By Speaking of Mysteries
A podcast of mystery
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...
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...
Crime fiction fans rejoice: with The Spy Coast, Tess Gerritsen launches a new series featuring retired CIA Maggie Bird and her fellow former intelligence officers, all of whom now reside in Purity, Maine. And, while members of the Martini Club—as...
In The Last Applicant, Rebecca Hanover’s debut adult thriller, a parent desperate to secure her son’s admission to an exclusive Manhattan private school, in Rebecca’s words, “goes there” and stalks the school’s admissions director. To tell you anymore would spoil...
The stakes couldn’t be higher for Junie Lagarde, the protagonist in The Beautiful Risk, Lynn Hightower’s new thriller. Her dog Leo—who, as Junie’s hearing dog, is much more than a pet—survived the plane crash in the French Alps that killed...
In a case of Herculean wordsmithing, Denise Mina is scheduled to publish two novels on August 1, 2023: The Second Murderer, which continues the story of Raymond Chandler’s immortal Philip Marlowe; and Three Fires, the story of the late 15th...
Not to put too fine a point on it, but having two titles published on the same day is a Herculean authorial accomplishment. But such feats of wordsmithing are not surprising to fans of Denise Mina, whose two titles The...
Sheriff Titus Crown, the protagonist in All the Sinners Bleed, S.A. Cosby’s recently published thriller, is not a man to be trifled with. He’s a man who, when he ran and—surprising himself, won—the election for sheriff “had made a choice...
Fans of Robert B. Parker’s extensive crime fiction universe, rejoice! Alison Gaylin is continuing the story of PI Sunny Randall, in Robert B. Parker’s Bad Influence. And in Bad Influence, Sunny—who’s never had a digital footprint —jumps into the world...
In Jordan Harper’s Everybody Knows, black-bag publicist Mae Pruett doesn’t worry about the truth, only The Story, because whether you call what she does picking up the pieces or placating The Beast, what she does is a nasty business. And...
Part domestic suspense, part espionage thriller, Alma Katsu’s Red London—the follow-up to Red Widow—is all tension. Mildly disgraced CIA agent Lyndsey Duncan is working to rehabilitate her reputation by taking an assignment in London sussing out a potential Russian defector,...
Cara Black took a break from her book tour to talk about Night Flight to Paris, the follow up novel to Three Hours in Paris, which introduced us to Kate Rees, the Oregonian sharpshooter whose considerable skills are put to...
While some things have changed for Margaret Mizushima’s protagonist Sheriff Deputy Mattie Wray—for one thing, Mattie has changed her last name from Cobb, the name of the man who kidnapped her, to that of her birth father—in Standing Dead, other...
There is a decided “down the rabbit hole” sensation to City Under One Roof, Academy Award-nominated screenwriter Iris Yamashita’s debut crime fiction novel. When body parts wash up on the shore adjacent to the city-in-one-building, three female narrators—with varying degrees...
There’s nothing like a high school reunion to trigger buried memories—and make you question them. For example, did Cassie Fitzherbert—now a London police officer—kill a fellow student in high school? Bleeding Heart Yard, Elly Griffith’s newly published crime fiction novel,...
In her just-published stand-alone thriller, Mother, Daughter, Traitor, Spy, Susan Elia MacNeal transforms the very real story of mother and daughter Grace and Sylvia Comfort—who risked their lives to infiltrate Nazi strongholds in Los Angeles during World War Two—into a...
Four women, who happen to be sixty-something professional assassins, are celebrating their recent retirement in Deanna Raybourn’s new thriller, Killers of a Certain Age.The Killers of the title—Billie, Natalie, Mary Alice and Helen—are looking forward to pursuing all the things that...
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...
All Paris Peralta wants in Things We Do in the Dark, Jennifer Hillier’s new suspense novel, is live a quiet life. Well, as the saying goes: make a plan and the gods laugh. Paris is arrested for her husband’s murder...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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,...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
In Castle Shade, Laurie R. King’s 17th Mary Russell-Sherlock Holmes crime fiction novel, the couple is asked by Queen Marie of Romania to investigate a threat made against her daughter, which requires Russell and Holmes to travel to Castle Bran...
Early in Jean Hanff Korelitz’s The Plot, protagonist Jacob Finch Bonner encounters a student in his writing class who claims he has a can’t-miss story. The student was right—sort of. Upon learning of the student’s death—and determining that the book...
Being a professional thief with a skill set that includes safecracking and lock picking does not preclude you from being a patriot, or so protagonist Ellie McDonnell finds out in Ashley Weaver’s A Peculiar Combination, when she’s asked to ply her trade...
All the World’s a Stage in Death of a Showman, Mariah Fredericks’ fourth installment of her series featuring lady’s maid Jane Prescott. After returning from what can only be called a working trip to Europe with her employers Louise and...
In The Consequences of Fear, the 16th installment of Jacqueline Winspear’s addictive series featuring detective and frequent intelligence asset Maisie Dobbs, it’s October 1941: Europe has succumbed to Nazi occupation and the outcome of Maisie’s new case, involving a murder...
Sheriff Lily Ross returns in The Stills, the third installment of Jess Montgomery’s series that takes place in 1920s Prohibition Era Southeastern Ohio. Trouble is, um, brewing and Lily couldn’t be busier: violations of the Volstead Act are everywhere—Lily’s best...
In An Extravagant Death, Charles Finch—who concluded the prequel trilogy of his protagonist Charles Lenox with 2020’s The Last Passenger—returns Lenox to his current timeline of the late 1870s and takes England’s most famous private detective on a road trip...
In Water Memory, Daniel Pyne’s new thriller, in the aftermath of a particularly violent operation in which she sustained a concussion, private security contractor Aubrey Sentro decides to follow a doctor’s advice and go on a cruise. Not just any...
