Crime Fiction

Let’s get one thing straight first: This is not “a Philip Marlowe novel.” Yes, that claim is made on the cover; and yes, there is a Los Angeles private eye in these pages bearing said moniker. But Joe Ide’s The Goodbye Coast (Mulholland) isn’t a Marlowe yarn in the same way as some other previous works of note. There is no intimate, first-person narration in these pages, and no indelible metaphors. Instead, this book imagines […]

Just yesterday morning, I posted — in The Rap Sheet — my selections of a dozen favorite crime, mystery, and thriller works from 2021. But those were certainly not all of the genre books I enjoyed reading over the last year. Below are five more that were also contenders for my list. Blood Grove, by Walter Mosley (‎Mulholland): Mosley had a good thing going with his African-American series sleuth, Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins, when he considered […]

Three years ago, author-screenwriter Anthony Horowitz’s Golden Age-style whodunit, Magpie Murders, won critical applause on both sides of the Atlantic. And not without ample justification. The novel introduced us to Susan Ryeland, one of the editors at a minor London publishing house, who was busily working her way through the manuscript of the ninth, and apparently concluding, entry in author Alan Conway’s best-selling mystery series starring Atticus Pünd, a 65-year-old half-Greek, half-German concentration camp survivor […]

Among the changes I made in my life during these last 12 months was to accept an invitation to join the staff of an independent bookshop serving one of Seattle, Washington’s more upscale neighborhoods. This has succeeded in getting me out of my often lonely office, increasing my contacts with other human beings, and further enlarging my reading tastes beyond crime, mystery and thriller fiction. Nonetheless, my interest in tales of criminality and espionage has […]