“There is nothing more frightening than the secrets our loved ones keep from us,” says Robert Crais about Elvis Cole’s latest case in The Big Empty. Traci Beller, an influencer known as The Muffin Girl, hires Elvis to find out what happened to her father who went to the outskirts of Los Angeles ten years... Read more »

Sharon Short first heard the story of Great Aunt Ruth—the inspiration for Aurelia Escalante, the protagonist of Trouble Island—right before her wedding when she was gifted Aunt Ruth’s ring, which she’s wearing in her photo. When Sharon’s soon-to-be sister in law suggested a trade for another family heirloom, Sharon’s response was to decline because, “What’s... Read more »

In Gathering Mist, the ninth installment in Margaret Mizushima’s engaging series featuring Deputy Mattie Wray and her K-9 partner, Robo, both Mattie and Robo find themselves seconded from the Colorado Rockies to a search-and-rescue operation in the forests of Washington State’s Olympic peninsula. A nine-year-old boy—the son of a movie star—is missing from a remote... Read more »

At the beginning of Fortunate Son, Andrew Bridgeman’s debut thriller, Ben Danvers thinks his biggest challenge is giving a presentation to the executives at his company. Then he finds he isn’t who he grew up thinking he was—and people want to kill him      

There’s a blizzard on its way—and not just the snow and ice kind—in Cold Trail, the fourth installment in Taylor Moore’s series featuring Garrett Kohl. Someone is blowing up natural gas facilities and it may—or may not—have something to do with the ecological demonstrators who have shown up. Oh, and environmental activists aren’t the only... Read more »

Renowned Sherlockian, Les Klinger discusses Sherlock Holmes and the Telegram from Hell, with Nicholas Meyer, his sixth”edit” of a heretofore undiscovered manuscript by John H. Watson M.D. The stakes are always high, but especially so in tracking down the Zimmerman telegram. Should it not be intercepted the consequences could be nothing less than Great Britain’s... Read more »

Everyone needs more Will Trent in their lives. In This Is Why We Lied, Karin Slaughter’s 12th Will Trent mystery, Will and his bride Sara Linton are off on their honeymoon at the off-the-grid McAlpine Lodge. It’s an idyllic setting—until the screams start when the manager of the lodge is brutally murdered      

Tom Straw’s The Accidental Joe: The Top Secret Life of a Celebrity Chef, blends murder, mirth, high-stakes espionage, gastronomic highs and lows and killer locales for an appetizing thriller that launches a new series featuring peripatetic bad boy chef Sebastian Pike and his CIA handler Cammie Nova. Tasty, indeed       Photo of Tom... Read more »

Fans of Don Winslow are—understandably—in denial that City in Ruins is his final crime fiction novel. But if it’s true, if Don has put away the keyboard to devote himself to political activism, City in Ruins, the third and final installment of his Danny Ryan trilogy, just might prove that he saved the best for... Read more »

In Past Lying, the seventh novel in Val McDermid’s series featuring Karen Pirie, the action—or restriction thereof—is in and about Edinburgh during lockdown in Spring 2020, as Karen and her team investigate whether or not a partial manuscript found in the papers of a recently deceased crime fiction writer is a roadmap to the disappearance... Read more »