Suspense Radio host Tracey Devlyn sat down with New York Times bestselling author Katy Hays to chat about her new literary thriller—SALTWATER.

Sun-soaked paradise or a gilded cage of deception?

A long-buried crime resurfaces, shaking a fractured family to its core. When the past refuses to stay buried, trust is shattered—and survival isn’t guaranteed.

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Katy Hays is a Californian, writer, and cake aficionado. She lives in the shadow of the Sierra with her husband and their dog, Queso. In addition to writing, Katy works as an adjunct Art History Professor teaching rural students from Truckee to Tecopa. She holds an MA in Art History from Williams College and pursued her PhD in Art History at UC Berkeley. When not writing (or eating cake) Katy is a skier, cyclist, trail runner, eastern Sierra enthusiast, and—well, reader.

Suspense Radio host Tracey Devlyn sits down with debut author Francesco Paola to chat about his new release—LEFT ON RANCHO.

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A failing entrepreneur. A desert town full of secrets. When Andrew Eastman takes on a risky cannabis venture, his search for answers drags him into a deadly world of corruption, smuggling, and betrayal—where every choice comes with a price, and survival means deciding what he's truly willing to lose.

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Show Notes: https://suspensemagazine.com/blog2/2025/02/11/interview-with-francesco-paola/

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FRANCESCO PAOLA was born in Turin, Italy, and was raised in Italy, Thailand, and Australia before moving to the US, where he earned an engineering degree from MIT and an MBA from the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley. He is an accomplished technology entrepreneur, and has written technical blogs, white papers, and articles for over twenty-five years as an executive in the tech-startup ecosystem. He and his wife Jackie have called New York City home since 1999.

Suspense Radio host Tracey Devlyn sits down with Eric P. Bishop to chat about his new military thriller—BABYLON WILL RISE.

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A stolen nuke. A rogue arms dealer. When two long-missing nuclear weapons resurface, the Omega Group is thrust into a global race against time—where every move could trigger catastrophe. With a new operative on board and the enemy rewriting the rules, failure isn’t an option. The world’s survival hangs in the balance.

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Show Notes: https://suspensemagazine.com/blog2/2025/02/08/interview-with-eric-bishop/

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ERIC P. BISHOP grew up in Connecticut, and relocated to the South after college. After becoming restless moves to the Rockies and the Pacific Northwest occurred before finally heading back East to raise a family. The wanderlust has never left Eric and he's always yearning for the next adventure.

After many years in corporate America, he decided to turn his passion for the written word and dreams of crafting a novel into reality. Eric's debut novel The Body Man came out in 2021, the sequel Breach of Trust in 2024, and the third book in The Body Man Series titled Supreme Justice will be out July 2025. Eric also has released two books in The Omega Group Series: Ransomed Daughter and Babylon Will Rise.

Eric lives in the foothills of Western North Carolina with his kids. You can normally find him exploring the great outdoors most weekends, traveling the world when possible, and grilling out on his back deck, all the while dreaming up the next great novel.

Suspense Radio host Tracey Devlyn sits down with USA Today bestselling author Alison Gaylin to chat about her newest psychological thriller—WE ARE WATCHING.

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A tragic accident. A twisted prophecy. As a grieving mother becomes the target of a violent conspiracy tied to a decades-old novel, she must uncover the truth behind her husband’s death and confront a fanatical group determined to destroy her family—before fiction turns fatal.

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Show Notes: https://suspensemagazine.com/blog2/2025/01/28/interview-with-alison-gaylin/

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ALISON GAYLIN is the USA Today and international bestselling author of thirteen books, including the stand-alones The Collective and If I Die Tonight (winner of the Edgar Award) and the Brenna Spector series: And She Was (winner of the Shamus Award), Into the Dark, and Stay With Me. Nominated for the Edgar four times, she has also been a finalist for numerous awards, including the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Strand Book Award and the ITW Thriller, Macavity and Anthony Awards. She lives with her husband in Woodstock, New York.

Suspense Radio host Tracey Devlyn sits down with New York Times bestselling author Jayne Anne Krentz to chat about her new romantic thriller—SHATTERING DAWN.

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A stalker in the shadows. A night lost to memory. When Amelia Rivers hires private investigator Gideon Sweetwater, their search for answers unleashes buried secrets, dangerous chemistry, and a deadly conspiracy tied to psychic experimentation. To survive, they must unravel the truth—before the past claims them both.

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Show Notes: https://suspensemagazine.com/blog2/2025/01/07/interview-with-jayne-anne-krentz/

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The author of over 50 New York Times bestsellers, JAYNE ANN KRENTZ writes romantic-suspense in three different worlds: Contemporary (as Jayne Ann Krentz), historical (as Amanda Quick) and futuristic (as Jayne Castle). There are over 35 million copies of her books in print.

Suspense Radio host Tracey Devlyn sits down with USA Today bestselling author Alex Segura to chat about his newest thriller—ALTER EGO.

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Lost legends. Buried secrets. When a visionary creator finally gets the chance to reimagine her favorite childhood hero, she uncovers a web of lies, power plays, and a truth darker than any comic book plot. Passion meets peril in this thrilling homage to creativity, legacy, and the stories that shape us.

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Show Notes: https://suspensemagazine.com/blog2/2024/12/03/interview-with-alex-segura/

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ALEX SEGURA is the USA Today bestselling and award-winning author of Secret Identity, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Mystery/Thriller and a New York Times Editor’s Choice and an NPR Best Mystery of the Year. He's also the author of the Pete Fernandez series, as well as the Star Wars novel, Poe Dameron: Free Fall, and a Spider-Verse adventure called Araña/Spider-Man 2099: Dark Tomorrow. He lives in New York City with his family.

Here’s the thing about the South—if you can’t tell a story, they won’t feed you. They’ll simply deposit you behind the barn and let you wither away. That doesn’t happen often because everyone down there can spin a yarn. Some better than others, but a story is a story. This is a rich tradition and congers up names like William Faulkner, James Dickey, Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Conner, Tennessee Williams, Mark Twain, Harper Lee, Truman Capote (who spent much of his childhood in Alabama), James Lee Burke, and the list goes on and on.

Where did this tradition come from? Since much of the South was settled by Scotch- Irish immigrants, they transported their storytelling skills across the pond. Ever hear of a Scotsman who couldn’t reel off a story over a few glasses of whiskey? Me, either. Plus, the South was rural, poor, and with fewer resources, so much of society revolved around the farm, and hearth and home. Books were a luxury, meaning that family entertainment came from stories told by the fireplace.

I grew up in Alabama. Huntsville to be exact. Not your typical southern town. Sure we had acres of farmland, churches on every corner, enough pickup trucks to cause a traffic jam, and a cacophony of country music, but we also had a space program. Snuggled up to the city is NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center where Werner von Braun and cohorts built the rockets that sent men into orbit and eventually to the surface of the moon. Made for an interesting soup of folks. Rednecks and scientist, all dining on barbecue and biscuits, and of course pecan pie.

So, what is it that makes Southern storytelling so compelling? It’s the many facets of the area. You can’t write about the South without considering country music, the blues, country stores, cornbread, sweet tea, and the weather.

Weather: Weather is a character in Southern stories. The rain, the hair-raising electrical storms, and, of course, the heat and humidity conspire to alter everything in life. The cracking of lightning puts nerves on edge while the sauna-like air wilts your clothing, slows your walk, and stretches out your drawl like back strap molasses creeping over a mess of hotcakes. In his famous “Ten Rules of Writing,” Elmore Leonard admonished authors to never start a story with the weather. He forgot to tell that to James Lee Burke. His Dave Robicheaux series moves around the swamplands of Louisiana, a place where weather is most definitely a character. Don’t believe it. Read the first paragraph of his Edgar Award-winning Black...

We are so honored to bring you ex-criminal prosecutor and current bestselling author Marcia Clark. She joins us to talk about her latest book, TRIAL BY AMBUSH, her first True Crime novel.

Marcia Clark is the best selling author of nine legal thrillers and one memoir, starting with four bestselling legal thrillers featuring prosecutor Rachel Knight: The Competition, Killer Ambition, Guilt by Degrees, and Guilt by Association. TNT optioned the books for a one-hour drama series and shot the pilot, which starred Julia Stiles as Rachel Knight.

Her most recent series features criminal defense attorney Samantha Brinkman and includes Blood Defense, Moral Defense, Snap Judgment, and Final Judgment. Marcia’s latest thriller, released in September 2022, The Fall Girl, was a standalone featuring two leads with alternating chapters. Marcia narrated the audiobook along with TV writing partner, Catherine LePard.

SHOW NOTES:  

FORENSIC
SCIENCE TIMELINE

Prehistory: Early cave
artists and pot makers “sign” their works with a paint or impressed finger or
thumbprint. 

1000 b.c.: Chinese use
fingerprints to “sign” legal documents. 

3rd century BC.:
Erasistratus (c. 304–250 b.c.) and Herophilus (c. 335–280 b.c.) perform the
first autopsies in Alexandria. 

2nd century AD.: Galen
(131–200 a.d.), physician to Roman gladiators, dissects both animal and humans
to search for the causes of disease. 

c. 1000: Roman attorney
Quintilian shows that a bloody handprint was intended to frame a blind man for
his mother’s murder. 

1194: King Richard
Plantagenet (1157–1199) officially creates the position of coroner. 

1200s: First forensic
autopsies are done at the University of Bologna. 

1247: Sung Tz’u publishes
Hsi Yuan Lu (The Washing Away of Wrongs), the first forensic text. 

c. 1348–1350: Pope Clement
VI(1291–1352) orders autopsies on victims of the Black Death to hopefully find
a cause for the plague. 

Late 1400s: Medical
schools are established in Padua and Bologna. 

1500s: Ambroise Paré
(1510–1590) writes extensively on the anatomy of war and homicidal wounds. 

1642: University of
Leipzig offers the first courses in forensic medicine. 

1683: Antony van
Leeuwenhoek (1632–1723) employs a microscope to first see living bacteria,
which he calls animalcules. 

Late 1600s: Giovanni
Morgagni (1682–1771) first correlates autopsy findings to various diseases. 

1685: Marcello Malpighi
first recognizes fingerprint patterns and uses the terms loops and whorls. 

1775: Paul Revere
recognizes dentures he had made for his friend Dr. Joseph Warren and thus
identifies the doctor’s body in a mass grave at Bunker Hill. 

1775: Carl Wilhelm Scheele
(1742–1786) develops the first test for arsenic. 

1784: In what is perhaps
the first ballistic comparison, John Toms is convicted of murder based on the
match of paper wadding removed from the victim’s wound with paper found in
Tom’s pocket. 

1787: Johann Metzger
develops a method for isolating arsenic.