Pages

Aug 23, 2016

Surrender, New York, Caleb Carr

Drs. Trajan Jones and Mike Li were feted advisors to the NYPD, until they exposed some serious failings at the forensics lab and got run out of town as a result. Now they spend their days in the farm town of Surrender; teaching online courses in forensic science and profiling from the cabin of a restored airplane. Jones is a criminal psychologist, following the methods of Dr. Lazlo Kreizler and Li is a whiz at collecting and interpreting trace evidence. Li still pines for his ex-colleague, Gracie Chang and Trajan (LT to his friends) spends his free time caring for a rather unusual pet.

LT and Mike are brought in by the local police after the latest in a series of murders around Surrender. The victims, throwaway children, so called because their parents simply abandoned them to start a new child free life. Unable to go to school and unable to legally work these are the kids who end up on the street selling themselves or drugs.

LT determines that the murders are something else entirely; a case which points right to the rotten core of the Big Apple and puts him, Li and the local police in the crosshairs of some very powerful people. In a bid to understand the nature of the throwaways LT brings one of them onto his team which could prove to be his undoing.

Aug 15, 2016

The Night Bell, Inger Ash Wolfe

The sins of the past revisit the present in this the fourth of the Hazel Micallef series.

1959 Hazel is among the last people to see classmate Carol Lim, alive in Port Dundas, Ontario. Carol’s parents report her missing and Hazel’s adopted brother is questioned in connection with her disappearance, but never charged.

Present day, the town is in thrall to developers, the police service too. Hazel and her colleagues are being downsized and shoehorned into a new shopping mall on a site locals call the lion’s paw and she isn’t happy about it. Her mother, the former mayor of Port Dundas is ill and Hazel is wrestling with a new case.  The project manager of a ‘luxury’ subdivision being built on the outskirts of town has been covering up a grisly discovery; human bones found on land where the county foster home once stood.


Amid reports of corruption and broken promises Hazel and her colleagues investigate. They find more bones but a colleague disappears during the search and that night a series of brutal murders begins.  Determined to find her colleague, Hazel begins to see links to her long deceased brother, her actions to clear his name once and for all, propel her into the sights of an angry killer.

Seven days in the book world with Mark Pryor

Mark is the author of the Hugo Marston series and grew up in Hertfordshire, England. He had a number of jobs in the UK that stood him in good stead for his current career including ski instructor and print journalist. Moving to the US in the mid nineties he studied journalism and law at Chapel Hill and Duke respectively passing with as he puts it 'honours, a lot of debt and one helluva wife.'

Mark's day job is Assistant District Attorney with the Travis County DA's office. He lives in Austin, Texas with his wife and children.

Here is Mark's week in his own words.

It’s funny that I’m writing this post this week. You see, normally I don’t get to read as much as I’d like, what with a full-time job, three kids, and writing two books a year! But this week is an exception, for some reason, so I actually have something to share.

First, we’ll ignore the police reports that I read every day as part of my job as a prosecutor here in Austin. They tend to be a litany of stolen cars, home burglaries, and other unsavory (and not so interesting) stories!

So we can begin with a novel that I’m literally launching into it tonight while my son has soccer practice: What Remains Of Me, by Alison Gaylin. I’ve heard such good things about it, and I’ve gotten to know her at several book events. She’s a lovely person and I’m excited to get started, I know I won’t be disappointed.

I’m also finishing up a biography called Gift Of Darkness, Growing Up In Occupied Amsterdam, by Craig Comstock. It’s a fascinating look at a terrible period in our history, and is proving to be valuable research material. You see, I’m slowly plotting a book set in Amsterdam in 1942, but before I get to work I need to educate myself. To that end, we just got back from a trip there, actually, where we saw the Resistance Museum and the Anne Frank House.

But that’s not all! I also have a .pdf copy of an upcoming novel in my bag. It’s called No Way To Run, by a first-time author named Holly Crichton. It’s her memoir, and her publisher has asked me to read it with an eye to providing a blurb. I’m about 80 pages in and it’s riveting—short version: she’s a former race jockey, paralyzed in an accident, and living with an abusive husband who…. Well, I won’t give too much away, but like I said, it’s riveting.

Last of all this week… I have a copy of Asterix and Cleopatra on the go. I will never stop loving, and reading, these wonderful books!

Mark's week in a nutshell

What Remains Of Me (2016)
Gift of Darkness, Growing Up In Occupied Amsterdam (2015)
No Way To Run (Nov 2016)
Asterix and Cleopatra (1969)

Paris Librarian is out now 9781633881778

Sorrow Road, Julia Keller



1938: Three boys cause a fatal accident in Caneytown, they are never charged.

2017: Thornapple Terrace, Muth County seems like a nice place to dump senile old people; problem is people attached to the place keep dying.

Acker’s Gap in winter is a brutal place and this winter is the worst on record. County prosecutor Bell Elkins has been summoned to a bar by an old colleague from her law school days. Darleen Strayer wants Bell to look into Thornapple Terrace, the care home, where Darleen placed her father, Harmon, when his mind started to go. Harm died recently and Darleen noticed something or someone was upsetting her father during their last few visits.

Carla Elkins swore she’d never return to Acker’s Gap but she’s home and Bell knows she’s hiding something. On the plus side Carla’s got herself a job, a job which may unwittingly crack several of Bell’s cases wide open, including the Strayer case.

The Wages of Desire, Stephen Kelly

1941, the second world war rages and in England the conscription act has been expanded to include women. Detective Thomas Lamb is using his daughter, Vera, as his driver mainly because he’s badly sprained his ankle and partly to keep her out of the conscription dragnet.

They are on their way to the tiny Hampshire village of Winstead where a woman has been found, shot to death, in the graveyard. Finding out that the woman Ruth Asquith was a former conscientious objector Lamb and his team turn their attention to the work camp where she and other conscripts are building a prisoner-of-war camp.


The villagers are proving to be suspicious too, the charismatic vicar seems to have lost his gun, local busybody Flora Wheatley is going around strangling baby sparrows and young Lily watches the nocturnal comings and goings of the villagers whilst her mother works the night shift at a factory in Southampton. Yes, Winstead is a village full of secrets, some long buried, some about to be unearthed.

Aug 9, 2016

Paris Librarian, Mark Pryor

Paul Rogers is in charge of the recently donated Severin collection at the American Library in Paris.
When he dies, seemingly of natural causes, Hugo Marston, who found his body starts an off the books investigation. Paul was Hugo's friend and it seems that the Severin collection or someone connected to it may have caused his death. 

Rumors swirl about a dagger that Isabelle Severin used to kill an SS officer in 1944 and Hugo has a surprise visitor, Merlyn (Button Man) and her journalist friend Miki Harrison, who is writing a book on Severin. Hugo digs deeper into Paul's background, unearthing  a devious killer and their fading accomplice and by revisiting the scene of a decades old unsolved crime, Hugo places himself and girlfriend Claudia in grave danger.

Playing Dead, Elizabeth Greenwood

Playing Dead is darkly charmingly bizarre.

Greenwood, who graduated with a six figure yoke of debt on her shoulders tells her teacher colleague at dinner one night that she’s going to make a quick buck by a) doing a TED talk that will go viral or b) she’ll run away to Belize. Her colleague suggests an option c) fake your own death and claim on the insurance.

Intrigued, Greenwood googles ‘fake your own death’ and enters a world just below the surface of the everyday. She meets people who will help you disappear and investigators who will stop at nothing to resurrect you.

Pseudocide for most people is a fantasy, cutting all ties with the rat race and running away to laze on a sundrenched beach. The reality Greenwood finds is a lot harder. She interviews fraudsters who attempted to use a faked death to escape prison, sees the collateral damage caused to those left behind and travels to the Philippines where pseudocide is more like a cottage industry. She receives phone calls from beyond the grave from pop royalty and spends time with a man who having successfully paddled into oblivion made some changes to his appearance and moved into the house next door to his wife as her handyman!

Love Mary Roach, Jon Ronson or Eric Larson? then this is the book for you.

Aug 2, 2016

Sixth Idea, P.J. Tracy

Sixty years ago during a friendly golf game two scientists working on the Manhattan project came up with the Sixth Idea and weeks later one of them was dead.


In present day Minneapolis the Christmas season is dampened by a series of murders that at first glance seem to have nothing in common. Detectives Leo Magozzi and Gino Rolseth take their baffling case to Monkeewrench’s door. Grace MacBride and her team of unconventional geniuses uncover not only a link but opposing sides one determined to wipe out all sixth idea descendants, the other determined to protect them. 

Can Monkeewrench find the answer and could it make them targets too?

Aug 1, 2016

Seven days in the book world an interview with Blake Crouch

Something a little different this week as Dark Matter is out now 9781101904220 here is a Q&A with Blake. 

A Conversation

with
Blake Crouch
Author of
DARK MATTER
Crown; July 26, 2016

Q. In your own words, can you introduce readers to the premise of Dark Matter?
A. A brilliant physicist named Jason Dessen is living in Chicago with his wife, Daniela, and son, Charlie. He is a true genius, and while there was a point in his late twenties when his research could have made him a star in his field, he instead chose a family-focused life. One night, while walking home, he’s abducted by a mysterious masked man and injected with a drug. When he next awakes, his world has completely changed. He’s no longer married, doesn’t have a son, and has achieved professional success beyond his wildest dreams. This sets him on a thrilling, mysterious, and at times terrifying journey to learn what has happened to him, and to find his way home to the people and the life he loves.

Q. Where did the idea for the novel originate?
A. For the last decade, I’ve wanted to write a story that hinges on quantum mechanics. I tried several times to write a version of Dark Matter . . . getting into SPOILER TERRITORY HERE. Three different story lines had been teasing me, and I’d tried and failed to write them all separately. One story line involved the box. Another involved the idea of meeting yourself. And the last was about a man being hopelessly lost in time. The novelist Marcus Sakey is one of my good friends, and we always meet up at the inception stage of a new book to pressure-check each other on our ideas. While we were in Chicago two years ago, I was pitching each of these ideas to him separately when it occurred to me they were actually all part of the same story. They suddenly clicked together, like puzzle pieces, and I was off and running. I find the writing process endlessly mysterious and wonderful.

Q. Millions of readers will recognize you as the author of the bestselling Wayward Pines trilogy and for your suspense novels and short stories. Dark Matter is a new direction for you. Can you tell us a bit about what sparked the change?
A. In a way, Dark Matter is very much like the Wayward Pines trilogy in that it’s a thriller with a backbone of speculative science. But with this book, I wanted to push myself to do something bigger and better than I’d ever written before. The story opens up much faster than Wayward Pines and is larger in scope—about as large as it’s possible to get, really, given that it takes place (SPOILERS AHEAD!) in the multiverse. And the quantum-mechanics underpinning for the premise was a huge challenge to tackle. Trying to understand that science, even on a basic level—let alone incorporate it into a story without dragging the narrative down into incomprehensibility—seemed so daunting. But I knew that if I pulled it off, it would let me play with some really big ideas about our day-to-day existence and the choices we make that haunt us. It allowed me to build a really cool, far-out thriller plot around themes that felt very grounded and meaningful to me.

Q. Dark Matter is grounded in very real scientific theory and principles—quantum mechanics, superposition, etc. How did you go about weaving the science so seamlessly into the narrative and making it understandable to a lay audience?
A. I hope it’s seamless, thank you! I am definitely not a physicist. In fact, I took as few science and math courses as I possibly could on my way to my English degree at the University of North Carolina. If the science is understandable to a lay audience, it’s because I’m a lay audience. To prepare, I read a ton of books on the subject and pulled out the elements of quantum mechanics that intrigued me—and that I could actually comprehend. One of the most fascinating things I stumbled across was a Ted Talk by Aaron O’Connell entitled “Making Sense of a Visible Quantum Object.” Unlike most material on quantum mechanics, which focuses on subatomic matter and can feel very abstract, O’Connell’s talk is about how quantum mechanics might actually be at work at the macro level. At our level. And what that might imply about the world around us. His presentation (which is short and easily findable on YouTube) is worth viewing.

When the book was done, I hired a brilliant professor from USC named Clifford Johnson to read the manuscript and make sure I hadn’t gone too far off the rails. This is speculative fiction, and there’s still a certain leap the reader has to be willing to make, but I wanted to present the concepts behind the story with as much accuracy as I could.
Q. Do you yourself believe there could be other Blakes out there living in alternate realities?
A. According to the Many-Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, every choice we make and every event that affects us really does cause reality to branch into alternate timelines. So, as crazy as the concept sounds—sure, it’s absolutely possible. The idea of different versions of myself living different lives, with different careers, spouses, children, etc., was actually my main inspiration for writing this book.

Q. If you had the chance to enter “the box” and explore parallel universes, would you?
A. Never! I can’t imagine a more dangerous place to be. The chances of finding another world like ours are unimaginably slim. The odds of stepping into a world of ruin and fear and destruction are massive.  

Q. While Dark Matter certainly has elements of science fiction and is a vivid suspense thriller, themes of love and family also seem to be at the heart of the story. Would you say that’s a fair assessment? 
A. Absolutely. Dark Matter is a thriller, of course, but it’s also the first love story I’ve ever written, and I worked hard to strike a balance among thrills, science fiction, and genuine emotion. To me, it’s the love and family elements that make up the beating heart of Dark Matter.

Q. Daniela’s character is also essential to not only the plot of the novel but to the tone and emotional feel. What was the inspiration behind her character?  
A. With Daniela, I wanted to explore the flip side of Jason’s experience. What would it be like to meet another version of your spouse? What if they were married to someone else or worked a different job or you two had never met? Would there still be a flicker of electricity? Would there be some recognition? Would the intensity of your relationship in your world bleed over, on some small level, into others?

Q. Do you see any of yourself in your characters?
A. Very much so. It never really occurs to me until I’ve finished a book, but all of my novels are ultimately therapy and reflective of what I’m dealing with personally during the writing. The last few years have been insanely busy for me on the professional front, and I often feel the tension between me the writer and me the father and husband. The pull of both worlds. It’s not as simple as either/or, but every day we make choices about the person we want to be, the life we want to have. So Jason’s story hits close to home, because I feel like I’ve been wrestling lately with the same push and pull between family and career, and trying to find that balance. 

Q. Speaking of being busy, in addition to being a novelist, you’re currently adapting the screenplay of Dark Matter for Sony, producing for the Wayward Pines TV series on FOX, and writing/producing Good Behavior, a new TV series (based on another of your novels), for TNT. How are you able to move so fluently across mediums? And how do you find the time?
A. I view myself primarily as a novelist, but I love the process of taking a book and turning it into film and television. The mediums are quite different, but it’s all about story structure at the end of the day. The film/TV business lights up the extroverted part of my personality, while the novel writing very much speaks to my introverted self.

Time is becoming an issue, because I never imagined I would be lucky enough to have two TV shows going into production simultaneously and this script adaptation of Dark Matter to contend with. As much as I’m enjoying it, I also find myself getting more and more excited about that moment when I get to go back to the basics of being a novelist and figure out my next book. The brainstorming process of a new novel is my favorite part of writing. All potential and possibility.

Q. You’re originally from North Carolina and spend a great deal of time in New York and Los Angeles for your film and TV work, but you live in Durango, Colorado. What drew you there?
A. I moved to Durango out of college, sight unseen, because I love everything about the West. The wide-open space. The history. The mentality. Rain curtains over the desert. How much deeper and more rattling thunder sounds as opposed to everywhere else. Sage brush. Mountains. Desert. Snow. But most important, a serene, contemplative place to write.


Thanks to Dyana at Random House for her assistance.
More at blakecrouch.com