Don’t miss Walter Mosley, Richard Osman, and more of your favorite mystery authors at a FREE virtual event tomorrow, October 13th! Starting at 11:00 AM ET, log in to the Mystery / Thriller Community Hub to access sessions, engage in Community Conversations, and explore the books being featured during the event.
Kicks of at 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM ET Award-winning authors Walter Mosley (Blood Grove) and Kellye Garrett (Like a Sister) join moderator Gabino Iglesias (The Devil Takes You Home) for a ground-breaking conversation about crime, justice, and the search for truth.
Test your mystery knowledge at The Immersive Q&A Experience at 2:00 PM ET. Think you’ve got what it takes to make it through this interactive and immersive experience? Join your fellow mystery / thriller aficionados in an interactive guessing game for a chance to win prizes! This event is FREE for members of the Edelweiss Mystery / Thriller Community.
Click here to become a member and access sessions on October 13th.
A funeral at a posh island resort isn’t supposed to be fun, but in Lexie Elliott’s new mystery, How to Kill Your Best Friend, it’s more than sad, it’s deadly. And complicated.
Georgie, Bronwyn, and Lissa are close friends having swam competitively together in college. But there long have been undercurrents in the relationships particularly after Bronwyn had an affair with Lissa’s first husband now deceased.
“Lissa, the strongest swimmer of them all, has somehow drowned off the coast of the fabulous island resort she owned with her husband,” says Elliott, who tells the story through the eyes of Georgie and Bronwyn. The two are among a group of mourners—all with interconnecting ties going back to college. But beyond the grieving are questions—and soon violence. Georgie is attacked and both she and Bron begin receiving threatening messages. Plus, there are so many secrets including whether the posh resort is going bankrupt. But even more so, are questions about what really happened. After all, why would Lissa swim in an area known for its deadly currants and is she really dead? And why did Georgie believe that the only way to stop Lissa from murdering again was to figure out the best way to kill her.
A sudden storm hits the island, cutting them off from the mainland and leaving the friends to figure out whether Lissa is really dead or not and who can they trust as the winds crash through windows and turn glass and roofing into weapons while the rains pelt down.
Like the characters in her book, Elliott says her life has always been steeped in chlorine.
“I swam competitively through my school years and represented Oxford University in both swimming and water polo,” she says. “I first dabbled in open water swimming whilst at Oxford and won the Scottish Open Water Championships in the year 2000. Post university, I switched across to triathlons, but after I had my first child, I dipped my toe back into the open water swimming scene and ultimately swam solo across the English Channel in 2007. It took me twelve and a half hours and it was very cold and very far; whilst I’m delighted to have done it, I have no intention of ever doing it again.”
Elliott may be the last person one would expect to be writing mystery-thrillers. She holds a doctorate in theoretical physics from Oxford and had worked as an investment banker with her husband and two children in London. But when she was downsized during the Global Financial Crisis, she decided to pursue writing—a long time dream. This is her third novel and though now she’s back at work, she is already finishing up the next. She can’t divulge the plot except to say it involves Oxford and the French Alps.
After a spectacular burnout that caused him to lose his high-paying job, Jamie Buckby has found work as a coffee shop barista, a job that pays much less than his previous career.
But money really isn’t an issue for him. He lives with his girlfriend, a wealthy, successful businesswoman, in her wonderful historic home in a tony London neighborhood. The two have had a long and compatible relationship, but in keeping with the saying there’s no fool like an old fool, Jamie risks it all when he falls for the beautiful, manipulative and much younger Melia.
This being a mystery by bestselling British novelist Louise Candlish, there are plenty of other complications as well in “The Other Passenger.” We watch the story unfold through the eyes of Jamie, who commutes to work by riverboat with his neighbor Kit, who is married to Melia.
Kit and Melia are living well beyond their means, wracking up credit card debts and obviously envious of Jamie’s lifestyle. Then, one day, Kit doesn’t turn up at the boat, and when Jamie arrives at his stop, the police are there waiting for him. Kit’s been reported missing, and another passenger saw Jamie arguing with him on the boat just before he disappeared.
But it’s way too time consuming and difficult for Melia to wait and work hard to achieve her dreams. It’s much better to convince Jamie with promises of money and a life together to help her get rid of her husband. Jamie is foolish enough to believe that’s what Melia really wants. With the police closing in, he soon realizes that Melia has outwitted him and has much different plans in mind.
“There were several inspirations, and that’s how my books are usually conceived — I’ll find a way to marry multiple obsessions,” Candlish said. “I wanted to do a commuter mystery, I wanted to create a ‘Double Indemnity‘ for the 2020s, I was eager to explore the generational warfare between Gen X and millennials. Finally, I felt the need to write a love letter to London life around the River Thames, to capture its dangerous allure.”
In David Bell’s newest mystery, “Kill All Your Darlings,” Connor Nye’s life is rapidly deteriorating. Indeed, the college professor, who is still mourning the death of his wife and son five years earlier, knows he might not make tenure unless he publishes something quick. Lost in grief, it’s an impossible task.
But fate seems to toss him a life line. Madeline, one of his best students, disappeared suddenly two years ago after spending the night drinking and chatting with Connor and other students at a local bar. Connor doesn’t remember much about how the night ended; he was too inebriated. But he does remember Madeline’s manuscript, an amazingly written thriller about a murder.
When Madeline doesn’t reappear and it seems more likely that Connor may lose his job, he submits her work as his own. It seems safe enough. No one has heard from her in two years, she didn’t use a computer to write her manuscript, and he is the only one with a copy.
After celebrating the book’s publication at a get-together where he’s showered with praise, and believing that his life is finally back on track, Connor arrives home to find he has an uninvited guest.
Madeline has returned and she wants Connor to pay for stealing her manuscript. He doesn’t have the money she wants; it’s already gone to pay bills.
To make matters worse, Madeline isn’t the only unexpected visitor at the Nye home.
A police detective arrives the next morning as Connor is on his way to class. She questions Connor about his book and how the descriptions of the murder match exactly with the facts police have been withholding. Now, Connor not only risks losing his job and his reputation, he also appears to be a suspect in an unsolved murder. He grapples with whether to tell the truth or not, and decides not to.
The phrase “kill all your darlings” most likely originated with Nobel Prize Laureate William Faulkner, who said, “In writing, you must kill all your darlings.” Or in other words, kill any characters, even the ones you love, that don’t move the story forward. The characters that do remain in Bell’s book include a licentious department head who preys on young, vulnerable female students. It’s a subject that Bell also explores in his book.
“Since the Me Too movement, though we’ve become aware of all these situations, it still happens,” he said, noting that what the existing power structures will do to keep these situations quiet is for the school’s sake not the students’.
David Bell virtual event
What: Parnassus Books will host author David Bell for a discussion of his book “Kill All Your Darlings,” with May Cobb, author of “The Hunting Wives.”
Bad Axe County has seen some bad days, but this may be the worse as Heidi Kick, former beauty queen and now sheriff learns that the medical examiners have determined that the homeless man recent found dead, had been buried alive.
Even for Kick, who is pretty tough having survived the murder of her parents years earlier and the savage world of beauty competitions, this case is exceptionally hard. Being buried alive has always been one of her worst fears.
So begins “Bad Moon Rising” In John Galligan’s third book in his Bad Axe County. Set in rural Wisconsin, Kick is grappling with her own fears and unresolved issues as more and more bodies are discovered. That’s not all that’s facing Kick. Married to a former standout local baseball player, she’s the mother of three young children and is up for re-election. Some people think she should be home with her children and start spreading lies about here.
Galligan, who teaches writing at Madison College in Wisconsin, is also the author of the Fly Fishing Mystery series. Describing Wisconsin as his favorite place to be, he also knows the culture of some of its more rural towns. Bad Axe County is fictional carved out by Gallaher between two real counties. He doesn’t shy away from writing about some of the prevalent issues facing rural areas and how they impact his characters.
“The region’s beauty and its challenges fascinate me,” he says. “There are hundreds of miles of spring creeks where wild trout still thrive. At the same time factory farms and sand-fracking outfits are moving in, and climate change is having a devastating impact.” There’s also meth to contend with and those who are so set in their ways they can’t accept a woman as a sheriff. In his books, he uses real situations to show what Kick is dealing with.
Galligan also sees the closeness of such communities as well.
“Neighbors look out for each other,” he says. “You can find a pancake breakfast or a brat fry on any day of the week. People both leave and stay with equal degrees of passion.”
This realistic look at the fictional Bad Axe County shows us why Kick remains despite everything.
Country girls, says Galligan, can hunt, fish, shoot, get great grades in school, and be good at just about everything. That’s the kind of heroine he’s given us in this series.
He’s incredibly handsome, impeccably dressed, totally urbane, interested only in no-strings relationships, and so amazingly rich that it’s hard to remember when anyone in his family has ever worked besides, that is, practicing their golf swings. Of course, Windsor “Win” Horne Lockwood III is totally obnoxious or would be if he didn’t recognize and make fun of all those traits. He knows he was born into money not for any reason but the wining of the genetic lottery. Ditto for the looks. He doesn’t have to wear—gasp—hoodies but can instead with all that dough attire himself in sartorial splendor. As for the relationships or lack of them, well, Win has issues that started in childhood so you can’t really blame him for that.
CANNES, FRANCE – APRIL 7: Writer Harlan Coben is photographed for Self Assignment, on April, 2018 in Cannes, France. (Photo by Olivier Vigerie/Contour by Getty Images).
(EDITOR’S NOTE: Photo has been digitally retouched).
What he’s never had before is a mystery novel all about him. But now he does in “Win” (Grand Central 2021; $18.98 Amazon price) written by Harlan Coben, the bestselling author who has 75 million books in print in 45 languages as well as multiple number of Netflix series including “The Stranger” and “The Woods” with two more “The Innocent” and “Gone for Good” out soon.
Up until now, Win has been a sidekick to Coben’s main character, Myron Bolitar, a sports agent who moonlights—often unintentionally—as a private detective. Coben never intended to make Win the main character in a novel but that changed.
“I came up with a story idea involving stolen paintings, a kidnapped heiress, and a wealthy family with buried secrets – and then I thought, ‘Wow, this should be Win’s family and his story to tell’,” says Coben. “Win is, I hope you agree when you read the book, always a surprise. He thrives on the unexpected.”
The kidnapped heiress is Win’s cousin Patricia, who was abducted by her father’s murderers and held prisoner until she managed to escape. She now is devoted to helping women who are being victimized by men. The stolen paintings include a Vermeer that was taken when Patricia was kidnapped. That painting along with another appear to have been stolen by a former 1960s radical turned recluse who was murdered in his apartment after successfully hiding from authorities for more than a half century.
But keep in mind, that this is a Coben novel, so nothing is ever as it seems. The plots are devious, and the twists and turns are many. As Win goes on the hunt for the painting he has to deal with other difficulties that arise as well. His proclivity for vigilante justice (he knows, he tell us in one of the many asides he makes to readers, that we may not approve) has led to retaliation by the man’s murderous brothers who almost manage to kill him. The hunt for the Vermeer gets him involved with a treacherous mobster who is determined to find the last remaining radical of the group of six who he believes was responsible for his niece’s death.
“Win has been Myron’s dangerous, perhaps even sociopathic, sidekick and undoubtedly the most popular character I’ve ever written,” says Coben. “That said, you don’t have to read a single Myron book to read “Win.” This is the start of a new series with a whole new hero.”
Coben decided to write a novel when he was working in Spain as a tour guide. Did he get the job because he’s fluent in Spanish? Not exactly.
“My grandfather owned the travel agency,” says Coben. “While I was there, I decided to try to write a novel about the experience. So I did. And the novel was pretty terrible as most first novels tend to be – pompous, self-absorbed – but then I got the writing bug and started to write what I love – the novel of immersion, the one that you get so caught up in you can’t sleep or put the book down.”
With “Win” he has certainly done just that.
What: Harlan Coben, #1 New York Times bestselling author, discusses his new book “Win” with moderator and author Shari Lapena.
When: Thursday, March 25 at 7 p.m.
FYI: Hosted by the Book Stall in Chicago, the event is free and open to the public. To register, visit the events page on the store’s website, www.thebookstall.com
“I’m destined to disappear,” Rachael Bard tells the listeners of her true crime podcasts.
Eliza Jane Brazier
For Sera Fleece, whose life is tumbling down around her as she dwells upon each of her many perceived failures and seldom leaves her home, her time is totally focused on every episode — each one dedicated to a missing or murdered woman. She thinks in terms of the episodes and absorbs the details Rachel reveals about her personal life. Sera knows she lives on Fountain Creek Ranch in the yellow house somewhat distant from her parents’ home and the barns, stables and quarters for the campers who fill the ranch in the summer.
And then, one day it happens. There are no more podcasts and no more social media posts. Rachel has disappeared.
“I know, the first 48 hours are crucial,” Sera tells herself. (After all, she doesn’t talk to anyone else — not her ex-husband who still cares, or her parents, or even the clerks she interacts with when she finally is able to get herself out of the house to buy tea.) “And every hour you don’t update, I think, ‘Something is wrong.’ I think, ‘The case is going cold.’”
“I will use the things you told me,” she says to Rachel, promising to find her.
But it doesn’t look promising. Somehow she missed the turn for the ranch, and stopping in the little town where Rachel went to school and where her best friend disappeared when they were high school students, she finds that no one will even mention its existence.
Turning back, she finds the ranch’s entrance, noticeable because what is supposed to be a tourist attraction has signs reading “No Trespassing” and “Beware of Dog” posted on the drive.
“The setting came from a job I took in northern California that got weird at an isolated dude ranch. I won’t go into details, but the truth is very nearly stranger than fiction,” Brazier said when I ask about the eerie setting she created. “The emotion came from finding myself single again after my husband died. And the hook came from my love of true crime.”
Like Sera, Brazier says she was looking for answers but in a different way than most.
“After my husband died, I found that the grieving process really replicated true crime podcasts: you are searching for answers,” she said. “I found a lot of comfort in them and still do to this day. For me it’s about facing your fears, making order out of chaos and also about control. In true crime, you know the bad thing is coming. It can be a way to address trauma and feel less alone in it.”
Playing detective, Sera is hired by the Bards to work with the horses, a job that allows her to search for clues to Rachel’s disappearance. Her searching arouses suspicions but startlingly, she realizes that no one seems concerned about Rachel’s disappearance besides Sera. Rachel, she learns, has disappeared before and will do so again. At the ranch, Sera finds meaning not only in her investigation but in working with the horses and her developing romance with the ranch manager.
Yet that doesn’t stop her search for Rachel, or the overwhelming feelings that there are many dangerous unknowns surrounding her. Was Rachel involved with the ranch manager and what happened to his wife? Did she really go back to Texas like he says. Is it possible he’s a murderer?
Brazier, a screenwriter and journalist who lives in Los Angeles, is currently developing “If I Disappear” for television and writing another mystery.
“It’s a brutally funny thriller about very bad rich people,” she said.
Online events
This story previously appeared in the Northwest Indiana Times:
Kate Collins, best-selling author of the popular Flower Shop mysteries, is—excuse our pun–branching out with her Goddess of Greene St., a series of cozy mysteries centered around single mom Athena Spencer who after divorcing returns home to work in her family’s garden center.
Kate Collins (Linda Tsoutsouris)
It was a big change not only for Athena but also for her creator, Valparaiso resident Linda Tsoutsouris who has written 23 Flower Shop novels under the pen name of Kate Collins. Three of those books including “Mum’s the Word” were made into Hallmark Movies & Mysteries starring Brooke Shields in the role of Abby Knight, Tsoutsouris’s flower shop owning sleuth along with actors Brennan Elliott, Beau Bridges and Kate Drummond.
Former attorney-turned-small-town-florist, Abby Knight, has a nose for sleuthing, quickly embroiled in a murder investigation, grateful for the help when she teams with retired private eye, Marco Salvare, who now owns a local bar and grill. Photo: Brennan Elliott, Brooke Shields Credit: Copyright 2015 Crown Media United States, LLC/Photographer: Christos Kalohoridis
“It was hard to leave the flower shop, Abby, her boyfriend Marco and everyone—they were like family,” says Tsoutsouris whose two Goddess mysteries are “Statue of Limitations” and “A Big Fat Greek Murder,”
“But now I’m feeling more comfortable and I really like Athena,” she says.
As she did with her other series, Tsoutsouris has created a cast of quirky, fascinating characters including Athena’s mother, Hera who is, as one would expect of the matriarch of a large Greek family, a fantastic cook. There’s also Maia, the goddess of the field in Greek mythology, is a vegetarian in the series and Delphi, a take on the oracles of Delphi who foretold the future.
“In my book, she’s always reading tea leaves,” says Tsoutsouris.
The Flower Shop series takes place in the town of New Chapel, a stand-in for Valparaiso.
“Goddess of Green St. is a mix of Saugatuck, the Lake Michigan town in southwest Michigan and Key West,” says Tsoutsouris who lives part time in Key West, Florida. “I like to give people a point of reference.”
A Flower Shop Novella
Before she became a writer, Tsoutsouris, who holds a master’s degree from Purdue University, worked as an elementary school teacher. After taking time off to care for her young son and daughter. Tsoutsouris became somewhat restless despite learning to macrame and so signed up for a correspondence course on how to write children’s books. She took it, wrote one, got it published and went on to write another 20. Her next shot at publication wasn’t quite so successful. Tsoutsouris wrote a romance novel she describes as horrible. The publisher agreed, rejecting her book. Always full of energy, Tsoutsouris immediately began attending as many conferences on the subject as possible and broke into that market as well.
Now with five of her books having made it on to the New York Times Best-sellers’ list, Tsoutsouris is working on the Goddess of Greene St. series and keeps in touch with Abby and New Chapel by writing Flower Shop novellas such as the just released “A Frond in Need.”
Asked where she gets her ideas as plots for so many mystery novels, Tsoutsouris that almost anything is a creative spark.
“If I see a garden pond,” she says, “I ask myself what if a body turns up in the pond?”
“We all have a friend from our past who is a lot of fun when we’re young but when we get older and get settled that person is someone you want to leave behind,” says David Bell, explaining the idea behind his latest mystery-thriller The Request (Berkley 2020; $11.99—Amazon price). “And I wondered what would happen if that friend showed up and even more if that friend knew something about you that one else knows.”
That’s what happens to Ryan Francis. Years ago, Ryan was involved in a car accident that left a young girl seriously injured. It was his fault his best friend Blake Norton tells Ryan after he wakes up in the hospital, the memory of the accident completely gone.
Since that time, Ryan has rebuilt his life, marrying, starting a successful business and is now the father of a young child. He also carries the guilt of knowing he’s harmed someone and has stealthily left large sums of money in the girl’s mailbox to help with her ongoing medical expenses.
But things are coming undone. The girl’s sister confronts Ryan, demanding a large amount of cash or else she’ll reveal the truth. But she’s not the only one wanting something from Ryan. Blake is back and he needs a big favor—break into his ex-girlfriend’s home and steal letters Blake wrote her that she’s threatening to show his current fiancé. And though Ryan refuses, Blake won’t take no for an answer. If Ryan won’t get those letters then Blake will reveal the truth of what happened all those years ago.
It’ll be easy, Blake assures him. But, of course, it’s not. Letting himself into the house when Blake’s ex is supposed to be at yoga class, Ryan can’t find the letters—they’re not where Blake said they’d be. But much, much worse, the Blake’s ex never left the house to go to yoga. Ryan stumbles across her body—she’s been murdered. And at the same instant, his phone lights up, the woman lying dead at his feet has just asked him to become her Facebook friend.
Blake disappears, stealing Ryan’s laptop, a strange man tries to break into their home while his wife and baby are there by themselves and the police zero in on Ryan—and his wife–as a possible suspects. It seems that others besides Ryan and Blake have their secrets as well.
“Even the person closest to you has a secret they don’t want you to know,” says Bell. “I think we’ve all had the experience of thinking we know someone really well but people can still surprise us, no matter what.”
DAVID BELL is a USA Today bestselling, award-winning author whose work has been translated into multiple foreign languages. He’s currently an associate professor of English at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green, Kentucky, where he directs the MFA program. He received an MA in creative writing from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, and a PhD in American literature and creative writing from the University of Cincinnati. His novels include Layover, Somebody’s Daughter, Bring Her Home, Since She Went Away, Somebody I Used to Know, The Forgotten Girl, Never Come Back, The Hiding Place, Cemetery Girl, and The Request.
In Pretty as a Picture, Elizabeth Little’s latest thriller, film director Marissa Dahl accepts a job to work on an isolated island off the coast of Delaware with the notoriously erratic director Tony Rees. When she arrives on the set, Dahl doesn’t know much about her new job except that the movie is about a woman who was murdered there two decades ago. But there’s more going on besides a megalomaniacal director and an old unsolved murder. Rees wants the movie to convey, in graphic detail, the woman’s death; numerous scandals are about to erupt and before long, another woman is found dead. Will she be next, Marissa wonders?
Extremely talented Marissa, who has high functioning-like autistic social interactions, is befriended by two completed wired-in teenaged girls when she goes in search of peanut butter. The girls are convinced that there’s more to the local murder than meets the eye. Teaming up they work to solve the mystery.
Little knows Hollywood. Her husband had many miserable years there working in the business (he’s now getting a degree in social worker) and she’s met her share of outrageous and egotistical directors. That in part is why she wrote this, her second mystery.
“With Pretty as a Picture, I had known for a couple of months that I wanted to write something about the film business—I live in Los Angeles and am married to an ex-filmmaker, so it was a subject that was very close at hand,” says Little. “I tried writing a few chapters, working out some of the plot lines, but nothing really took root until I realized that my main character was a film editor who was far more comfortable in the company of her favorite movies than in that of real-life people. I wish I could say that inspiration struck suddenly—or even efficiently—but I think I just had to write my way into the realization.”
Little describes herself as writing in a highly immersive first-person perspective.
“I want my readers to be in both the heads and the bodies of my narrators, to really feel what they’re feeling,” she says. “And in order to do this, I work really hard to put myself into a place, mentally, where I’m able to credibly conjure up the physical and emotional sensations of my narrators. I don’t just put myself in their shoes, in other words—I put myself in their muscle and sinew and skin. It’s a little extreme at times, to be honest, and I wonder at times if I’m Daniel Day Lewissing it—when I finish a day of work, it can really feel like I’m finally coming up for air. It’s probably far too pretentious an approach for a thriller writer, but it seems, so far, to be working for me.”
Little may not like Hollywood, but she does like Marissa.
“She’s particularly dear to me because she’s so deeply uncool and sweet and weird,” she says. “She’s vulnerable and awkward and loyal and hilarious and annoying and really, really good at her job. I love her. I hope readers love her, too.”
Shelf Life 