Episodes

All Paris Peralta wants in Things We Do in the Dark, Jennifer Hillier’s new suspense novel, is to live a quiet life. Well, as the saying goes: make a plan and the gods laugh. Paris is arrested for her husband’s murder and even she has to admit it doesn’t look good, she’s found next to... Read more »

It’s been twenty long years, but Glaswegian auctioneer extraordinaire Rilke is back with his merry band of pranksters in The Second Cut, Louise Welsh’s follow up novel to her remarkable The Cutting Room. The times may have changed—tech-savvy Rilke is now meeting men on Grindr instead of in pubs—but remarkably, Rilke, Rose, Anderson and Les,... Read more »

In Winter Work, Dan Fesperman’s new thriller, it’s the winter of 1990, the Berlin Wall has fallen and the fall of East Germany has ignited a feeding frenzy among competing—think C.I.A.—and complementary—think K.G.B—intelligence agencies. And for the East German operatives who will soon be out of work, it’s a matter of who is buying and... Read more »

In his debut novel, An Honest Living, Dwyer Murphy takes readers on an odyssey through time and space in turn-of-the-21st-century New York City, complete with its own Ulises, who just happens to be a Venezuelan poet. Along this journey with nods to past noir novelists such as Ross Macdonald and Raymond Chandler (think mysterious beautiful... Read more »

The last thing Hudson Miller, the protagonist in It Dies with You, Scott Blackburn’s debut crime fiction novel, wants to do is return to his hometown of Flint Creek, North Carolina. But when his father is shot and killed, it’s the first thing he has to do Photo of Scott Blackburn ©Ross Fletcher... Read more »

If 99 Miles From L.A., P. David Ebersole’s debut crime fiction novel, sounds like it should be the title of a song, that’s because it is. Written by Hal David and Albert Hammond—and sung by everyone from Hammond to Julio Iglesias to Art Garfunkel (a decidedly disturbing version)—it’s Johnny Mathis’s take that inspired Ebersole, and... Read more »

When Kaveri Murthy, the recently married headstrong young woman in The Bangalore Detectives Club—Harini Nagendra’s debut historical crime fiction novel that takes place in 1921—witnesses the aftermath of a murder at a club where the cream of Indian society can socialize with members of the British Raj, she does what’s in her nature to do:... Read more »

Aimée Leduc is back in Murder at the Porte de Versailles, the 20th installment in Cara Black’s arrondissement-specific series that takes place in November 2001, in a fraught post-9/11 Paris. This time Aimée is racing around the 15th arrondissement, a residential part of Paris that, Cara explains, is where you move after you finish your... Read more »

In The Echos, Jess Montgomery’s fourth installment of the Kinship mystery series, Sheriff Lily Ross has an unimaginable amount on her plate. Or should we say, plates? It’s July 4th, 1928, and Lily is dealing with the security for the new amusement park when a murder of a young woman, who may or may not,... Read more »

Is there any location riper for noir than a small town high school? Except maybe the heart of a teenager? Stewart O’Nan’s new noir novel Ocean State, isn’t so much a “whodunit” as a “why-dunit” story of the murder of a teenage girl and the ripples the crime and its aftermath cause in a small... Read more »

From the lush improbability of the Hotel Bel-Air’s Swan Lake to the wild and weird of Death Valley, it’s no wonder LAPD Detective Margaret Nolan is feeling both personal and professional whiplash. People are turning up dead in L.A. and secrets are escaping from the desert and it’s her job—along with fellow LAPD Detective Remy... Read more »

Captain Sam Wyndham and Sergeant Suran Banerjee are back in The Shadows of Men, the fifth installment in Abir Mukherjee’s series set in post-World-War I Calcutta. Banerjee has found himself in a spot of bother, in that he’s been accused of murdering a Hindu scholar in a same-as-it-ever-was story of political and religious tension as... Read more »

Alison Gaylin opens The Collective, her latest thriller, with a quote from Euripides’ Medea, “Hate is a bottomless cup; I will pour and pour.” Meet Camille Gardner who, five years after the death of her daughter as the result of a violent sexual assault, is living at the intersection of grief, anger and vengeance. It... Read more »

Syria isn’t the only thing aflame in Damascus Station, David McCloskey’s debut thriller set against the ongoing conflict: McCloskey’s protagonist, CIA officer Sam Joseph, has fallen for a source, strictly forbidden, but the heart wants what the heart wants. Only, when it comes to the CIA “F-ups happen to good officers. Deception does not. You... Read more »

In Road of Bones, James R. Benn’s 16th installment of his Billy Boyle series of World War II mysteries, Billy is off to the USSR, where gaslighting is a way of life, a map cannot be found for love or money, and Night Witches take to the skies to silently rain terror on Germans fighting... Read more »

From the outside looking in, Paloma’s life in My Sweet Girl—Amanda Jayatissa’s debut thriller—seems charmed. Adopted from a Sri Lankan orphanage at age twelve, Paloma has grown up with loving parents surrounded by affluence in San Francisco. Now, at 30, Paloma is grappling with events from her past and dealing with ghosts, some more real than... Read more »

In Striking Range, Margaret Mizushima’s seventh installment in her Timber Creek K-9 mystery series, Timber Creek County Deputy Mattie Cobb braves ice storms and murderers while looking into the death of a young woman and the kidnappers of the woman’s newborn

At the start of Karen Cleveland’s new thriller, You Can Run, it’s just a normal day for CIA reports officer Jill Bailey, who postpones approving a new intel source to take a break and log into the video stream from her son’s daycare. Only he’s not there. To get him back Jill must do “just... Read more »

Enola Holmes shares many of her much older brother Sherlock’s skills and she brings them to bear in maybe her most challenging case so far, Enola Holmes and the Black Barouche, the latest installment in Nancy Springer’s delightful series. Because back in the day in Victorian England, a husband, father, or, for that matter, a... Read more »

Eight volumes in, Speaking of Mysteries co-founder Les Klinger talks about the astounding series of vintage mysteries that he edited, wrote introductions for and annotated for The Library of Congress Crime Classics. The choices may not be household names—in the homes of crime fiction fans, that is—but all them are significant for the quality of... Read more »

When a young Afghani boy survives a massacre, undercover DEA Agent Garrett Kohl—the protagonist in Down Range, former CIA-analyst-turned-operative Taylor Moore’s debut thriller—takes him home to the Texas Panhandle to keep him safe. And while the Taliban may be thin on the ground in Texas, they aren’t the only threat to Kohl, Kohl’s family—and the... Read more »

In Jeff Abbott’s aptly-named new crime fiction novel An Ambush of Widows, (ambush is the collective noun for widows) two men with no apparent connection to each other are shot and killed in a warehouse in Austin, Texas. Coming from two different directions—literally, philosophically, and socio-economically—their two widows, Kirsten and Flora, must join forces to find... Read more »

In The Hollywood Spy, the tenth installment in Susan Elia MacNeal’s World War Two-era series featuring spy-code breaker-bomb defuser, Maggie Hope, Maggie has decamped to Hollywood with her close friend Sarah Sanderson, who is going to film a movie choreographed by George Balanchine. It’s a Busman’s Holiday, however, as there are Nazis everywhere. Oh, yes,... Read more »

As if going to the funeral of your sister—someone from whom you are occasionally estranged—isn’t bad enough, getting a posthumous email from her during the service accusing her now widower, Theo—the scion of the wealthy Thraxton family—of murdering her, is certifiably creepy. So opens Her Last Breath, Hilary Davidson’s latest mystery, for Deirdre Crawley. Secrets and... Read more »