CrimeReads: Bad Love, Good Sex: The Best Thirst Traps in Crime Fiction. https://crimereads.com/bad-love-good-sex-the-best-thirst-traps-in-crime-fiction/
Tag: Fiction
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CrimeReads: Gone, But Not Forgotten: 12 Great Mystery Authors Readers Still Love
CrimeReads: Gone, But Not Forgotten: 12 Great Mystery Authors Readers Still Love. https://crimereads.com/12-great-mystery-authors-readers-still-love/
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CrimeReads: 10 New Books Coming Out This Week ‹ CrimeReads
CrimeReads: 10 New Books Coming Out This Week ‹ CrimeReads. https://crimereads.com/10-new-books-coming-out-this-week-february-7-2022/
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Good Rich People and the Bad Games They Play
Lyla and Graham Herschel like to play games. Not board or video games. Too boring for this ultra-rich restless couple who live in a home high up in the Hollywood Hills and not too far from Graham’s overbearing mother who would certainly win any mother-in-law from hell contest.
No, the games they like to play involve destroying people’s lives. And that’s what they intend to do to Demi Golding, who they believe is a high earning executive at a tech company.
In Good Rich People, Eliza Jane Brazier, sets up an unwitting match between these heartless trio and Demi, who is homeless. But they don’t know that. By luck—and the cunning of those always on the brink of catastrophe—she has the necessary information to take them up on an offer to live on their property.
Typically, son, mother, and wife set people up so they lose everything—their jobs, reputations, and money. But Demi doesn’t have any of those to lose and she’s learned how to survive during her tumultuous childhood, a skill she really needs to try to outwit the threesome who, suffocating with boredom, have upped their game to include murder.
Brazier, who lived in London for years but now resides in California, knows a little bit about homelessness and having to scrabble to survive. After moving to England, she lost her job and was lucky enough to be taken in by a kindly man who would become her future husband.
“He was always taking people in and helping them,” she says about her musician spouse who is now deceased.
The jobs she was able to find didn’t pay enough to give her security and so what writing about the ultra-rich versus the poor really resonates.
It’s typical of Brazier to draw upon her experiences for her books.
“I worked at a ranch in Northern California which is where my book, If I Disappear, is set,” she says in a phone interview where she’s working on her fourth book. Her third, set in Los Angeles where she lives, is already written.
When I ask her if the real ranch was as creepy and weird as the one in her book, she laughs and tells me it was worse. Wow.
Life is different now with the success of her books. Brazier says she was always a storyteller but didn’t have confidence in her writing ability. When she finally decided to give it a try, she spent a lot of time honing her writing skills and learning the business. Now, she not only is writing mystery novels but also is developing If I Disappear for television.
“It’s still unbelievable,” she says about the turn her life has taken. “I’m still somewhat in denial.”
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How to Marry Keanu Reeves in 90 Days
At first Bethany Lu Carlisle can’t believe what she’s hearing. Keanu Reeves, her super crush forever, is getting married in three months. No way, she thinks trying to dismiss the thought before doing a frantic internet search to find out if it’s really true.
It’s a vulnerable time for Lu. She’s having difficulty with her creative process which is a fundamental problem given that she’s an artist with a show coming up at her best friend Dawn’s New York City gallery. She also is fielding a business offer from a shark-like, uber rich entrepreneur who wants to brand her work. It’s a very lucrative deal but Lu is afraid of losing control over her own work and besides the guy is way too “hands-on.” Plus, her other best friend, True, the handsome college professor who wrote a definitive and highly praised book on some type of economic theory—Lu hasn’t read it—is getting job offers from West Coast businesses and has an attractive and overly-friendly research assistant. Like Keanu, True has been a serious crush for Lu but she’s never let him know it. We don’t think it’s a spoiler alert to let you know that he’s been crazy over her for the last 20-plus years as well.
All this calls for a drastic shake-up to get her life back on track and what better way than to track down Keanu and convince him if he’s going to marry, then she’s available.
Sure, it sounds flaky but remember How to Marry Keanu Reeves in 90 Days is a romantic comedy (rom-com) written by USA bestselling author Kwana Jackson under the pen name K.M. Jackson. It’s the latest in the many rom-coms novels she’s authored.
Jackson, who was born in Harlem, is just as obsessed with Keanu as Lu and it seems to be a real life family trait.
“I called my mother today like I do every day and she was busy watching a John Wick movie,” she said in a recent phone interview.
For the five people in this country who don’t know, John Wick is a lethal and ruthless assassin played by Keanu Reeves in a series of movies by the same name. Retired, Wick is forced back into business to track down his adversaries—a seeming endless task that results in a high rate of carnage in each of the four movies.
The idea for her book started with a fun tweet Jackson posted after realizing the next Matrix movie starring Reeves as well as the newest John Wick film would come out on the same day.
“When I saw that, I tweeted don’t bring out your next book on Keanu day,” said Jackson who was bombarded with comments about the book she was supposed to write and told by her agent she’d better get to work on it.
But that really wasn’t a problem for Jackson.
“I’ve always been an un-ashamed romance book lover and romance has given me a wonderful place to escape into when I need a place to decompress,” she said. “It makes me happy to write a place for people to escape into.”
This review previously appeared in the NWI Times.
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Article: Mystery Writers of America Announces the 2022 Edgar Award Nominations
Mystery Writers of America Announces the 2022 Edgar Award Nominations https://flip.it/4wuPbl
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The Guardian: The best recent crime and thrillers – review roundup
The Guardian: The best recent crime and thrillers – review roundup. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/jan/14/the-best-recent-and-thrillers-review-roundup
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Article: 10 Classic Crime Stories That Have Just Entered the Public Domain in 2022
10 Classic Crime Stories That Have Just Entered the Public Domain in 2022 https://flip.it/Pbeef_
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All Her Little Secrets
Most of us keep secrets from those we love—whether it’s simply misdirection about how much that new dress really cost or an outright lie like what really happened at the work party your partner couldn’t attend.
But in Wanda Morris’s All Her Little Secrets, attorney Ellice Littlejohn has taken it to a new level. Sure, she graduated from an Ivy League Law School and she’s extremely bright and hardworking. She’s also the only Black lawyer at the company where she works. Indeed, she is just one of a few Blacks working there at all. Which explains why there’s a constant stream of protestors outside the company’s building protesting their hiring practices.
But who is Ellice? She’s not from Atlanta, Georgia like she tells everyone. Instead, she grew up in a poverty-stricken small town where she lived with her alcoholic mother and sadistic stepfather. She did attend a prestigious boarding school, but it was as on an academic scholarship not because she was a rich kid like most of the other students. And no, she’s not an only child, but her brother Sam, who she dearly loves, has been in and out of jail. That’s not the kind of back story Ellice has created for herself. It doesn’t go with the fancy condo, expensive clothes and car that define her Atlanta lifestyle, one she’s perfected to keep others from finding out about her past including what exactly happened to her stepfather whose body has never been found.
All these falsehoods start to unravel when she takes the elevator up to the 20th floor to meet with Michael, her boss, for one of their all-too frequent early morning meetings. But Michael’s dead, an apparent suicide and Ellice instead of calling for help, leaves.
Michael is also her long-time lover. The problem, at least it would be for some women, is that he’s married. But Ellice isn’t sure if she loves him nor is she certain she wants to take over his job when offered that plum promotion. She’s been keeping secrets for too long to know what she wants or how she feels.
As complicated as all this is, it becomes even more so when the police discover Michael was murdered. To add to the stress, Ellice’s brother Sam was caught on camera using his sister’s ID to get past security at the office. Did Ellice have Sam kill Michael so she could get his job and his plush office (redecorated, of course), or did she kill him herself? And why won’t the police believe her when she tells them that Michael had discovered criminal activity on the 20th floor?
Morris, who has held positions as an attorney in several Fortune 100 companies, says she thinks both her work as Black female lawyer and her fascination with thrillers helped shape the story.
“Ellice’s experiences are an amalgam of what many women experience in their lives,” says Morris, who is married with three children and lives in Atlanta. “Think about it, you are the only women working in a predominantly white male space and your colleagues despise you simply because of your race and/or gender and put obstacles in front of you.”
A fan of mystery/thriller writers like Karin Slaughter, Lucy Foley, Walter Mosley and Joe Ide, Morris wants readers to see the distinctive viewpoint Black female writers can bring to the genre.
“I’ve always enjoyed books by other thriller authors like John Grisham and Joseph Finder, but I couldn’t find many books like theirs with female protagonists who liked me,” she says. “Black women should be able to find themselves in all types of books including thrillers with smart, sophisticated Black women chasing down bad guys through dark office towers at night without a gun or an ounce of regret.”
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The Attic on Queen Street by Karen White
Karen White and I are talking about ghosts, particularly the ghosts haunting Melanie Middleton Trenholm in White’s latest novel, The Attic on Queen Street, the last in the series set in haunted Charleston, South Carolina.
“Do you believe in ghosts?” she asks.
Not really, I reply, but I also don’t like staying in places that are supposedly haunted when I’m by myself.
White feels the same way because, as we both agree, you just never know.
It’s then that her phone goes dead.
“I don’t what happened,” says White when she calls back. “My phone was charged and everything.”
Coincidence? Most likely. But still, it makes you wonder.
But phones going dead are the least of the problems for Melanie, a Charleston real estate agent with young twins, a husband who is deciding whether he wants to stay in the marriage, and a teenaged stepdaughter whose room is haunted. Indeed, the entire house on Tradd Street is haunted. Some of the ghosts are helpful, some are evil, and one is the ghost of a dog—which is fine as it gives Melanie’s dog a companion to play with. And to make matters worse, Melanie’s young daughter is already showing signs of being able to see ghosts.
Ghosts are such a problem that Melanie learned early on to sing ABBA songs loudly to drown out the sounds of the dead people trying to talk to her. But that only works sometimes and in this novel there’s plenty of evil for Melanie to deal with both living and dead. For starters there’s Marc Longo, who stole her husband’s manuscript and turned himself into a bestselling author. Longo is now heading a film crew in Melanie’s house while underhandedly trying to discover the diamonds he believes are hidden there. Melanie is also trying to aid a good friend in discovering who murdered her sister years ago—with the help of the cryptic messages the deceased sister keeps sending her way. And then there’s Jack, her handsome husband. They’re still in love but Jack is darned tired of Melanie always getting herself into deadly situations.
White first introduced us to Melanie in The House on Tradd Street in what was to be a two book series.
“But when it came out and was so popular, my publisher said let’s make it four,” says White. “This is the seventh and I’m really going to miss them.”
Well, kind of, as White is continuing the theme of a haunted city and the Trenholm family, only with Melanie’s stepdaughter in the key role who has to deal with her only supernatural beings when she move to New Orleans in a book due out this coming March called The Shop on Royal Street.
Interestingly, the Tradd Street series was originally going to be set in New Orleans. White went to Tulane University and in 2005 she was all set to go with her family back to New Orleans to do research for the first book when Hurricane Katrina hit.
“I knew that there was no way with all the catastrophic flooding, and deaths that I could write this story without having Katrina in it and this wasn’t that kind of book,” says White, who has authored 23 books,
Choosing Charleston made sense as White had ancestors who lived in Charleston in the late 1700s and family who had lived on Tradd Street. In ways, she says that when she visited, she felt the pull of genetic memory—a sensation of a past shared life.
“I smelled what they call pluff—which is rotted vegetation,” recalls White, “and I said oh doesn’t that smell so wonderful.”
Coincidence? Doubtful.
The Attic on Tradd Street is also available as an audiobook and electronically.
Shelf Life 