Holiday Merriment Via Bad Sex in Fiction Award

I usually blog about mystery or thriller writing, but during the holiday season, the dark side of human nature just seems an inappropriate topic. Luckily, even serious fiction can create light moments, especially when authors struggle (and fall) in coming up with new ways to describe sex scenes. So for some holiday merriment, I'll pass along excerpts from the annual Bad Sex in Fiction Award, established back in 1993 by London's Literary Review. The 2017 winner is American author Christopher Bollen for The Destroyers and a scene in which protagonist Ian describes his male equipment as a "billiard rack," creating some confusion over how many balls were involved. In the same scene, Bollen describes the female love interest's skin as "tan like water stains in a bathtub," which is erotic only for those who like their love action a tad grimy. The runner-up nominees include The Seventh Function of Language by Prix Goncourt winner Laurent Binet, who calls a felating female a "mouth-machine" and has a male lover whisper "with an authority that he has never felt before: 'Let’s construct an assemblage.'" The purpose of the award is to "draw attention to poorly written, perfunctory or redundant passages of sexual description in modern fiction," hopefully to inspire writers to do better.  Alas, every year there are still plenty of nominees! For more laughable, cringeworthy or simply baffling excerpts from 2017's nominees, see http://www.newsweek.com/bad-sex-writing-fiction-award-2017-728981

T

— just wasn’t written badly enough, calling the sex "very discreet". 

A Holiday Sampler of Award-Winning Mysteries

Heading into the holidays, I like to stock up on mysteries to help relax from the season's whirlwind of shopping and socializing, and I always check out the new crop of award winners. This year's Edgar Award for best novel, for example, went to Before the Fall by Noah Hawley, creator of the "Fargo" TV series. A private jet leaves Martha's Vineyard for New York, carrying 11 people, including two multimillionaires and their families as well as one failed artist invitee. It crashes into the Atlantic without even a May Day call, and the only survivors are the artist and the 4-year-old boy he saves. A media frenzy paints the artist by turns hero or villain, while the investigation tries to decide between tragic accident and sinister intention. Meanwhile, the 2017 Edgar Award for best first novel tapped Under the Harrow by Flynn Berry, a novel for fans of The Girl on the Train. Londoner Nora goes to visit her sister in the countryside, only to find her brutally murdered, and Nora soon becomes obsessed and fearful as the search for her sister's killer uncovers dark secrets. if your taste for foreign sleuthing is whetted, try British publishing's Dagger Awards, which selected The Dry by Jane Harper for a Gold Dagger and gave an International Dagger to The Dying Detective by Leif G.W. Persson. In The Dry, Federal Agent Aaron Falk arrives in his Australian hometown for the first time in decades to attend the funeral of his best friend, Luke. Twenty years ago Luke lied to provide Falk with an alibi in a murder accusation. Now, amid an historic drought, Falk reluctantly joins a local detective to investigate Luke’s death and its connection to long-buried mysteries. You have to go north to Scandinavia for The Dying Detective, about a retired detective recovering from a stroke. In a race against mortality, the detective takes on the unsolved murder of a 9-year-old girl, conducting an investigation from his hospital bed with the help of his assistant, Matilda, an amateur sleuth, and Max, an orphan with a personal stake in the case. Meanwhile, the 2017 Anthony Award for best mystery selected Canada's veteran Louise Penny and A Great Reckoning. Penny's Quebec Chief of Homicide Armand Gamache is drawn into the death of a professor that involves an old map, a mysterious stained glass window, four police cadets, and Gamache's past. All together, that's a great trove of top mysteries to explore. For more ideas, see Amazon's mystery/thriller best-sellers: https://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Books-Mystery-Thriller-Suspense/zgbs/books/18

These Mysteries Use Arson to Fire Up the Plot

The recent California fires in Sonoma County really struck a chord for me. Not only do we have close friends in Santa Rose affected by the fires, but fire is one of my phobias. As a result, I generally don't choose murder mysteries involving arson, whether flames are used to cover up murder evidence, as the main murder weapon, or express a pyromaniac obsession. However, the terror of killers who use fire does spark (no pun intended) a deep desire for apprehension, which makes the solution at the end of these mysteries especially satisfying. Among arson-murder mysteries, 7th Heaven by James Patterson and Maxine Paetro (part of the Women's Murder Club series) is a good example. As Detective Lindsay Boxer and her partner Rich Conklin are searching for leads in California golden boy Michael Campion's disappearance, they are drawn into a series of arson fires that kill suburban couples in wealthy homes. The plot of Douglas Preston's White Fire intriguingly combines modern arson murders and a long-lost Sherlock Holmes story. FBI Special Agent Pendergast comes to help protege Corrie Swanson when her examination of remains from a Colorado town's fabled 19th century grizzly attack on miners turns up shocking results. But the pair soon face modern mayhem as fires burn down multimillion-dollar mansions with families locked inside. Pendergast discovers a long-lost Sherlock Holmes story that may be the key to solving both the mystery of the long-dead miners and the modern-day arson killings as well! Fireproof  by best-selling author Alex Kava brings back his protagonist special agent Maggie O'Dell, who is leading the search for a serial arsonist in Washington, D.C., a search with a personal stake now that Maggie's brother Patrick is back in D.C. and working for a private firefighting company frequently called in to the fires. I'm a sucker for Irish settings like Graham Masterton's Dead Girls Dancing (part of the Kate Maguire series). DCI Maguire investigates the tragic deaths of 13 promising Irish folk dance stars who die when their studio goes up in flames in Cork. A small Australian town is the setting of 2017's Little Secrets by Anna Snoekstra. Would-be journalist Rose Blakey thinks she can win acclaim with a big scoop about strange porcelain doll replicas of the town's daughters that are turning up on doorsteps, terrifying parents already shaken by an arson fire at the town's courthouse, which killed a boy trapped inside. Community paranoia, ugly secrets, a suspicious stranger, and subtle red herrings propel this psychological thriller. For more arson mysteries, see https://www.alibris.com/search/books/subject/Arson-investigation

Mass Shootings' Only Mystery: The Motive

After the Las Vegas massacre of concert-goers by a heavily armed gunman firing from high in a hotel, it dawned on me that, while there are often fictional treatments of family annihilators or terrorist attackers, mystery writers rarely dwell on the more typical American mass murderer represented by the Las Vegas shooter: a white male using legally purchased firearms. Of course, the who-done-it element is missing, since the shooters are almost always captured or suicides. Second, the means is known; only details on the extent of planning, the existence of confederates, police response, etc., are hashed out after the fact. The victimology and opportunity can offer some hope of detection and prevention if there is a relationship to the killer or his expressed grudge, such as a gathering of workplace, racial, governmental, religious, or familial "enemies." But what if the killer chooses strangers in a place that optimizes kill zone, as in the Las Vegas, 2012 Sandy Hook elementary and 1966 Austin clock tower massacres? Then the opportunity becomes any time and anywhere people gather, and the victims are anybody. So the only mystery left to decipher is the motive. The "armed white male" can be amended to "angry armed white male" or "disturbed armed white male," but what explains the destructive fury? In this country, there are a lot of unhappy loners, losers and loonies, and many own scary arsenals. They all don't aim their bullets at crowds. Unfortunately, no matter how deeply we dig for motive, for a "trigger event," grievance, violent creed or mental aberration, that mass shooting motive is likely to remain incomplete or incomprehensible. So mystery fiction, without satisfying solution or justice to offer, avoids this kind of crime. But the real world pays a terrible penalty for ignoring mass shootings. It's time to talk about the fact that, on average, there is a mass shooting (4+ victims including shooter) every day in America. While dwelling on the everyman "who" and the unknowable "why" is likely to be nonproductive and nonpredictive, we can discuss the very concrete "how." For more about the reality, not the fiction, of gun violence, see these statistics: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/10/2/16399418/us-gun-violence-statistics-maps-charts

Crime and Mystery Writers Tackle Football

In the latest headlines, American football has collided with politics, corruption and social conflict. So it's no wonder authors have been drawn to the gridiron for murder mystery and crime thriller plots. Consider Paydirt, by Edgar nominee and best-selling author Paul Levine: Bobby Gallagher is a broken man, fired from his prestigious job, disbarred from the legal profession, divorced from the wife he loves, and in debt to the mob. So he decides to win it all back by rigging the Super Bowl. Assisted by his 12-year-old son, he must fix the game, win a huge bet and avoid getting killed. Also focusing on the Super Bowl is Thomas Harris' best-selling thriller Black Sunday (later a movie) about a plot by terrorists to commit mass murder during the Super Bowl in New Orleans, turning the innocuous blimp into a death machine. Harlan Coben, Edgar Award-winner and master of the surprise twist, turns to football with Deal Breaker. Myron Bolitar is a sports agent whose prize client, a rookie football quarterback, is poised on the edge of the big time. Then the young quarterback gets a phone call from a former girlfriend—a woman believed dead—and Myron must confront the dark side of the sports business and unravel dangerous truths about a family tragedy, a woman’s secret, and a man’s lies. Of course, as a University of Michigan grad, I can't resist mentioning Bleeding Maize and Blue by Susan Holtzer. In football-obsessed Ann Arbor, computer consultant Anneke Haagen is swept up in the UM President's Weekend festivities where her boyfriend, police lieutenant Karl Genesko, is set to be honored as one of Michigan's brightest former football stars. Then a student sportswriter breaks the story of an NCAA probe of UM recruiting, and the agency's investigator turns up murdered in the stadium end zone. Anneke uses her analytic mind to help probe deadly secrets and shady deals involving deep alumni pockets. Finally, before either pro football or college football, there is high-school football, the proving ground of young athletes and community pride. In The Prophet by best-selling author Michael Koryta, the murder of a teenage girl  reopens decades-old wounds and forces two estranged brothers, one a bail bondsman on the social fringes and one the beloved coach of the local high school football team, to unite to stop a killer. For more football-themed mysteries and crime thrillers, see http://themysteryshop.com/murder-at-the-super-bowl-other-football-crime-fiction/

Can Illegitimacy Drive Modern Mystery Plots?

Illegitimacy and the consequential stigmas of extramarital children have played a key role in the works of great authors, including Shakespeare, Voltaire, Austen, Dickens, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Hardy, to name but a few. Some noted mystery writers also have used out-of-wedlock birth as a plot centerpiece, including Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White and Dorothy L. Sayers' The Nine Tailors. But there's no arguing that times have changed. As of 2015, 40.3% of all births in the U.S. occurred outside of marriage (compared with 7% in 1940). And today's illegitimacy rates are even higher for most European countries. The majority of births (over 50%) are outside of marriage in Iceland, Estonia, Bulgaria, Slovenia, France, Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Portugal, and nearly half of births also are extramarital in the Netherlands, Czech Republic, United Kingdom, Belgium, Hungary, Spain, Austria and Finland. As out-of-wedlock birth has become more commonplace, the social and legal status of illegitimate children, unwed mothers and cohabiting couples has improved. In the United States, for example, U.S. Supreme Court decisions in the 1970s found that most legal disabilities imposed on illegitimacy violated the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause. Yet extramarital children can still provide mystery writers with murder motives. Even the old "Secret Shame" plot can be updated. For example, while illegitimacy alone may no longer be as socially unacceptable, illegitimacy resulting from other taboos--such as incest, rape or even adultery--can create a secret that someone will murder to conceal or avenge. Another plot device that still resonates is "The Unwanted Heir." When there is an inheritance to divide, even legitimate siblings can turn on each other, and a family outsider who stakes a claim can spark more than rude confrontations. "Cain and Abel" is one of the oldest plots around, so it's easy to imagine bitter feelings between marital and extramarital siblings going to lethal lengths as they vie with each other for social status, financial gain or parental affection. Finally, there's the traditional "Revenge" plot. Although many loving couples raise happy children outside of marriage today, there are less sanguine situations in which the violent feelings of a spurned lover, a betrayed spouse or an abandoned child can lead to murder. For more famous fiction works with an illegitimacy theme, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegitimacy_in_fiction

Perfect Crime? Disguising Murder Isn't Easy

Murder disguised as suicide, accident or natural death is a popular trope of mystery fiction and TV crime drama. In murder mystery plots, common "perfect crime" accidents include the trusty fall down the stairs or over a cliff; the bathtub head-injury slip or electrocution; drowning (the at-home convenience of tubs and pools is popular, but lonely spots of ocean and river are handy, too); the traffic accident (ranging from car crash to pedestrian hit-and-run); the accidental medication overdose or unknowingly ingested deadly allergen; the hunting accident (if VP Dick Cheney can misfire...); and, a new favorite, strangulation covered up as an autoerotic asphyxia hanging. Mystery writers can find many models from real crime cases. For example, the less than godly Pastor Arthur Schirmer used different types of accidents to cover disposal of two wives: Wife No. 1 died from a catastrophic "fall down the stairs" in 1999, a murder which escaped punishment until it was revisited after Schirmer was convicted of killing wife No. 2 with a crowbar and staging a car accident in 2008 to cover up the injuries. We can't know how many murders go undetected, but the "perfect crime" killer today needs to jump through more hoops than ever, and the mystery writer can deliver more clues to an ace detective, thanks to forensics and society's ever-expanding technological surveillance. Of course, the killer must make sure there are no fingerprints, DNA (blood, saliva, hair, etc.), or fibers in incriminating places. Plus, in staging the crime, the murderer now needs to be aware of the ubiquitous security cameras recording movements for gas stations, stores, ATMs, hotels, and even neighbors. To avoid being caught in a lie, perpetrators also need to worry about telltale credit card receipts and even bar codes that will direct police to an incriminating purchase or location and timing contradiction. A murderer's alibi today can be checked against location tracking via mobile phone and car anti-theft device, while suspicious Internet interactions leave telltale cyber tracks. And, if in search of a perfect alibi, a killer hires/persuades someone else to create an "accidental death," then the murderous instigator is either in thrall to a potential blackmailer and betrayer--or forced to plan another perfect murder! For an interesting discussion, see https://zmprofiler.wordpress.com/the-perfect-murder-2/

Natural Disaster Is Key Player in These Mysteries

Despite the heroic responses to hurricanes Harvey and Irma, it's a sad truth that the chaos created by natural disaster also unleashes and provides cover for human predators. So it's no surprise that mystery writers sometimes use a powerful natural menace--whether shaking earth, raging waters or roaring winds--to heighten suspense and complicate detection in their plots. For example, The Weatherman, by best-selling author Steve Thayer, is a collision of man-made and natural mayhem: Two tortured Vietnam vets, one a television meteorologist with an eerie gift for reading the weather and the other a news producer with a disfigured face, both love the same beautiful cop-turned-reporter. When fierce weather events coincide with murders, the meteorologist is accused, and the disfigured vet and lovely reporter join forces to investigate. In The Breathtaker by Alice Blanchard, a massive tornado strikes a small Oklahoma town and leaves behind three mutilated bodies in a ruined farmhouse. Police Chief Charlie Grover assumes the victims were impaled by flying debris, until evidence proves they were brutally murdered. Grover must enlist the aid of a tornado-chasing scientist to stalk a murderer who conspires with nature to conceal terrible crimes. The drama of Hurricane Katrina (plus a New Orleans setting) have inspired many fictional tales. Certainly, Hurricane by Jewell Parker Rhodes deftly weaves the region's natural and supernatural forces in her mystery plot. Dr. Marie Levant, great-great granddaughter of voodoo queen Marie Laveau, awakens from a nightmare, goes for a drive to clear her head, and finds a crime scene: a couple and their baby killed in the village of DeLaire. She reports the murders to the local deputy and sheriff, and meets the ailing Nana, a voodoo practitioner who's foreseen Marie's arrival. As Marie focuses on the local mystery, an approaching hurricane threatens wider death and destruction. Dead Man's Island, by Carolyn Hart, puts a very different sleuth in the eye of a hurricane: Henrietta O'Dwyer Collins, a widowed former reporter, is invited by an old beau, a media magnate, to his private island off the coast of South Carolina to help him figure out who is trying to kill him. As a monster hurricane hits the island, plot and storm naturally peak together. And if you're hungry for disaster thrills with a dash of romance, there's Chris Fey's Disaster Crimes Series, including Hurricane Crimes, Seismic Crimes, Tsunami Crimes, etc. For more options, see https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/45619.Natural_Disaster_Fiction

What If Social Media Turns Murderous?

Social media use has become so ubiquitous that it's no wonder mystery plots are mining social networking for clues, motives and even psychological weaponry. One example is the Social Media Murders Series by Angela Clarke, starting with Follow Me. If you think social media feeds fame monsters, you'll appreciate a plot in which recent graduate Freddie, who is trying to get her journalism career started via online contacts and posts, bumps into old friend Nasreen, now a police officer, and seeks a scoop by following her to a crime scene where a dead man lies slumped over his computer. Social media-savvy Freddie realizes the victim was a troll and finds the Twitter account of the "Hashtag Murderer," who takes credit for the murder and posts cryptic clues to the next target, titillating press and public. Freddie and Nasreen are soon in the crosshairs as they race to catch the fame-crazed killer. Or, maybe you fear that some folks in your social network of "friends" are playing unfriendly games. Then you won't find any comfort in The Other Twin by L.V. Hay. In the British thriller, Poppy returns home after her sister India dies from a fall off a railway bridge and hacks into her sister's laptop seeking the truth about her death. Poppy finds a social media world where resentments are played out online, identities are made and remade, and secrets outnumber truths. Now if you're a person who feels vulnerable to online-savvy miscreants, join tech-impaired, retired Detective Bill Hodges of Mr. Mercedes, the first entry in Stephen King's Bill Hodges Trilogy. In an unsolved case at the end of Hodges' career, the "Mercedes Killer" used a stolen Mercedes to mow down a crowd of people waiting outside a job fair. Miserable in retirement, Hodges is jolted back to life by taunting messages from the killer and drawn into a cat-and-mouse game on an anonymous social media chat site, leading to a race to stop a psychopath. Maybe you're worried social posts are attracting undesirable followers who'll try to move from virtual to actual contact. Then you'll be terrified by The Secrets She Keeps from Michael Robotham. Unwed and pregnant Agatha, who works part-time stocking shelves at a grocery store, is fascinated by chic customer Meghan, who writes a droll parenting blog and boasts two perfect children and a happy marriage. When Agatha learns her blog idol is pregnant again, and that their due dates fall within the same month, she approaches the unsuspecting Meghan and sets something terrible in motion. Or test your social nerves with Caroline Kepnes' novel You. Beautiful Guinevere Beck shops in a New York bookstore where smitten employee Joe "Googles" the name on her credit card. Joe soon finds all he needs to know from her public Facebook account and constant Tweets. He begins to orchestrate meetings and events designed to push her into his arms, and removes any obstacles to his passion--even if it means murder. For thrillers featuring social media, check out https://strandmag.com/seven-thrillers-featuring-social-media/

Hospital Settings: Scary Prescriptions for Murder

I've been taking some time off from blogging during my summer vacation, but I got a burst of inspiration after spending a day last week in the hospital with my elderly father. It was nothing serious, but the visit reminded me why hospital settings are so chillingly apt for murder mysteries: so many potentially lethal means at hand, so many plausible explanations for death, and so much institutional and personal power over life and death. What could go wrong? Medical murder mysteries answer that question with truly inventive plots. And it's no surprise that many best-selling medical mystery authors are medically trained. Start with physician-turned-novelist Robin Cook. In his first best-seller, Coma, set in a Boston hospital, a young woman intern begins investigating suspicious comas following routine surgery and is soon marked for death herself. Best-selling physician-writer Michael Palmer also plays on our fears of medical power run amok in Extreme Measures, which is about an ambitious young doctor confronted by an elite medical clique who will stop at nothing--including murder and mutilation--to protect their secrets. Harvard Medical School-trained Michael Crichton, of Jurassic Park and Andromeda Strain fame, actually started his writing career with the Edgar Award-winning A Case of Need, in which the pathologist protagonist tries to prove the innocence of a friend accused of killing a woman in a botched abortion (then illegal). Another medico-turned-writer is urologist Kelly Parsons; his first mystery, Doing Harm, is about an ambitious hospital chief resident playing cat and mouse with a killer, and it won good reviews from the likes of Stephen King. So what about female authors? At the top of any list is multi-award-winning author P.D. James, who put her experience in hospital administration to good use in books such as A Mind to Murder (set in a psychiatric clinic), Shroud for a Nightingale (set in a nursing school), and The Private Patient (set in a plastic surgery clinic). Also on the distaff side, physician author J.L. DeLozier offers a unique protagonist in Dr. Persephone Smith, a psychologist with the gift (or curse) of enhanced empathy. In Storm Shelter, Smith is deployed to an abandoned air hangar turned medical shelter during a massive hurricane, but she soon has something more terrifying to deal than the storm as staff and evacuees begin disappearing--and turning up as mutilated corpses. For more ideas, check out these blogger suggestions: https://storify.com/sillynarra399/the-17-best-medical-mystery-books-ever-written

Time to Relax With Summer's New Mysteries

I'll admit that I have been lax in posting--overcome by summer heat and lethargy. But with a vacation ahead, I got busy looking for new mysteries to take along. I'm a fan of Scandinavian authors, so I quickly picked up the latest Jo Nesbo fare, The Thirst, in which Inspector Harry Hole hunts down a serial murderer targeting female victims on Tinder. Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz, best-selling author of Moriarty and Trigger Mortis, is described as a "classic whodunit worthy of Agatha Christie," so you know I was intrigued. In the Horowitz tale, the editor of a manuscript by a popular crime author, who sets his tales in Christie-style English villages, begins to suspect that the writer's latest fiction has hidden clues to a real murder. Far from English villages, Kristen Lepionka's "uniquely compelling" The Last Place You Look features a tough bisexual private investigator who must solve a 15-year-old murder case in time to save an innocent man from death row. Meanwhile, The Child is the latest offering from New York Times best-selling author Fiona Barton and starts with the discovery of a tiny skeleton by a workman, launching London-based journalist Kate Waters on the trail of a decades-old crime and the darker mystery that underlies it. I also gravitated to The Marsh King's Daughter by Karen Dionne, because it takes me back to old haunts in Michigan and is described as "sure to thrill fans of The Girl on the Train." The title alludes to the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale about a child born to a monster and an innocent, and Dionne's psychological thriller follows Helen Pelletier, who lives in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula wilds, on her search for her father, an escaped convict who had kidnapped her mother and kept her captive for years. For more new summer mystery options, check out https://media.bookbub.com/blog/2017/06/06/new-mystery-books-coming-in-summer-2017/

The Sport of Catching Red Herrings

Red herrings swim happily about in mystery fiction pools and challenge readers to net them. FYI, the origin of the term "red herring"--in this case meaning a clue that leads mystery readers towards a false conclusion--is supposedly based on the use of a kipper (a pungent, reddish smoked fish) to train hounds, either to follow a scent despite distractions or to divert them from the correct scent. Most authors are not so obligingly obvious as Dan Brown in The Da Vinci Code, where he creates the red herring Bishop Aringarosa, a highly suspicious cleric, and names him for a red/pink (rosa) herring (aringa) in Italian! Apropos of the dog training origin of "red herring," Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles, about a family supposedly cursed by a demonic hound, contains famous red herrings in an escaped convict and a sketchy butler. However, Agatha Christie is really the queen of red herrings. Just a few examples: In The ABC Murders, the alphabetical order of murders is a red herring planted by the killer to fool the police (and the reader), while The Moving Finger's poison pen letters are red herrings that fail to hid the murderer's true motive from the sharp-eyed Miss Marple. In Death on the Nile, when an heiress is murdered on a Nile cruise packed with suspects, Hercules Poirot uses his "little grey cells" to spot red herrings like the bad blood between the heiress's husband and jilted fiancee. Another good example is found in The Withdrawing Room by bestseller Charlotte MacLeod. The red herrings begin with Barnwell Augustus Quiffen, an obnoxious old lodger at young Sarah Keeling's Beacon Hill boardinghouse full of eccentrics. Quiffen dies suddenly by falling under a train, but a bag lady appears to tell Sarah that it was no accident, that she saw an unknown person push Quiffen to his death. Next the lodger replacing Quiffen is murdered in a random street mugging. Sarah and her friend Max Bittersohn investigate, uncovering a carefully planned crime. In more recent fiction, red herrings dart through last year's New York Times' bestseller I Let You Go, a debut novel by Clare Mackintosh. The novel begins with a grim prologue about the hit-and-run death of a 5-year-old boy in Bristol, leaving police with few clues to a crime witnessed only by the boy's distraught single mother. The story is next narrated by Jenna Gray, who has escaped to an isolated shack on the Welsh coast to try to forget her traumatic memories, while another narrative follows the police doggedly investigating. Spoiler alert: There's a big plot twist ahead! For more examples of red herrings in popular books, TV shows, movies and even video games, check out https://literaryterms.net/red-herring/

Mysteries From the Viewpoint of a Witness

Most murder mysteries focus on the victim, the killer and the sleuth (detective, PI, prosecutor, etc.). But there is a third group of essential characters: the witnesses. Authors present witnesses and their narratives to the readers for evaluation based on the same elements used by legal teams. First, expertise and experience are key to witness credibility, ranging from specialized education to ordinary familiarity. Witnesses are also evaluated in terms of consistency, meaning both consistent telling of his or her story by the witness and consistency with input from other witnesses. A certain level of detail makes a witness more believable, too--as long as details don't vary with each telling. Readers (and jurors) also judge reliability by witness "demeanor," or a gut "feel" evoked by dress, body language, speaking style, and assumptions (perhaps wrong) about social, racial or ethnic background. Finally, perceived "neutrality" counts in how much weight readers are going to give to a witness; readers are more likely to suspect self-serving bias if the witness has a clear stake in the outcome, such as financial gain or a personal relationship. Witnesses don't have to be supporting cast members in mystery fiction. Authors can choose to unfold a story from the viewpoint of a witness for a number of good reasons: to mislead with partial or unreliable narration, to hide or highlight the reasoning of the detective, or to create empathy and emotional tension. A recent example of this is The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins, in which the main character Rachel witnesses a shocking scene involving a couple she has observed during her daily train commute past their neighborhood, but her emotional problems, drinking and personal bias cause the police (and the reader) to question her reliability as a narrator. Another example where witnesses take center stage is Agatha Christie's Murder in Retrospect, in which Hercule Poirot solves the 16-year-old murder of a philandering painter, for which his wife was convicted, based solely on narratives of five witnesses. If you want a witness protagonist plus romance, check out The Witness by Nora Roberts, about a young woman who flees after witnessing a Russian mob killing and emerges years later in a small Ozarks town as a quirky freelance programmer protected by high-tech security systems, guard dog and firearms--and so she naturally attracts the sexy local police chief! Unfortunately, fictional justice does not necessarily mimic reality in terms of credible witnesses. Check out these 10 famous lying witnesses, and the miscarriages of justice that resulted from their false testimony: http://listverse.com/2015/08/04/10-people-who-brazenly-lied-on-the-witness-stand/

'Impossible Murders' Challenge Mystery Buffs

The "impossible murder" or the "locked room murder" is a fun mystery plot device that includes early examples such as Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone and Arthur Conan Doyle outings with Sherlock Holmes. These mystery puzzlers generally include a victim who is apparently alone, or a murderer who inexplicably disappears, and suspects who have solid alibis and/or could not have logically committed the crime. "Impossible murder" purists turn up their noses at any explanations that rely on supernatural agents, hokey secret passages, or gimmicks like Edgar Allan Poe's killer orangutan in The Murders in the Rue Morgue. John Dickson Carr is a master of the "locked room" tale. Consider his 1935 puzzler The Hollow Man about a professor found murdered in a room locked from the inside, with people apparently present in the hall outside during the murder, and the ground below the room's window covered in unbroken snow. Similarly, award-winning French author Paul Halter specializes in "impossible murders" and began his career with The Fourth Door: The Houdini Murders, in which seemingly impossible murders are believed to be the work of a reincarnated Houdini--until Dr. Alan Twist unveils the rational solution. Ellery Queen penned a doozy with The King Is Dead, in which a wealthy munitions magnate, whose brother threatens to shoot him at midnight, locks himself in a hermetically sealed office. When the brother, under constant observation, pulls the trigger of an empty gun at midnight, the magnate is hit by a bullet, proved to be from the same gun, in his sealed room, where no gun is found. Two Japanese authors of impossible murder stories include Soji Shimada and Keigo Higashino. Shimada's The Tokyo Zodiac Murders challenges the reader to explain a cycle of gruesome "impossible" murders that begin with the locked-room death of an artist and continue to take the lives of his relatives over four decades. In Higashino’s Salvation of a Saint, the murderer's identity is known, but she has a seemingly unbreakable alibi: She was on the other side of Japan at the time of the murder. For a list of more "locked room" mysteries, check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locked-room_mystery

Avoiding Cliches in Mystery Plot Twists

There's nothing worse than a mystery "plot twist" that you can see coming for many chapters ahead. There is an art to the plot twist that requires writers to avoid the obvious (the cruel stepfather) and gimmicks ("it was just a dream") and then to plant clues that obscure, redirect or contradict suspicions so that the final twist surprises and impresses readers by fitting the right puzzle pieces into a believable solution. Although there are very few plot devices that are completely original, some plot twists slip more easily into cliche if attempted by less skilled mystery writers. Here are some of my pet peeves. The first is a mystery tale that, in a desperate effort to create a twist, injects some last-minute new suspect, deus ex machina event, or unrealistic "coincidence." This abuses the basic mystery-solving pact with the reader. But I'm equally irritated by authors who create so many suspicious characters, red herring clues and dead-end turns that following the plot line becomes mentally exhausting. Then the eventual solution of the mystery goes from an "aha" moment to an "at long last" moment. Plot twists often focus on one of four characters: the victim, the suspect, the detective or the narrator. For victims, there's the old "I'm not really dead" resurrection (usually because the victim was trying to fool the law, an enemy, a loved one or an insurance company). Other victim surprises include mistaken identity or a twin/doppelganger killing. In the wrong hands, the not-a-real-victim twist undermines the mystery and reader interest. When it comes to suspects, plot surprises often involve a guilty "but who would ever think" character (the granny, the kid, the pretty girl) or a not-guilty "but sure looks like a villain" character, a la Harry Potter's Professor Snape. Writers can unwittingly flag a suspect by overly disguising a character as either too nice or too nasty. When it's the detective who delivers the plot twist, a dusty ploy is the surprise appearance of a character or motive from the detective's "tortured past." That so many fictional detectives are tortured (alcoholics, loners, etc. ) is another cliche worth discussing elsewhere! Finally, there's the "unreliable" narrator. This plot device has created some classics, like Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd or Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl, but it's not easy to pull off (please don't have the killer's creepy italicized commentary throughout a story). And finally, it is not really a plot twist when a death ruled to be accidental or a suicide turns out to be (shock) a homicide. We know we're reading a "murder mystery" after all. For some examples of mysteries with critically acclaimed plot twists, see the https://the-line-up.com/plot-twists-books

The Special Satisfaction of Solving Cold Cases

The other day I was reading the latest mystery from Tami Hoag, The Bitter Season, including a cold-case investigation of the 25-year-old murder of a sex crimes detective, and I began to think about the fascination of cold cases. Not only are there many TV series, both the fictional and "reality" variety, built around cold cases, there are also many cold-case mysteries by top authors. For example, there is The Drop by Michael Connelly, in which LAPD detective Harry Bosch is asked to look into why DNA from a rape and murder 21-years earlier matches a 29-year-old convicted rapist. Is the new regional crime lab compromised, or is something even darker going on? Kate Atkinson launched her PI Jackson Brodie series with Case Histories, about three investigations--a little girl who went missing 30 years before, a random maniacal attack on an officer worker, and a grisly crime by an overwhelmed new mother--which turn out to have surprise connections. From Harlan Coben, a favorite for plot twists, comes Stay Close, about a detective doggedly pursuing the 17-year-old unsolved disappearance of a husband and father until the hidden secrets of past and present suburban lives disastrously collide. Laura Lippman's After I'm Gone also explores how one man’s disappearance affects his wife, mistress (who later disappears and ends up dead) and daughters, and then ensnares a retired Baltimore detective working the cold cases 36 years later. Similarly, in The Dead Will Tell by Linda Castillo, Chief of Police Kate Burkholder finds that her investigation of an old man's murder links to the tragic past of the abandoned, haunted farm where an Amish father and his four children perished, and his young wife disappeared, 35 years earlier. And finally, one of my favorite forensic mystery writers, Kathy Reichs, offers Bones to Ashes, in which forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan (the inspiration for the "Bones" TV series) works to solve the mystery of a young girl's skeleton. Could she be Brennan's childhood friend who vanished 30 years earlier? Or are the bones tied to a series of cold cases that have left three girls dead and four missing? I find there's a special pleasure in reading about the solution to a cold case. For one, there's the thrill of solving a puzzle that has baffled others. And then there's the satisfaction of the hunt, of capturing the murderer who almost got away. Most important, the long shadow of justice is affirmed, and the mystery ends with cathartic closure to tragic history. In reality as opposed to fiction, many cold cases remain unsolved, and those solved owe less to detective brilliance than to improved forensics, especially DNA, and belated witnesses or confessions. For examples of real cold case solutions, see http://www.forensicscolleges.com/blog/resources/10-cold-cases-solved

A Salute to Mother-Daughter Writing Teams

Mother's Day is coming, and it always has a bittersweet quality for me because my mother died right after Mother's Day 16 years ago. My mother was not a writer, but she was well-read and critically observant, and I'm sure she could give me valuable advice on my writing if she were still here. So I am naturally envious of the successful mother-daughter writing duos out there. For example, in the mystery fiction arena, there are the equally well-known Mary Higgins Clark and her daughter Carol Higgins Clark, authors of books together and separately. Their first collaboration was Deck the Halls, described by Publishers Weekly as a "amiably lighthearted Christmas ornament of a book," in which Regan Reilly, the dynamic young sleuth from Carol Higgins Clark's novels, accidentally meets Alvirah Meehan, Mary Higgins Clark’s amateur detective, and they team up to solve a Reilly family-linked kidnapping. Another mystery writing duo operates under the pseudonym P. J. Tracy for mother-daughter team Patricia (P. J.) and Traci Lambrecht. Their debut Monkeewrench, which won a Barry Award as Best First Mystery Novel, is a tale of serial killings inspired by the new computer game of software company Monkeewrench, whose eccentric partners have a secret past that may link to the crimes. In the Young Adult space, New York Times bestselling author Suzanne Brockmann teamed up with her daughter Melanie Brockmann to write the paranormal Night Sky series about Skylar Reid, a teenage girl who discovers that she is a Greater-Than, meaning she has scary super-powers. Bestseller Jodi Picoult also collaborated with her daughter, Samantha van Leer, to produce Young Adult fare, starting with Between the Lines, a fairy tale-styled teen romance. Sometimes the mothers and daughters who share writing talent work best as mutual inspirations rather than as co-authors, as seen with the late award-winning writer Carolyn See and her best-seller daughter Lisa See (who also has mystery chops via her Red Princess series). Carolyn and Lisa did share the pen name Monica Highland, too. For more about mothers and daughters in publishing, see http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jocelyn-kelley/moms-write_b_1510114.html

Join Mystery Gardeners in Rooting Out Evil

Spring blossoms perfume the air, and the garden centers are crowded. Luckily, if you're a mystery lover with a passion for gardening, the shelves are full of fiction to satisfy both interests! Sleuthing gardeners, or gardening sleuths, can find a kindred spirit in Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe, a food-loving armchair detective who is also an ardent cultivator of orchids; if you're new to the series, begin with the seminal first entry, Fer-de-Lance. Or learn some herbalist arts from award-winning Ellis Peters' Brother Cadfael, a 12th century English monk with a keen eye for poisonous human and plant secrets (A Morbid Taste for Bones is a good starting point). The English are noted for their gardens and their mysteries, so retired botany professors with detective skills seem to abound. That includes Anthony Eglin's English Garden mysteries featuring retired botany professor Lawrence Kingston (The Alcatraz Rose is an International Book Awards winner); award-winning author E.X. (Elizabeth) Ferrars' Andrew Basnett, another retired botany prof; and John Sherwood's Horticultural series with Celia Grant, a London botanist. Back in the U.S.A., gardening mysteries bloom in the cozy category, including Washington, D.C., gardener and housewife Louise Eldridge, who digs up crime in the Ann Ripley series that debuted with Mulch. Meanwhile, Susan Wittig Albert offers China Bayles, an herbalist and former attorney in Pecan Springs, Texas; the series debut, Thyme of Death, was a finalist for Agatha and Anthony awards. A unique choice is Naomi Hirahara's sleuth Mas Arai, a Hiroshima survivor and Los Angeles gardener. Snakeskin Shamisen won an Edgar Award and was an Anthony Award finalist. For more gardening-themed mysteries, see http://www.stopyourekillingme.com/JobCats/HerbsGardens.html

Twins Focus the Nature vs. Nurture Mystery

Can "bad genes" destine people to violence and criminality? As a mystery fan, I've never liked that kind of characterization because I want to unravel not only the puzzle of who-done-it but also the why. A genetically predetermined monster just isn't as interesting in terms of motive and plotting. Plus, the "bad genes" theory tends to drift into offensive racial, ethnic and social stereotypes. And, finally, I prefer mystery solutions that deliver justice, and that means supposing free will rather than genetic determinism. Last year, a Boston Globe article by two associate professors of criminal justice approached the controversy head-on, arguing that a genetic basis for crime has not been adequately explored both because scientists do not have the practical or ethical ability to perform randomized controlled trials and because political headwinds cause them to avoid the issue. In the meantime, the best crime-relevant data untangling heritable personality traits (such as aggression) from environmental factors (such as bad parenting) come from identical twin studies. Overall, research finds about 50% of personality traits are heritable and 50% due to environmental factors--so no simple behavior answers from the twins. Perhaps the mystery of genetics-vs.-environment is why twins are an old theme in literature, often using a good one vs. evil one trope. For the curious, here's some mystery fiction with a twin twist: The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield, where the gothic history of a mysterious family includes the deeply bonded identical twins Adeline (the violent one) and Emmeline (the calm one); John Hart's The Last Child about a 13-year-old boy who embarks on a dangerous quest for his missing twin sister, with help and hindrance from a local detective; The Nightspinners by Lucretia Grindle, in which a teenage girl with a telepathic connection to her brutally murdered twin sister faces an unknown killer; and Lives of the Twins by Rosamond Smith (aka Joyce Carol Oates), the tale of a shallow woman who takes a dangerous path by initiating affairs with identical twin brothers, one gentle and one sadistic, who are estranged by a terrible secret. For more twin-themed books, see https://www.abebooks.com/books/identical-evil-siamese-lamb-niffenegger/twins-in-literature.shtml

These Mysteries Play April Fool Tricks

Tomorrow is April Fool's Day, and although I've never been a fan of its tradition of pranks (they often seem more cruel than funny), it really is an appropriate day for the mystery writer's penchant for fooling readers via surprise plot twists and red-herring clues. Here are three good novels that specifically play on the April Fool theme. April Fool by William Herbert Deverell, a well-known Canadian author and criminal lawyer, won the 2006 Arthur Ellis Award for best novel. It's just one entry in his series featuring the classically trained, self-doubting Arthur Beauchamp, QC, of the British Columbia criminal bar. Beauchamp is enjoying his retirement as a hobbyist farmer on B.C.’s Garibaldi Island when he is dragged back to court to defend an old client, Nick "the Owl" Faloon, once one of the world’s top jewel thieves. The diminutive Faloon has been accused of the unlikely rape and murder of a psychologist, and the combination of courtroom thriller and whodunit takes the reader on an entertaining ride of twists and turns. Another Canadian favorite of mine, Louise Penny, penned The Cruelest Month (referring to April), which won the 2008 Agatha Award for best novel. It is the third novel in her series featuring Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and the small Canadian town of Three Pines. The tale involves a group of friends who visit a haunted house in Three Pines in the hope of ridding it of evil spirits. When one ends up dead, apparently of fright, Gamache and team investigate, and Gamache soon faces some old ghosts of his own. Finally, for fans of historial mystery settings and H.R.F. Keating, the noted English crime fiction writer best known for his series featuring Inspector Ghote of the Bombay CID, there is A Remarkable Case of Burglary. The story begins on the morning of April Fools' Day in 1871, as Val Leary--handsome, charming and broke--notices a young maidservant scrubbing the steps of a home as he walks through one of London's wealthiest districts. He is instantly inspired by the idea of a "remarkable burglary," but the seemingly perfect set-up soon gets complicated in the upstairs-downstairs world of Victorian England. For more April Fool's fare, see http://mysteryreadersinc.blogspot.com/2015/04/april-fools-day-mysteriesapril-fools.html

Happy Birthday to March-Born Mystery Writers!

Because I was born in this month, I am naturally curious about other writers with March birthdays. If you look at the whole literary realm, from children's book great Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seuss) to the Roman poet Ovid, the list is overwhelming. So I narrowed it down to just March-born mystery/crime fiction writers. And they're a varied lot! Start with the late Mickey Spillane (Frank Morrison Spillane, born March 9, 1918). I'm actually not a fan of his PI Mike Hammer, who debuted in 1947's I, the Jury, but Spillane is a pioneer of "hard-boiled" crime fiction and won the 1995 Edgar Allan Poe Grand Master Award, so you may want to meet Hammer just to indulge in old-fashioned, tough-guy nostalgia. More modern mayhem comes courtesy of James Patterson (born March 22, 1947). Patterson is probably best-known for the African-American psychologist and police detective protagonist of his Alex Cross series (including Along Came a Spider and Kiss the Girls), but he has penned standalone thrillers and other series, such as the Women's Murder Club. Meanwhile, there's Nevada Barr (born March 1, 1952), author of the Anna Pigeon mystery series with a park ranger detective (so naturally set in national parks). Her debut novel, Track of the Cat, won the 1994 Anthony Award and Agatha Award for Best First Novel. Staying with the wilderness theme, another March writer is Dana Stabenow (born March 27, 1952). Her Kate Shugak mystery series is set in Stabenow's native Alaska and has a unique protagonist: an Aleut living on a 160-acre homestead in a national park, with a half-wolf, half-husky roommate called Mutt. The first Kate Shugak mystery, 1992's A Cold Day for Murder, won the Edgar Award for Best Paperback Original. But probably my favorite of all the March-born mystery writers is Peter Robinson (born March 17, 1950) and his Inspector Alan Banks novels set in Yorkshire. The 1999 Anthony Award and Barry Award for Best Novel went to the tenth entry in the series, In a Dry Season. When a drought drains the local reservoir to reveal the ruins of a lost village and the unidentified bones of a murdered young woman, Banks must hunt down a sadistic killer who has escaped detection for half a century. For all authors born in March, check out this list: https://www.bookish.com/articles/happy-birthday-authors-a-look-at-writers-born-in-march/

My Plan to 'Spring Clean' the Bookshelves

Happy St. Patrick's Day! After some green beer, I've decided to launch my spring agenda, which requires that I tackle two tough topics: spring cleaning and getting rid of books. Even though I buy fewer hardcover or paperback books now that e-books are inexpensive, more convenient for traveling and reference, and create no storage headaches, I still do buy bound books simply because there is nothing more pleasurable to me than sitting quietly and turning pages, lost in a story. But then I end up with cluttered, dusty bookcases and no space for my new favorites because out-of-date texts and raggedy paperbacks are hogging limited shelf space. So after reading advice columns about how to best tidy my bookshelves, here is my spring-cleaning plan: No. 1, I take all the books off the shelves, and clean and fix the shelves. No. 2, I initially divide the books into piles of "must keep" and "could go." (I steel myself to resist reading the books while making my decisions, or I'll never finish the task.) How do I decide which books to let go? I decide to cart away books that I have read but don't like, that I have read but know I will never read again, or that I haven't read but know I will never read. No. 3, I further divide the "could go" pile into four piles of books to "sell," "donate," "return to owner/lender," or "trash." Some folks suggest turning the trash books into craft projects (such as paper flowers from the pages), but I'll leave that to someone more artful. No. 4, I take the books that I'm going to keep and clean them up (maybe repair a few), and then rearrange them by some scheme that makes sense while remaining visually appealing (author, size, genre, etc.). No. 5, I follow through on selling, donating and trashing, so that piles of unwanted books don't end up in the garage as homes for spiders. No. 6, I reward myself with a quiet read of a new book, or one of the old favorites I found while cleaning. I do empathize with any readers determined to cling to book-jammed spaces, however, and so I'll also pass along these memes about bookworms who hate spring cleaning: https://media.bookbub.com/blog/2017/03/15/reading-over-spring-cleaning-memes/

Time to Add Irish Green to Your Noir Reading

It's almost St. Patrick's Day, and I admit to a special liking for the holiday. It's not because of my Irish heritage; it is because the holiday falls on the day before my birthday (I had many green-iced birthday cakes growing up thanks to bakery discounts). What better way to celebrate than an exploration of Ireland's healthy crop of mystery and crime fiction! I can only mention a few, so I'll start with one of my favorite Irish authors: Tana French. Her 2007 debut mystery, Into the Woods, won Edgar, Macavity, Anthony and Barry awards for best first novel and launched her Dublin Murder Squad series. A male-female detective team investigates the murder of a young girl in the same place where two children went mysteriously missing "into the woods" many years earlier (with a very personal connection for one detective). The latest French work is 2016's The Trespasser, in which a slamdunk, lover's-quarrel murder pulls the Murder Squad protagonists in unexpected directions. Another good Irish author choice is Benjamin Black, the mystery-writing pen name of award-winning novelist John Banville. Christine Falls, an Edgar and Macavity awards nominee, launched Black's series about a tormented pathologist named Quirke. Set in 1950s Dublin, the story begins when Quirke tipsily returns to the morgue after a party and finds his own brother-in-law tampering with the records of a young woman's corpse. Quirke reluctantly begins looking into the woman's history and discovers a web of treachery that implicates the Catholic Church and may involve members of his own family. In 2016, Black added Even the Dead to the Quirke series: A mysterious car crash death and a missing pregnant woman lead the pathologist into a dark tangle of profit, politics and religon. Back on the distaff side, another award-winning series comes from Louise Phillips. The Doll House, which won Best Irish Crime Novel of the Year for 2013, features Phillips' series protagonist Dr. Kate Pearson, a criminal pyschologist. Pearson is called in when a body in a Dublin canal ties back to a family's tragic past and newly surfaced, traumatic childhood memories. Liz Nugent's Unravelling Oliver is another Irish Book Award winner; it's a dark "why-dunnit" about a seemingly charming Dublin children's author who shocks the community when he savagely attacks his devoted wife. And if you're looking for crime noir, try Ken Bruen and his lauded Jack Taylor series about a disgraced Galway police officer turned PI whose investigations often confront the negative Irish social changes of "Celtic Tiger" prosperity. Bruen's most recent series entry is 2016's The Emerald Lie. For more Irish mysteries by Irish authors, see https://www.goodreads.com/shelf/show/irish-crime-fiction

Senior Themes: Proving Mystery Never Gets Old

Because I'm in the process of moving my 91-year-old father to an assisted living facility, I've been researching the mysteries of aging--and aging in mysteries. Most mysteries about seniors feature amusing, quirky "golden-agers" of the "cozy" mystery variety. I guess it's reassuring to read about older characters who aren't "cognitively impaired" and "mobility challenged" while "facing mortality." But, after dealing with real senior issues, I began to hanker for a realistic senior detective without a sweetening dose of cute humor. And I wanted characters and social issues more contemporary than Agatha Christie's Miss Marple in an English country manor! My search of senior-themed mysteries turned up one non-cozy example in Daniel Friedman's Don't Ever Get Old, winner of the Macavity Award for Best First Novel and nominee for both Anthony and Edgar awards for best first novel. Ex-Memphis detective "Buck" Schatz starts on the trail of an old nemesis, partly to settle scores and partly to recover a possible treasure in gold. Though 80-something Buck is literally “too old for this,” his instincts remain, and he does have a grandson's help with things like “the googles” and other technological hurdles. Violence and realism are laced by humor that acknowledges mortality and old age's physical and mental limitations. Another discovery was Thirty-Three Teeth by British author Colin Cotterill, which won a 2006 Dilys Award from the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association. Dr. Siri Paiboun, one of the last doctors left in Laos after the Communist takeover, has been drafted to be national coroner and must unravel a series of mysterious murders. Untrained for the job, the 72-year-old has outstanding qualifications undimmed by age: curiosity and the courage to follow clues despite political pressure. But I'm not opposed to a spunky elder sleuth if he or she is the credible product of a spunky elder author! Start with Macavity Award nominee A Valley to Die For by 81-year-old Radine Trees Nehring, which introduces widow Carrie McCrite and retired detective Henry King to her "Something to Die For" series set in the Ozark mountains. From 83-year-old Lorena McCourtney comes the gray-haired Ivy Malone, protagonist of a series that includes two Daphne du Maurier Award winners, Invisible and On the Run. Finally, Edgar Award-winning screenwriter Rita Lakin, 87, offers the Gladdy Gold series, starting with Getting Old Is Murder, in which 75-year-old Gladdy Gold and her gang of Fort Lauderdale retirees hunt down a killer. For cozy senior options, see http://www.mystery-cozy.com/Mystery-Cozy-Senior-Sleuth-Cozies.html

Honor Valentine's Day With Romantic Mysteries

Happy Valentine's Day reading! First, a bit of personal background: My husband and I went on our first date 42 years ago on Valentine's Day. It was a disappointing event, to be honest, but there was enough spark to encourage another outing, and the rest is history. It seems appropriate to celebrate the romantic holiday with some romantic-mystery/mystery-romance genre mating. Maybe start by revisiting the popular "gothics" of my teen reading years: Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, Nine Coaches Waiting by Mary Stewart, Dragonwyck by Anya Seton and Wings of the Falcon by Barbara Michaels. For more modern fare, try You Belong to Me by Karen Rose, in which a sexy widower cop and a troubled medical examiner find love while investigating a serial killer, or Heartbreaker by Julia Garwood as against-the-odds romance blossoms amid another serial murder case. Or, embrace Stephanie Plum, the protagonist of Janet Evanovich's popular series, for her debut with One for the Money, in which Stephanie takes a job hunting bail jumpers for a quick buck and is soon on the trail of a hot ex-beau with a price on his head while getting training from the studly "Ranger." All of these are sturdy romantic mystery entries, but, if you're looking for more literary prose, read the Booker Prize-winning best-seller Possession by A.S. Byatt. Described as a "novel of wit and romance, an intellectual mystery, and a triumphant love story," the tale is built around a pair of young scholars researching the lives of two Victorian poets through their letters, journals, and poems, and tracking the dead poets' movements from London to Yorkshire, with seances and fairy lore along the way. For additional romantic mystery options: http://bestmysterybooks.com/best-romantic-mystery-books.html

Enduring Appeal of the Pilgrimage Experience

I just returned from India, and part of the trip included visits to beautiful South Indian Hindu temples, which were very crowded because we unknowingly arrived during the local pilgrimage season. Groups of men lined every dusty road, rested in fields, dodged through city traffic and eventually jammed the temple grounds with devotion. They were dressed simply and minimally, carried little and lived austerely, and traveled in clusters by friendship, family, community or chance-met camaraderie. They had left their homes and embarked on foot to seek epiphany, transformation, redemption or perhaps just an adventurous escape from the daily grind. Religious pilgrimage is as common in modern India as it was in Medieval Europe, when it inspired Geoffrey Chaucer's classic The Canterbury Tales. But you don't have to go back in time or to exotic lands for a pilgrimage experience. If you think of a "pilgrimage" as a journey of personal or spiritual significance, you can become a pilgrim right now in America. For example, the popular Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed describes a kind of pilgrimage. In the wake of her mother’s death and a failed marriage, a damaged young woman decides to hike more than a thousand miles of the Pacific Crest Trail, alone and without training, and ultimately heals herself. Or consider The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce: A sad, dull Englishman receives a letter from an old female friend who is dying in a hospice 627 miles away and impulsively starts walking to see her. On his transformational journey, he realizes wonders he has missed, rediscovers his need for his wife, and finds he is stronger than he realized. In the Pulitzer Prize-winning nonfiction book The Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, author Annie Dillard describes a metaphysical journey through a dramatic year in Virginia's Roanoke Valley, exploring nature and its seasons near her home while recording both her scientific observations and her thoughts on solitude, nature and religious faith. The international award-winning novelist Paulo Coelho has written lyrically about pilgrimage, too. He is best known for The Alchemist--about an Andalusian shepherd boy whose dream of treasure sends him on a quest to the Egyptian desert--but before he wrote that fictional tale, Coelho penned The Pilgrimage about his own spiritual quest along the famed pilgrimage route of the Camino de Santiago, still the most popular long-distance trail in Europe. Inspired to follow in his footsteps? Check out the many recent pilgrim accounts or guides: https://www.amazon.com/Pilgrimage-Road-Santiago-Complete-Cultural/dp/0312254164

In the Dead of Winter, Embrace 'Nordic Noir'

January, that month of bleak and often icy landscapes, should help you appreciate the 'Nordic Noir' mystery writers of Scandinavia. Many American readers immediately think of Swedish writer Stieg Larsson's The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo series, but there are many other excellent mystery and crime fiction authors from Sweden, Norway, Finland and even Iceland, and 2016 saw a number of notable novels. For those who like dark and disturbing, there's The Crow Girl, a tale originally published as three separate volumes in Sweden, by Erik Axl Sund (nom de plume of a writing duo). Police detective Jeanette Kihlberg and psychologist Sofia Zetterlund are trying to crack the case of the sadistic Crow Girl, who is capturing and torturing children around the city of Stockholm and who seems to have a strange connection to a mental patient that Zetterlund is treating. In neighboring Norway, Gunnar Staalesen offers Where Roses Never Die, the 19th in a series whose private detective character Varg Veum is actually honored by a statue in the city of Bergen, where he fictionally operates. Now Veum, suffering from alcoholism and haunted by past failures, is seeking redemption by helping a mother find out what happened to her three-year-old daughter, who disappeared nearly 25 years earlier, so the statute of limitations on justice is about to run out. Also from Norway is The Bird Tribunal by Agnes Ravatn, a mystery with an isolated, wild setting and Gothic overtones. Allis Hagtorn answers an ad for a caregiver to Sigurd Bagge, a surly and secretive character who seems more in need of companionship than care. As Allis timidly sets out to impress him, she also becomes curious about what happened to his wife--leading to rising dread with hints of the supernatural. Let's not forget about Finland. In Dark As My Heart, author Antti Tuomainen's protagonist Aleksi Kivi is a 33-year-old man obsessed by the disappearance of his mother two decades earlier when she went out on a date and never returned. So he manages to get a job working on the estate of Henrik Saarinen, a wealthy man his mother had dated, and gains his trust. But the nearer he gets to the truth, the closer he gets to losing sane perspective. For more 2016 Nordic Noir fare, check out http://www.crimefictionlover.com/2016/12/top-10-nordic-noir-novels-of-2016/

Honor Martin Luther King With Thoughtful Reads

This year I'm paying a little more attention to January's Martin Luther King Day, both grateful for how far we've come since Dr. King's death and aware of how many problems remain. My children were introduced to King's story in public school, but I come from a white generation burdened by miseducation about race that is not necessarily remedied by actual participation in desegregation and civil rights struggles. Luckily, there are three Pulitzer Prize-winning histories that address both America's racial history and Dr. King's legacy: Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II by Douglas A. Blackmon, which examines indentured servitude and neo-slavery in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, overturning the idea that the Emancipation Proclamation ended slavery in America; The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation by Gene Roberts and Hank Kilbanoff, which explores the role of black and white journalists in changing public sentiment towards the Civil Rights movement (how will today's journalists and fake news purveyors perform?); and Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63 by Taylor Branch, portraits of both King's rise to greatness and an American society of turmoil and transformation. But what about the continuing challenges of racism and inequality? Perhaps the next required reading is the 2016 book Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul by Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., which presents his passionate argument against the fallacy of a "post-racial society" and explores the current state of the black community, including the politically charged issues of institutional racism and the Black Lives Matter movement. For more suggested reading on Dr. King's legacy: http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/the-read-down/11-books-to-help-you-understand-dr-martin-luther-king-jr-s-legacy-in-2016

2017 Reading Resolutions to Broaden the Mind

It's time to make resolutions for 2017 and for me that includes reading that might help me think more clearly about some of the contentious issues of 2016's bitter presidential campaign. I'll start with the touchy subject of race. If you haven't read Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me — a best seller, National Book Award winner, and Pulitzer finalist — put it on your list. In a personal and literary exploration of America's racial history, written in the form of a letter to his adolescent son, Coates shares what it means to be black in America, from the story of his awakening to the truth about his place in the world through revelations from Howard University, Civil War battlefields, Chicago's South Side and even Paris. If you prefer fiction, a 2016 National Book Award winner, The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead, also has something new to say about America's racial sins via an imaginary tale of slaves fleeing north on a literal underground railroad — complete with locomotives, boxcars and conductors. Another book of cultural revelation is Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance, a Yale Law School graduate who grew up in a poor Rust Belt town. Vance offers a personal analysis of white working-class America in crisis through his family's story and his own experience of growing up amid social, regional and class decline. This book may help the baffled to understand the appeal of Donald Trump's presidential campaign to these "forgotten" men and women. What about terrorism? Put Karan Mahajan's The Association of Small Bombs, also a finalist for the National Book Award, on your reading resolution list. The 2016 novel opens with a Kashmiri terrorist attack in a Delhi market and follows the lives of those affected, including Deepa and Vikas Khurana, whose young sons are killed, and the boys’ injured Muslim friend Mansoor, who grows up to flirt with political radicalism. It's a book ­that forces American readers to care about the toll of terror even when it comes to a place they may see as alien and violent, to understand, and even like, people for whom terrorism exerts an appeal, and to realize the complexity of Muslim politics and grievances beyond "radical Islam" bashing. In the end, Mahajan reveals the terrible truth that, to quote The New York Times review, "nothing recovers from a bomb — not our humanity, our politics or even our faith." For ideas from The New York Times' 10 best books of 2016, see http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/books/review/best-books.html