing children.

We ran until our chests burned and our legs stumbled. We splashed our way across the river, and into the safe, familiar fields beyond, but we kept running until we made it up and over the final fence and onto the tarmacadam roads of the estate.

That evening, at our usual noisy family dinner, I told everyone what had happened. My sisters were fighting over a borrowed and broken set of colouring pencils. My brother didn’t look up from his book. I tried again, tried to put weight on my words. I saw my parents glance at each other across the kitchen, a crease of amusement about my father’s eyes, and I knew then that the same thing was happening at three other dinner tables that evening. No one would believe us. Maybe that was understandable. It was an odd sort of story, after all. The kind of thing a child might make up. A story without an ending. The kind of story that sounds exaggerated, built it up with a bit of colour, a bit of extra bite. A fleshy globule.

I’ve thought about what parts of that experience fed the writing of The Ruin. It might be the scary old house. That dark and lonely driveway. Certainly, all of those elements are found in the book. And one more thing, perhaps. The part where the children tried to tell, and no one listened.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The Ruin.

Photo credit Julia Dunin

At the beginning of Fran Dorricott’s debut mystery, a little girl goes missing during a solar eclipse. Sixteen years later, her older sister, Cassie, has returned home, another eclipse is on the way, and another local girl has gone missing. After the Eclipse follows Cassie as she tries to uncover the truth and come to terms with her grief and guilt over the fate of her sister. One wouldn’t automatically assume that inspiration for a devastating crime novel could be found in that safest of places: a bookstore. But Dorricott’s experience as a bookseller provided the key to finishing her first draft, inspiration for her favorite clue and more.

I’ve been a writer for longer than I’ve been a bookseller—but I’ve wanted to be both for as long as I can remember. My local bookshop, which is the one where I now work, was my first memory of seeing a bookshop that looked exactly how I thought a bookshop should look: It’s got three floors, a spiral staircase and floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. It’s stunning. And the benefits of working in such a beautiful place aren’t just the aesthetics.

I’d actually been working at Waterstones for less than a month when I wrote the bulk of After the Eclipse. I’d had the idea earlier that year, drafted a little and gotten myself stuck. Then, I had a chance conversation with a customer. She mentioned that she loved reading books that had strong echoes of the past, like those by Elly Griffiths and Kate Ellis—and I agreed. It was then that I realized: I’d been going about my drafting the wrong way, and I knew exactly how to fix it. I finished the rest of my first draft in less than a month.

The amazing benefits of working in a bookshop boil down to three main points: the books, the staff and the customers. Of course, the books must always come first. Honestly, just being around so many books every day makes me a better writer. Reading good books makes me hungry for more—and it drives me to work harder, take bigger risks, be the writer I want to see on those shelves. It’s amazing how being surrounded by thousands of books every day makes me love writing more. People always assume it would feel daunting, but actually it’s inspiring! All those people succeeded in writing a book that somebody loved, even if that somebody wasn’t me. I would find the space on the crime bookshelves in the store where my own name would sit: right between Eva Dolan and Louise Doughty. It was such a boost to realize I could one day do that, too! Plus, one of the biggest perks of being a bookseller is getting sent early review copies of upcoming releases. Checking the post is literally one of the highlights of my working days.

One of the best things about working with books is working with book lovers. It’s a prerequisite for the job! We eat, sleep and breathe books. Probably about half of my conversations on any given day are about books—and not just surface conversations either. Aside from other writers, booksellers are perhaps the best equipped to have a really fun chat with about the complexities of books we’ve loved: plot, character, pacing, etc. It’s really useful to see those things through a professional reader’s eyes, especially a reader who is selling those books on the ground, who knows what’s selling well and what isn’t, and what their regular customers love or hate. One of my colleagues accidentally helped me to come up with one of my favourite pieces of evidence in After the Eclipse—the mermaid mood ring—when we were discussing our favourite clues.

Which brings me to the customers. I love the customers! It goes without saying that booksellers talk about books a lot among themselves. But what about customers? I’ve had some of the best recommendations for books to try from my customers. A lot of my regulars are more than happy to give me wonderful new authors to try, and they often encourage me to read books I never would normally think to choose. One of my favorite recommendations last year was This Is Going To Hurt by Adam Kay. Not crime at all—not even close! But one of my regulars, who works for the NHS, said they had enjoyed it and was so enthusiastic that I couldn’t not read it. And I loved it.

Plus, customers are often an accidentally brilliant source of inspiration. From the lovely to the wacky to the downright rude, getting to talk to so many different kinds of people every day gives me insight into the world at large. I won’t say I’ve ever murdered one of my customers in one of my books, but I have drawn characteristics from more than just a few. Cassie’s mentor Henry was inspired in part by one of my favorite customers from my first months in the shop—a man in his 70s who walked a few miles into town every week to visit the bookshop and talk about what he was reading.

So beware next time you buy a book. You never know what your bookseller is thinking about. But don’t be afraid to recommend them your latest read—you might make a reading buddy for life.

In Leslie Karst’s fourth Sally Solari mystery, Murder from Scratch, the restaurateur stumbles onto her latest case after taking in her blind cousin, Evelyn, who is convinced that her mother was murdered. Sally and Evelyn’s investigation takes them into the fast-paced, high-stakes world of pop-up restaurants and celebrity chefs, giving Karst the opportunity to feature even more delicious recipes. Here, she shares six cookbooks she finds herself returning to over and over again.

Okay, that title may sound a tad dramatic, especially since—being more of a seat-of-the-pants style cook—I don’t even use recipes all that much. I do, however, love to read cookbooks and to study the techniques described by the experts who’ve come up with or compiled the recipes therein. Moreover, several cookbooks have had a huge impact on me from a young age, opening my eyes to a world of food and cooking far beyond the TV dinners and Jello salads so prevalent during my 1960s childhood.

So here are some of the cookbooks that have most influenced me over the years, listed in the order in which they came into my life.

The New York Times Cookbook by Craig Claiborne
I remember first noticing this big blue tome on our kitchen bookshelf when I was about eight or nine years old. The book was all the rage in the early ’60s, with its recipes for hip, “new” dishes such as rumaki and curried chicken and Eggs à la Russe. It harkens back to the days when the New York Times was the king of newspapers and people enjoyed their food with no qualms about butter or salt or excess calories.

But what was different about the book for me was that both my parents cooked from it. This was a big deal because my dad rarely ventured into the kitchen save to spread butter on saltines, slice a few stalks of celery and mix up a glass of chocolate milk for a light lunch watching the Saturday afternoon Dodgers game on TV. Dad only made two recipes from the book, however: Steak Diane and potato pancakes, which he would make on the same night, to be accompanied by a salad prepared by my mom. I thought it was heaven.

Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child, Louisette Bertholle and Simone Beck
This selection is somewhat disingenuous, as I actually first came to the book by way of Julia Child’s television show, “The French Chef,” during which this big, charismatic gal with a funny voice would demonstrate how to make many of the recipes from her newly published cookbook.

My mother adored the show, and she and I would sit on my parents’ bed in the afternoon and watch it together, Mom with a pen and notepad in hand to take down any recipes that struck her fancy. Later, she would try them out for the grand dinner parties my folks used to throw back in the day when that was a thing. (I miss those fabulous “days of the dinner party” but do my best to keep the tradition alive in my own home.)

Years later, I finally bought my own copy of the cookbook and have tried many of its wonderful recipes, including the to-die-for coq au vin and the labor-intensive-but-well-worth-the-effort cassoulet (which Ms. Child poetically translates into English as “baked beans”).

The Joy of Cooking by Irma S. Rombauer
My mother presented me with a copy of this book when I went away to college. For some years it was the only cookbook I owned, as it contains pretty much everything you need to know to be a quite passable cook—from how to stuff, truss and carve a chicken, to coring artichokes, to whisking up the perfect white sauce.

I once cited The Joy of Cooking as a “learned culinary treatise” in a brief I penned during my years as a research and appellate attorney. I needed to show how much was in the “three glasses of wine” our defendant client had testified that he consumed, and Mrs. Rombauer’s declaration that “an average serving of wine” was the genteel amount of three and a half ounces was highly beneficial to our case.

Sauces: Classical and Contemporary Sauce Making by James Peterson
This was one of my textbooks during culinary arts school, and through it, I discovered the wonders of the five “mother sauces” (béchamel, hollandaise, velouté, espagnole, tomato), from which all the secondary, or “small,” sauces are derived in classical French cooking. In addition, the book instructs about stocks, liasons, butter sauces, vinaigrettes, Asian sauces and even dessert sauces.

If you’re as much of a sauce junkie as I am, then you need to get this book now.

The Classic Pasta Cookbook by Giuliano Hazan
After I’d completed the first book in my Sally Solari culinary mystery series, Dying for a Taste, I realized I should really learn how to make my own fresh pasta if I was going to write books about a restaurant-owning Italian-American family.

This was the cookbook that taught me how. Giuliano is the son of the renowned Italian cookbook author Marcella Hazan, so he should know his pasta—and boy does he ever.

What’s especially wonderful about this book is all its terrific photographs, which not only give step-by-step tutorials on how to mix, roll and cut your pasta but also provide mouth-watering illustrations of what you have to look forward to once you add the luscious sauces and toppings (recipes for which are also included) to your handmade noodles.

Madhur Jaffrey’s Indian Cooking by Madhur Jaffrey
Several years ago, I resolved to teach myself to cook Indian food, since it’s one of my favorite cuisines. The first book I bought in my journey toward unwrapping the secrets of curries, dal, raita and chutney was this one, by the food writer I consider to be the queen of Indian cookery. This book was an offshoot of a TV show Madhur Jaffrey did for the BBC and makes for a perfect primer for learning about the cuisine.

A couple of years later, I was brainstorming ideas for Murder from Scratch and hit upon the idea of featuring a pop-up restaurant serving the kind of Southeast Asian dishes you’d buy on the street from a food vendor—which of course gave me reason to further my culinary education regarding Indian food. Many of the dishes featured in Murder from Scratch were inspired by Jaffrey’s book, including the butter chicken, lamb curry, dal, samosas and naan.

Margaret Mizushima’s latest mystery, Tracking Game, finds sleuth Maggie Cobb and her canine companion Robo on the hunt for both a murderer and a wild animal in the dangerous terrain of the Rocky Mountains. Here, Mizushima lists her favorite crime-solving, very good dogs in fiction.

Like many of you, my family and I love our dogs. My husband is a veterinarian, and he’s happiest when we have a pack of dogs at our house. Right now we have four, all working dogs who either hunt birds or herd cattle. But our experience from years ago when we trained two of our dogs in search and rescue gave me the background I needed for developing the dog character in my Timber Creek K-9 Mystery series.

Robo is a German shepherd trained in patrol and narcotics detection, and he’s Deputy Mattie Cobb’s partner in the fictional mountain town of Timber Creek, Colorado. Along with veterinarian Cole Walker, Robo and Mattie solve crimes that involve animals and humans in their mountain community.

Robo plays a big role in every novel, staying busy with tracking fugitives, searching for evidence, sniffing out drugs and rescuing people. He stars in five books so far, with the fifth, Tracking Game, out today from Crooked Lane Books.

The number of dog characters in mysteries has blossomed over the past few years. I could go on and on listing these great stories, but to get you started on some enjoyable reading, here is a partial list of some of the most popular dogs in crime fiction.

Maggie from Robert Crais’ Scott James & Maggie mysteries
Crais’ Suspect introduces traumatized LAPD officer Scott James, who is recovering from an assault in which his partner was killed and he almost lost his life. He’s barely fit to return to duty until he’s paired with his new partner Maggie, a bomb-sniffing German shepherd that lost her handler in Afghanistan. Their partnership offers healing for both; and if you love Maggie as much as I do, Crais has written a sequel called The Promise that continues the story of this crime-fighting duo.

Hawk from Sara Driscoll’s FBI K-9 mysteries
Lone Wolf is our intro to FBI Special Agent Meg Jennings and Hawk, her search-and-rescue Labrador. It’s a thrilling novel in which this team races against time to track down a bomber who is one of the deadliest killers in the country. Driscoll will release the fourth book in the series, No Man’s Land, later this month.

All of the dogs in Alex Kava’s Ryder Creed mysteries
Alex Kava pens a series featuring FBI agent Maggie O’Dell and Ryder Creed, an ex-marine turned K-9 rescue dog trainer. In Breaking Creed, one of Creed’s narcotics detection canines discovers a secret compartment on a commercial fishing vessel off the Pensacola Beach coast. But the Colombian cartel’s latest shipment isn’t drugs—it’s people. There are five books in the series so far.

Elvis from Paula Munier’s Mercy & Elvis mysteries
A Borrowing of Bones by Paula Munier features ex-soldier Mercy Carr and retired military K-9 Elvis, who were both traumatized when Mercy’s fiancé—also Elvis’s handler—was killed on their last deployment. Blind Search, the second book in this Vermont-set series, is out now.

Clyde from Barbara Nickless’ Sydney Rose Parnell mysteries
Blood on the Tracks is book one in this thrilling series featuring railroad police Special Agent Sydney Rose Parnell and her Belgian Malinois partner Clyde, both haunted by their time spent in the military in Iraq. Set in the depths of an icy Colorado winter, Parnell and Clyde descend into the underground world of rail riders to solve a murder. There are three mysteries in this series so far.

Chet from Spencer Quinn’s Chet and Bernie mysteries
Spencer Quinn introduced a wise and lovable canine narrator in Dog On It, the first book of the Chet and Bernie mystery series. In this first episode, Chet teams up with Bernie, a down-on-his-luck private investigator, when they take on a new case involving a frantic mother searching for her teenage daughter. Currently, there are nine mysteries in this entertaining series.

The novels listed here offer reading pleasure to mystery lovers and dog lovers alike. I invite you to partake and hope you enjoy the twists, turns and adventures as much as I do. Here’s wishing you happy reading!

Sarah Stewart Taylor’s The Mountains Wild is a simmering, immersive mystery that follows Maggie D’Arcy, a Long Island detective who journeys back to Ireland after learning that traces of her cousin Erin, who disappeared in the woods of Wicklow when both she and Maggie were in their early 20s, have been recovered.

In this essay, Taylor shares the haunting inspirations behind her debut novel: a series of real-life disappearances, and a friend who wasn’t who she said she was.

In September 1993, I moved to Dublin, Ireland. I had just graduated from college and the gesture was pure impulse, loosely inspired by a really good Irish literature seminar I’d taken my senior year and the week I’d spent in Dublin and the Dingle Peninsula the summer before. I used my summer job savings to buy a one-way plane ticket; I figured I’d work and travel for a bit and then come home and get a real job. I stayed for 2 1/2 years.

Not long after I arrived, I was in the back of a crowded car on an autumn night when the newly chilled air crept up steeply winding roads, driving back up to the city from a famous and somewhat touristy pub high up in the Dublin Mountains, and I heard for the first time that an American woman had disappeared in these mountains—perhaps near the pub—only a few months before I’d arrived in the country. I remember an Irish friend saying, “You’re from Long Island? Just like the girl who disappeared,” and warning me to be careful, as though the disappearance had something to do with Long Island, with being American.

I loved Dublin, immediately and completely. I find that many people, if they are lucky, can point to a place from the era of early adulthood that will always be The Place, the place we became ourselves, the place we had romantic adventures, the place we experienced soul-crushing loneliness and soul-lifting community, the place we discovered what we actually like, what we want and with whom, given the choice, we like to spend time. For me, it was Dublin. I loved every street I explored, every pub and coffee shop and bookstore and butcher shop. I worked for a while and then ended up going to graduate school there.

I walked the city endlessly in those years, striding along empty roads late at night, never afraid, despite the disappearance of the American woman. I once went hiking alone in the mountains where she’d disappeared. I thought about her and wondered. I thought about her family. It wasn’t until I returned home to the States that, thanks to the advent of online news, I started to follow the news about her still unresolved case, and the subsequent disappearances of Irish women in roughly the same region of the country, between 1993 and 1998. It was quite clear, in most of the cases, that something terrible had happened. By the end of the decade, what appeared to be the series of linked disappearances stopped.

Certainly, my novel The Mountains Wild has its origin in the tragedy of these unsolved mysteries. My main character Maggie D’arcy travels, fruitlessly, to Ireland when her beloved and troubled cousin Erin disappears in the Wicklow Mountains. Twenty-three years later, another young woman goes missing and new evidence suggests Maggie and her family may finally get the resolution they’ve been seeking. It was the thought of what the families of all of the missing women must be going through, how the lack of resolution and certainty must have haunted them, must haunt them still, that stuck with me. I think the novel must have started turning in my head two decades before I began to write it.

But if at first it seemed to me that I was writing a novel about those disappearances, I have since realized that, as is the case with many books, it’s much more indirect and complicated than that. If the real-life cases provided a spark of circumstance, it was another experience—and another woman—that provided me with the heart of my story and the themes and questions I wanted to explore. The experience was this: During those years I lived in Dublin, I had a friend who turned out not to be who she said she was. The name we knew her by was not her name. The details about her life that she told us were not true.

Looking back, of course there were things we should have picked up on.

I made a group of friends in Dublin who were all connected to a youth hostel where some of us lived and some of us worked. We were Irish and French and Scottish and English and American and Italian. It was a heady time. The constant coming and going of other young people from all over the world was life changing and life defining for me, but there were permanent characters among those of us who lived in the hostel too: an alcoholic house painter, a narcissistic and nocturnal Anglo-Irish artist. C. arrived in the middle of the night, ill, and with a heartbreaking story about arriving in Dublin to discover her husband was having an affair, no longer wanted to be married and had cut off her access to their bank accounts. She was Irish, but had been living in London for many years and they were moving back. She had no family left in Ireland, no way of making a living. There was something fragile about her that made you want to help her and she was fun to talk to; we spent a lot of nights listening to her stories and laughing.

Looking back, of course there were things we should have picked up on. I was working at a pub and always had a lot of small bills and coins in my jacket or backpack. Sometimes I would think I had a 20-pound note in my pocket and when I went to find it, it was gone.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The Mountains Wild.

At some point, my passport and Social Security card disappeared out of my backpack, but I told myself I’d been careless, leaving it around at work, and I assumed that’s where it had been stolen. Meanwhile, C. and J., one of our friends who worked at the hostel, decided to get a flat together. C. told us she’d gotten a job as an accountant. I was now working as an au pair and living with the family for whom I worked, but on the weekends I would often stay at their flat after we’d gone out to the pubs or clubbing. Other friends of ours would stay too and for a while, it was one of those roommates-like-family-everyone-lying-around-hungover-on-Sunday-mornings situations.

One night we came back to the flat to find C. sitting on the couch, claiming that a friend of hers from work had been over for a drink. They’d had a great time, she said, recounting stories the friend had told her. But something felt off. There were two glasses on the coffee table, but it was clear that only one wine glass had been filled. One Monday morning, after staying at the flat for the weekend, I told C. I’d walk with her as far as her office and then take the bus home. She seemed nervous during our walk and when I left her outside her office, I walked on and then looked back to see her furtively walking back towards the flat. I thought to myself, She doesn’t work in that building. Soon after, she told us she was going on medical leave. J., who was living with C., started to become suspicious about where C’s money was coming from. There were excuses for anything that seemed strange, more lies, stories that drew you in and made you want to believe that she really had been unfairly let go. But finally, J. searched the flat and found disturbing things, including piles of stolen mail and checkbooks, IDs in different names, checks written by a man to a woman whose name we’d never heard before. J. moved out and we heard later that C. had been arrested. We could never get any other information.

. . . was there a question I could have asked that might have broken the whole thing open?

I sometimes think that that’s when I became a crime writer. It was maddening. The name we had was fake, the details too. We had so many questions. How had we been fooled? Who was she? The one that stuck with me was: How could I have thought I knew someone and, in fact, not have known her at all? Was there a question I could have asked that might have broken the whole thing open?

These ideas—the parts of the people we care about that are never truly known to us and the crucial questions we should ask, but don’t—are the thematic source of my novel about a very different and real-life disappearance.

Undoubtedly, there was a sad story at the root of C.’s deception, but because we never found out, the experience haunted me, and eventually found its way into a novel inspired by the real-life cases of disappeared women in Ireland. But C. is at its heart. I will always wonder who she really was, what happened to her, whether she might have told me the truth if I had only asked the right question, if perhaps she was only waiting for someone to ask it.