Fiction Review

As I mentioned, there were authors in the audience at the 2018 Poisoned Pen Conference. Donis Casey, author of the Alafair Tucker mysteries, was one of the attendees. Alafair Tucker is a strong, independent farm wife and mother in Oklahoma in the early twentieth century. You can order copies of Casey’s books through the Web Store. Many of them are signed. https://bit.ly/2PACQyp

Here are Donis’ answers to three questions.

Your three favorite crime novels read this year.

Steven Saylor’s The Throne of Caesar

Ellery Adams’ The Secret, Book & Scone Society

Rhys Bowen’s In Farleigh Field

Your favorite crime fiction author, as of today?

Donis Casey couldn’t decide. She loves historical mysteries. She picked three authors – Steven Taylor, Rhys Bowen and Lindsey Davis.

What’s in the pipeline for you?

“I’m spinning off the Alafair Tucker series. One of the daughters runs away and ends up in the silent movies in Hollywood.”

Doris Casey’s website is www.doniscasey.com

It all comes together this week for Peter Blauner’s Sunrise Highway. It’s the Hot Book of the Week at the Poisoned Pen. Marilyn Stasio reviewed his book in her Crime column in The New York Times, calling it “a nifty police procedural”,   https://nyti.ms/2ofGdzh. And, Blauner will appear at the Poisoned Pen on Wednesday, Sept. 5 at 7 PM. If you can’t make it to hear him, you can still order a signed copy of Sunrise Highway through the Web Store. https://bit.ly/2MHdAcR

Here’s the description of Sunrise Highway. 

From Peter Blauner, the writer Dennis Lehane calls “one of the most consistently bracing and interesting voices in American crime literature,” comes a new thriller about a lone young cop on the trail of a powerful killer determined not just to stop her, but to make her pay.

In the summer of Star Wars and Son of Sam, a Long Island schoolgirl is found gruesomely murdered. A local prosecutor turns a troubled teenager known as JT from a suspect to a star witness in the case, putting away a high school football star who claimed to be innocent. Forty years later, JT has risen to chief of police, but there’s a trail of a dozen dead women that reaches from Brooklyn across Long Island, along the Sunrise Highway, and it’s possible that his actions actually enabled a killer.

That’s when Lourdes Robles, a relentless young Latina detective for the NYPD, steps in to track the serial killer. She discovers a deep and sinister web of connections between the victims and some of the most powerful political figures in the region, including JT himself. Now Lourdes not only has to catch a killer, but maybe dismantle an entire system that’s protected him, possibly at the cost of her own life.

There were authors on panels and authors in the audience at the 2018 Poisoned Pen Conference. I took the opportunity to corner a few authors and ask them three questions.

Thomas Kies is the author of two books featuring journalist Geneva Chase, Random Road and Darkness Lane. He’s a Poisoned Pen Press author who was on two panels at the conference, “Sleuths and the Media” and “Unconventional Women”. Signed copies of Kies’ books are available through the Web Store. https://bit.ly/2NHg1bS

Check out Tom’s answers to my questions.

Three favorite crime novels read this year?

Michael Connelly’s The Late Show

Ian Rankin’s Even Dogs in the Wild

Annie Hogsett’s Murder to the Metal

Favorite author as of this moment?

Michael Connelly – Love Bosch, as well as Connelly’s new character in The Late Show, Renee Ballard

What’s in the pipeline for you right now?

I’ve finishing the third Geneva Chase mystery, Graveyard Bay. I left readers with a cliffhanger in Darkness Lane. Geneva had to deal with a lot of twists and turns.

Thomas Kies’ website is https://thomaskiesauthor.com

Paul French was at the Poisoned Pen earlier this summer, on book tour for City of Devils: The Two Men Who Ruled the Underworld of Old Shanghai. Some of the staff of the Poisoned Pen, Patrick Millikin and Patrick King, convinced him there are enough crime novels set in Phoenix to make the city a feature for Crime and the City for the website CrimeReads.com.

Check out French’s post, “Crime and the City: Phoenix” to discover some of the authors writing about crime in Phoenix. https://bit.ly/2wAZiiX

Then, you might want to check the Web Store for books by the authors mentioned in French’s article. https://store.poisonedpen.com

And, of course, you can pick up a signed copy of French’s book as well.

If you follow William Kent Krueger on Twitter, you saw this Tweet from him on Friday.

All the news seems to be about authors whose books are being adapted for TV or Netflix lately. Earlier this week, it was about Harlan Coben. Now, it’s Lee Child’s news about adapting his Jack Reacher novels for TV. Of course, that isn’t the only news. The Guardian reports that Child is giving his papers to the British Archive for Contemporary Writing at the University of East Anglia (UEA). You can read the entire article here. https://bit.ly/2PRS4Qv

Of course, you can find Lee Child’s Jack Reacher novels in the Web Store. https://bit.ly/2opkoNy

Don’t forget, you can pre-order a signed copy of the November release, Past Tense, and learn more about Reacher’s family history.

John Larison’s Whiskey When We’re Dry is the current Hot Book of the Week at the Poisoned Pen. The book itself is quite hot, as you’ll see below, but you can order signed copies through the Web Store. https://bit.ly/2wuqujx

Here’s the description of Whiskey When We’re Dry.

Named a Best Book by Entertainment Weekly, O Magazine, Goodreads, Southern Living, Outside Magazine, HelloGiggles, Parade, Fodor’s Travel, Sioux City Journal, Read it Forward, Medium.com, and NPR’s All Things Considered.
 
“A thunderclap of originality, here is a fresh voice and fresh take on one of the oldest stories we tell about ourselves as Americans and Westerners. It’s riveting in all the right ways — a damn good read that stayed with me long after closing the covers.” – Timothy Egan, New York Times bestselling author of The Worst Hard Time 

From a blazing new voice in fiction, a gritty and lyrical American epic about a young woman who disguises herself as a boy and heads west

In the spring of 1885, seventeen-year-old Jessilyn Harney finds herself orphaned and alone on her family’s homestead. Desperate to fend off starvation and predatory neighbors, she cuts off her hair, binds her chest, saddles her beloved mare, and sets off across the mountains to find her outlaw brother Noah and bring him home. A talented sharpshooter herself, Jess’s quest lands her in the employ of the territory’s violent, capricious Governor, whose militia is also hunting Noah–dead or alive.

Wrestling with her brother’s outlaw identity, and haunted by questions about her own, Jess must outmaneuver those who underestimate her, ultimately rising to become a hero in her own right.

Told in Jess’s wholly original and unforgettable voice, Whiskey When We’re Dry is a stunning achievement, an epic as expansive as America itself–and a reckoning with the myths that are entwined with our history.

Mark De Castrique is one of the authors participating in the Ian Rankin Celebration sponsored by the Poisoned Pen on Labor Day weekend. https://bit.ly/2Pf1gNF. If you miss him at the conference, though, you can still order copies of his older books, or a signed copy of his new release, Secret Undertaking. The books are available through the Web Store. https://bit.ly/2L2fHmE

What’s Secret Undertaking about?

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nfs9VLjoyY&w=560&h=315]

Here’s the description.

Towns like Gainesboro, North Carolina, may be small but go big on local traditions. When funeral director and part-time deputy sheriff Barry Clayton and his childhood nemesis, Archie Donovan, Jr., unite to create a fundraising float in Gainesboro’s annual Apple Festival Parade, what could go wrong? With Archie involved – anything!

First, the Grand Marshal, NC Secretary of Agriculture Graham James, is attacked by a gunman and Barry’s Uncle Wayne is critically wounded in the melee. The assailant is killed. Then, when the body of a convenience store owner is discovered less than an hour later with the gunman’s food stamp card in his wallet, the case escalates. Two men dead. What is the connection?

Barry and Sheriff Tommy Lee Wadkins swiftly learn their small town offers no protection against big-time crime. The body count rises as the scope of their homicide investigation crosses into the realm of the U.S. Marshals and their secretive Witness Protection Program. To penetrate its walls, Barry and Tommy Lee resort to a most unlikely ally: Archie. Is the insurance agent, generally a victim of his own hare-brained schemes, capable of breaking the case, or will Archie find a way to become another of its casualties?

The trio’s secret undertaking into a convoluted conspiracy becomes a fight for survival in a world filled with betrayals where it’s impossible to know which people to trust.

With Harlan Coben’s new deal with Netflix, you might want to catch up with his books. The deal includes his upcoming March release, Run Away. You can pre-order that book, and order other books by Coben through the Web Store. https://bit.ly/2PHnWar

On Monday, Deadline Hollywood released the information about Coben’s deal for adaptations of this books.  https://bit.ly/2MVi1Qw

Congratulations to Sulari Gentill, Poisoned Pen Press author. Her novel, Crossing the Lines, published in Australia by Pantera Press, and in the U.S. by Poisoned Pen Press, was just announced as this year’s Ned Kelly Award winner for Best Crime Novel.

Here’s what the Australian Crime Writers’ Association said.

Here’s the cover of Crossing the Lines as published by Poisoned Pen Press. You can order a copy through the Web Store. https://bit.ly/2DdMLE1

Check out the summary of Sulari Gentill’s award-winning novel, Crossing the Lines.

“As one for whom certain story lines and characters have become as real as life itself, Crossing the Lines was a pure delight, a swift yet psychologically complex read, cleverly conceived and brilliantly executed.” –Dean Koontz, New York Times Bestselling author

Sulari Gentill, author of the 1930s Rowland Sinclair Mysteries, jumps to the post-modern in Crossing the Lines.

A successful writer, Madeleine, creates a character, Edward, and begins to imagine his life. He, too, is an author. Edward is in love with a woman, Willow, who’s married to a man Edward loathes, and who loathes him, but he and Willow stay close friends. She’s an artist. As Madeleine develops the plot, Edward attends a gallery show where a scummy critic is flung down a flight of fire stairs…murdered. Madeleine, still stressed from her miscarriages and grieving her inability to have a child, grows more and more enamored of Edward, spending more and more time with him and the progress of the investigation and less with her physician husband, Hugh, who in turn may be developing secrets of his own.

As Madeline engages more with Edward, he begins to engage back. A crisis comes when Madeleine chooses the killer in Edward’s story and Hugh begins to question her immersion in her novel. Yet Crossing the Lines is not about collecting clues and solving crimes. Rather it’s about the process of creation, a gradual undermining of the authority of the author as the act of writing spirals away and merges with the story being told, a self-referring narrative crossing over boundaries leaving in question who to trust, and who and what is true.

For fans of Paul Auster, Jesse Kellerman, Vera Caspary’s Laura, Martin Amis, Haruki Murakami, Marisha Pessl