Episodes

Baseball in Boston can be murder, and we don’t mean The Green Monster. In The Fens, Pamela Wechsler’s third Abby Endicott legal thriller, catchers are turning up dead and suspicions are flying faster than the star pitcher’s curve ball Photo of Pamela Wechsler ©Beth White

An engaging pair of police detectives, an exotic locale, and a turbulent time in history all come together in A Necessary Evil, Abir Mukherjee’s second novel featuring Captain Sam Wyndham and Sergeant Surrender-not Banerjee of the Calcutta Police Force in the years after World War One

Chaos theory, quantum physics and higher math are all part of a day’s work for many of the characters in The Last Equation of Isaac Severy, Nova Jacobs debut crime fiction novel. But while some of the characters may be geniuses, many of the things they do are far from smart Photo of... Read more »

Jane Prescott, the protagonist of A Death of No Importance in Mariah Fredericks’ novel, introduces herself to readers as a “Nobody. Less than nobody.” As a lady’s maid in the first decade of the 20th century, she’s not too far off. Regardless of her station in life, though, Jane has a keen eye. Once again, in her... Read more »

In Rip Crew, the third novel in Sebastian Rotella’s series featuring Valentine Pescadore, the global nature of organized crime is brought home—literally and figuratively, as the story travels from New York City’s financial heart to the border between Mexico and Guatemala to Naples, and the lawlessness of Italy’s mafia

Three years after spitballing doomsday scenarios for a U.S. intelligence agency, thriller writer Ian Ludlow—the protagonist of Lee Goldberg’s True Fiction—sees his horrible imaginings become reality. If that wasn’t bad enough, the agency who hired him would now like to clean up after themselves by destroying the evidence of their nefarious actions, and that means eliminating... Read more »

Part psychological thriller, part police procedural, If I Die Tonight, Alison Gaylin’s new crime fiction novel, is a twisty journey through a small town’s secrets, lies and social media Photo of Alison Gaylin ©Franco Vogt

In Hiroshima Boy, Naomi Hirahara’s seventh—and last—Mas Arai mystery, the American-born Mas travels to Hiroshima, where he lived between the ages of three and eighteen, surviving The Bomb, on a pilgrimage to repatriate the ashes of his best friend. The city of his youth has changed—and not changed—much like its former resident: Mas ... Read more »

The Ghost Notebooks, Ben Dolnick’s fourth novel, defies easy categorization: it’s a be-careful-what-you-wish-for story that’s a mystery, a ghost tale, and a love story, the whole being greater than the sum of its parts Photo of Ben Dolnick ©Todd Heisler

In Head Wounds, Dennis Palumbo’s fifth Dr. Daniel Rinaldi mystery, Rinaldi finds himself playing a deadly game of beat-the-clock with a villain so cunning and diabolical, he’s reminiscent of Hannibal Lecter If you’d like to know more about Dennis Palumbo’s series featuring Dr. Daniel Rinaldi, and Dennis’s “Hollywood on the Couch” column in... Read more »

After a working all day as an analyst handling highly classified material on the CIA’s Russia Desk, Vivian Miller, Karen Cleveland’s protagonist in her debut novel Need to Know, returns home to her husband and four children. All that domestic normalcy isn’t what it appears to be, though, in what becomes a test of loyalty... Read more »

In Jody Gehrman’s Watch Me, character Sam Grist is so enthralled by Kate Youngblood’s debut novel, he enrolls in the writing course she teaches at a small liberal arts college. Sam’s actions through the course of his side of the narrative are a chilling reminder than “fan” is a shortened version of “fanatic”

Amateur sleuths come from a variety of backgrounds—librarians, college professors, vampires—but as a Human Resources executive, Chuck Restic, Adam Walker Phillips’s protagonist in his two published crime fiction novels, The Silent Second and The Perpetual Summer, is unique. And wryly brilliant, too

In False Witness, Andrew Grant’s third installment of his Cooper Devereaux series, the bodies of young women wrapped up like birthday presents are being delivered across the city of Birmingham, Alabama, and Devereaux is in a race against the clock to prevent more murders Photo of Andrew Grant ©Carrie Schechter

Before you settle in to watch the annual Rose Parade on January 1, 2018, start reading Colorado Boulevard, Phoef Sutton’s new Crush mystery. I guarantee you’ll come away with an entirely new appreciation for Pasadena—the parade’s host city—as well as the city’s varied denizens And on January 14, 2018, be sure to catch Phoef’s... Read more »

Don’t let the rarified, bookish air of New York City’s 42nd Street Library lull you into a sense of serenity: there are dark doings and bad people roaming the stacks in Con Lehane’s Murder in the Manuscript Room

In H.B. Lyle’s novel The Irregular, fictional Wiggins—Irregular-in-Chief to Sherlock Holmes in the late 1880s—is recruited in 1909 as a spy by Vernon Kell, the real life founder of England’s domestic secret service, MI-5, to get to the root of German skullduggery and other evil goings on in and around London

In Clea Simon‘s new novel World Enough, it’s 2007 and former music journalist Tara Winton revisits her mid-1980s beat—Boston’s punk rock club scene—in the wake of the apparently accidental death of one of the scene’s prominent musicians. The clash of recollections of her fellow clubsters, though, reveals secrets that many would rather stay buried rather than... Read more »

Righteous, Joe Ide’s second crime fiction novel, continues the story of Isiah Quintabe that Joe began in IQ, which just won the Macavity Award for best debut novel at this year’s Bouchercon. This time Isiah is pursuing two investigations: one into the death of his beloved older brother Marcus and the second into saving his... Read more »

A private island in Long Island Sound, attached to the Connecticut mainland by a bridge, is the setting for Diane B. Saxton’s Peregrine Island, a novel of psychological suspense about the three generations of women who live there—Winter Peregrine, the owner; Elsie, Winter’s prodigal daughter; and Peda, Elsie’s child—and the painting that holds secrets that can change... Read more »

In Magicians Impossible, Brad Abraham’s debut crime fiction novel, even a spy with magical powers feels compelled to protect his son from a life he thinks is too perilous. Jason Bishop, the son, is drawn into the magical world regardless Photo of Brad Abraham © Kirsty Reeves

As much as Nora Watts, the protagonist in The Lost Ones, Sheena Kamal’s debut crime fiction novel, might want the past to stay in the past, it doesn’t. And PI Nora Watts’ search for the daughter she put up for adoption will take her into some very dark corners of her memory as her hunt... Read more »

In The Room of White Fire, T. Jefferson Parker’s first book of a new series, private investigator Roland Ford is hired by Arcadia, an exclusive mental health facility, to find a patient who has escaped. But finding that patient is going to mean traveling through some of the darkest spaces imaginable left over from the... Read more »

In City of Saviors, LAPD Detective Sergeant Elouise “Lou” Norton—the protagonist in Rachel Howzell Hall’s series—is broken, both physically and emotionally. Even so, people are still being murdered and Lou’s job is finding and arresting the killers