For his fifth novel, Tower of Babel, Michael Sears has chose the most ethnically diverse urban area in the world as his setting: the borough of Queens, New York, a place where over 130 languages are spoken. That Queens, and by extension the city, is a mélange of all these cultures, messy but dynamic, is…
Are Snakes Necessary? by Brian De Palma and Susan Lehman is a new Hard Case Crime thriller with three disparate threads propelling the fast-paced plot towards its explosive ending. Full disclosure: Brian De Palma is one of my favorite filmmakers ever, someone whose films I’ve been watching since I saw Carrie in 1976 as a…
The Killing Tide is Jean-Luc Bannalec’s fifth novel in the Brittany Mystery Series set in the small coastal community of Brittany, France. Five years ago, I read the first of the series, Death in Brittany, but I haven’t read any of the series since. In the series opener, Dupin was a recent transplant from Paris…
It’s been four years since a Jake Hinkson novel appeared in the United States, but now the wait for a new book is finally over. His newest, Dry County, explores terrain familiar to Hinkson readers, rural Arkansas, while at the same time going places Hinkson hasn’t gone before. The story takes place in 2016, just…
In the late 1960s, Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, the most popular science fiction writers in Russia, decided to write a mystery novel. The Dead Mountaineer's Inn was published in 1970, and its creation may have been motivated in part by the weariness they felt struggling with the Soviet authorities. Once writers of optimistic science fiction that…
Even a short list of the comic portraits created onscreen by Peter Sellers is impressive: Inspector Clouseau in the Pink Panther films, President Merkin Muffley and the mad Doctor Strangelove in the film Doctor Strangelove, Chauncey Gardner in Being There. No one who thinks of Peter Sellers the actor doesn't think of comedy. And yet…
Editor’s note: When we first heard from Scott Adlerberg, we gave him a hard time. He’d approached us about a “pre-pub” excerpt of a book we discovered had been out for a while, though with a different press than he now has. However, when he told us his tale, we not only understood how it…
