Mysteries Add Side of Mayhem to Thanksgiving

It's that time of year when families gather to feast, malls crowd, e-commerce hums and marching bands parade, and for mystery writers those are all opportunities for old feuds to turn deadly and for killers to create mass death. There are so many Thanksgiving-themed mysteries out there, especially in the cozy mystery space, that I'll only highlight a few. In the "killer in the crowd" category, there is Richard Hawke's debut Speak of the Devil, in which former police commissioner Fritz Malone chases a mystery killer dubbed Nightmare, who has opened fire at New York City's Thanksgiving Day parade and threatens more carnage unless the city meets his impossible demands. For fans of J.D. Robb's Lieutenant Eve Dallas series, there is Thankless in Death, which pits Dallas against a grievance-filled son who has murdered his parents for Thanksgiving and plans to strike again; Dallas knows the who, how and why, but must race to figure out the next victim. For cozy fans, Leslie Meier has an appropriate holiday entry in her amateur sleuth Lucy Stone series, Turkey Day Murder, as charming Tinker's Cove festivities are marred by the murder of a Native American activist with a long list of enemies. Finally, as a Southerner, I have to include a Dixie side with Hit and Run by Sandra Balzo. Journalist AnnaLise Grigg returns to her hometown in North Carolina's western mountains for a Thanksgiving bash hosted by the town's legendary womanizer Dickens Hart, who turns out to be her birth father. The philanderer also invites all former lovers and other children he may have fathered in an attempt to "do right" by potential heirs to his huge fortune. No surprise that the gathering soon takes a deadly turn! For a long list of Thanksgiving-themed mysteries, check this 2019 mysteryreadersinc post at http://mysteryreadersinc.blogspot.com/2019/11/thanksgiving-mysteries-thanksgiving.html

New Mysteries Ensnare Readers in the Dark Web

The dark web, which often comes up in today's TV thrillers, is making its mark in mystery fiction, too, as a new digital maze in which detectives must seek encryption-masked villains. For the uninitiated, dark web content exists on darknets that use the Internet but require specific software, configurations or authorizations to access. The identities and locations of darknet users stay anonymous and cannot be tracked due to a layered encryption system, which makes the dark web naturally attractive to black marketers, drug sellers, hackers, pedophiles and terrorists. Here are four recent well-reviewed mysteries that involve dark web sleuthing. In 2019's This is Gomorrah by Tom Chatfield, hacker Azi Bello is recruited by a mysterious espionage unit to take on Gomorrah, an exclusive dark web marketplace where Islamic terrorists have left a clue to their next deadly move. The Dark Web Murders by Brian O'Hare also arrived this year as an entry in the Inspector Sheehan series, pitting Sheehan and his team against a fiendishly clever serial killer who posts luridly about his kills on dark web blogs, murdering with seeming impunity. Meanwhile, a 2017 techno-thriller set in Portland, The Dark Net by Benjamin Percy, posits that the dark web also hosts an ancient evil threatening to spread virally into the real world unless it can be stopped by members of a ragtag crew: 12-year-old blind girl with a high-tech visual prosthetic, a technophobic journalist, a one-time child evangelist with a basement full of weapons, and a hacker who styles himself as a cyber warrior. In the 2015 mystery Dark Web by T.J. Brearton, the death of an online-gaming teen launches Detective John Swift on a quest to untangle a web of virtual and real crimes to solve a complex mystery. Those still skimming the Internet surface via Google and Facebook may want to first dive into the darker reaches with Jamie Bartlett's nonfiction The Dark Net.

Surprise! Digital Gen Z Readers Like Print Fiction

Today's authors of adult fiction face the arrival of a new generation of readers: Generation Z, those born in the mid-1990s to early-2000s, who now make up 25.9% of the U.S. population and will account for 40% of all consumer markets in 2020. So what appeals to a Gen Z readership? Thanks to Library Journal (LJ) and Pew Research surveys, we know that Generation Z is the most diverse generation to date, and on track to be the most educated. They have grown up with the anxieties of post-9/11 terrorism, mass shootings and climate crisis. They have also faced a more diverse society than ever before in racial/ethnic, sexual orientation and lifestyle terms. And they are social media beings and mobile device addicts who don't remember a world without streaming media. But that doesn't mean the Gen Z doesn't read: Some 72% of respondents told LJ they'd read at least one book for pleasure in the last 12 moths—the same as for every generation. Of course, social media does a play a big role for them, even when it comes to reading choices: While like previous generations they put friend and family recommendations at the top of the list of ways to find new titles, social media is Gen Z’s second choice, at 43%, to find out about new books. The good news for fiction authors is that Gen Z members are fiction readers, per LJ: Gen Z respondents prefer reading fiction nearly two to one over nonfiction. And, though weaned on Harry Potter and Percy Jackson series, we are happy to see that mysteries still place among their top four genres. Gen Z women’s four favorite genres are, in order, romance, fantasy and young adult fiction (in a virtual tie), and mystery/suspense. Men, meanwhile, gravitate to fantasy, sci-fi, horror, and mystery/suspense. And despite their supposed digital bias, Gen Z members, like millennials, prefer to read print for long-form content, Gen Z. Hardcover books are the most-read format (79%, compared with 32% for ebooks). Here's a difference: When they do read digitally, a whopping 77% of Gen Z respondents do so on their mobile phones. For the formative fictional reading of Gen Z, see https://bookriot.com/2019/06/05/books-and-series-gen-z-grew-up-with/

Mysteries Go Back to School for Campus Carnage

It's back-to-school time for campuses across the nation, and, frankly, there are few better settings for mystery plots than academia: ambitious academics; the corrupting influence of money; and the tangled relationships and pasts of young students. There were some good topical entries in the campus thriller category in 2019, starting with Dervia McTiernan's The Scholar, in which a woman found murdered on a college campus is identified as the heir to a fortune and the child of the university's biggest funder. There's also A Student of History by Nina Revoyr about a broke young student thrilled to land a research assistant gig with one of Los Angeles' ultra-rich, only to discover dark secrets that force him to decide how far he will go to protect his future. From 2018, there is Beth Gutcheon's The Affliction. At the troubled Rye Manor School for Girls, a former headmaster of a prestigious New York City private school is sent to assess the school’s problems only to find a teacher dead in the school’s swimming pool, a teacher with the "affliction" of nonstop chattering. From 2017 comes Ruth Ware's The Lying Game in which three former girl classmates at a remote boarding school near the English Channel receive a summoning text from the fourth member of their clique, drawing them back to her home near the school, where her father, the art teacher, was a formative influence on all of the women. The reunited friends soon revisit old secrets from their shared pastime, the lying game, in which they purposely fibbed to faculty and students to see what they could get away with. Finally, one of my faves for psychological chills, Tana French, offers 2014's The Secret Place in which her Dublin Murder Squad is called to a high school after an anonymous post claims to know who killed a popular boy the year before, drawing the detectives into a strange and dangerous underworld of teenage girls. For a broader compilation of examples, including top authors such as Dorothy Sayers, P.D. James, Amanda Cross and Donna Tartt, see https://crimereads.com/a-brief-history-of-academic-mysteries-campus-thrillers-and-research-noir/

Mysteries to Read Before Summer Officially Ends

Summer is coming to a close, so set aside time for a few mystery indulgences before back-to-school and back-to-work. I'm betting on some proven favorites. One is a book I missed at the end of last year: Tana French's The Witch Elm. After happy-go-lucky Toby surprises two burglars who beat him and leave him for dead, he retreats to the family ancestral home to recover from his injuries and care for a dying uncle. But then a skull is found in the trunk of an elm tree, detectives arrive, and Toby's beliefs about the past are challenged. As a fan of Karin Slaughter, I want to read her latest The Last Widow, too: First a scientist for the Center for Disease Control is abducted and then bombs blast the Atlanta neighborhood of the FBI and CDC. Medical examiner Sara Linton and investigator Will Trent are unraveling a deadly conspiracy when Sara is abducted, and Will must go undercover to save her and thousands of innocent lives. Plus, I'm putting the reliable Jo Nesbo on my list with the latest installment in his Harry Hole series, Knife, which plunges Harry, even though relegated to cold cases, into new danger. A new author I'd like to try is Ruth Ware. Ware's Turn of the Key is about a young woman who takes a live-in nanny post with an ideal family at a luxurious home in the Scottish Highlands, only to find herself in a nightmare that ends with a child dead and herself on trial for murder. For a very different locale, the reviewer-lauded Into the Jungle by Erica Ferencik takes readers to Bolivia, where a heroine running from her past arrives to take a teaching gig that falls through. She ends up following her lover into the depths of the jungle--and a fight for survival. For a different kind of primal confrontation, there's Daniela Petrova's Her Daughter's Mother. Lana meets and befriends her daughter's anonymous egg donor Katya in New York City. When Katya suddenly disappears, Lana begins to dig obsessively into her past, drawing the suspicion of police and unearthing shocking secrets. Meanwhile, parallel stories twist in a deadly knot in the opioid-plagued rural Kansas town of Laura McHugh's The Wolf Wants In as Sadie Keller tries to find out how her brother died, 18-year-old Henley Pettit desperately seeks to escape her family's crimes, and the police keep finding bones in the woods. For more ideas, see https://crimereads.com/the-most-anticipated-crime-books-of-summer/

The Dangerous Epidemic of Loneliness

The headlines are so full of stories fretting over the epidemic of mass shootings, hate speech and hate crimes that you may have missed a disturbing story about another epidemic: loneliness. Chronic loneliness is another term for social isolation, for a lack of physical and emotional connection to others, something human beings are biologically programmed to need for physical and mental well-being. Today, according to a new poll by YouGov, 30% of millennials, those aged 23 to 38, say they are lonely, higher than any other generation surveyed. More disturbing, 22% of millennials in the poll said they had zero friends, 27% percent said they had "no close friends," and 30% said they have "no best friends." While not measured by YouGov, the up-and-coming Gen Z also reports high levels of loneliness on other surveys. Chronic loneliness, which has tended to peak naturally with the elderly in the past, seems to be seeping downward. These findings are scary. Research has linked the stress of chronic social isolation to mental and physical health issues such as anxiety, depression, digestive problems, high blood pressure, heart disease, sleep problems, weight gain, and even premature death via increased risk of stroke and cardiovascular disease. And do we really think that there is no link between social isolation and the proliferation of tribalism and hate? Lonely people trying to make connections are fueling the growth of isolated social media groups, which create no true intimacy but do deliver a warped and ephemeral sense of belonging by defining themselves against the enemy "other," whether by race, gender, politics or sexual orientation. On campuses and at political events, the isolated and angry are susceptible to the toxic embrace of polarized tribes. And what happens when polarized souls, alone and threatened on the social battlefield, have easy access to battlefield weapons and hear an approving signal in the political noise? We should not discount this dark rot in our society. To help yourself, or someone you know, to cope with loneliness, check out this Psychology Today article https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-couch/201901/is-loneliness-making-you-sick

Munchausen by Proxy: Sickened by Love

Munchausen by Proxy (MBP) is a parenting disorder and form of child abuse that may be more common in fiction and television drama than it is in real life, but it makes for fascinating plots and characters, such as Gillian Flynn's monstrously neurotic mother in her psychological thriller Sharp Objects. MBP is when a parent, mainly the mother, either fabricates an illness or induces an illness in her child, sometimes even killing the child. The offending mom usually appears to be a model parent with little or no indication of family discord, and the abusive behavior is clearly premeditated and not a reaction to the child's behavior. There is a high mortality rate for the children, and the tragedy is that they are usually very young and defenseless; the average age of victims is 4 years old. While explanations are complex, MBP often seems to be spurred by an unhealthy desire for attention. Noble mothers tending sick children not only get lots of medical support but also sympathy and help from friends and family, and even media attention. In addition to Flynn's book, other fictional stories about MBP include the newly released thriller Saving Meghan by D.J. Palmer, about a devoted mother who insists she is trying to save her daughter and herself even though the 15-year-old is so frequently ill that MBP is suspected. Figuring out the truth will keep readers turning pages. Also new this year is We Came Here to Forget by Andrea Dunlop, about a young Olympic skier who loses everything when dark secrets about her sister's MBP come to light, a trauma based on Dunlop's experience with her own sister.  The young skier flees to Buenos Aires to reinvent herself, only to become enmeshed with a man keeping dark secrets of his own. Also check out Cradle and All by Zachary Alan Fox, a thriller about a Los Angeles couple with a new baby boy. After a series of mishaps for the baby at home, they are accused of child abuse—and then anonymous night-time telephone calls begin. Everything, Everything by Nicola Yoon is a Young Adult take on MBP about a 17-year-old girl isolated by an assumed severe immunodeficiency until she finds out the terrible/liberating truth.  For true-crime drama, there is this year's "The Act," starring Patricia Arquette, on Hulu. Episodes are based on the real story of Gypsy Rose Blanchard, who was tortured by her MBP-afflicted mother DeeDee—until Gypsy orchestrated mom's murder. For more chilling real-life cases, see https://listverse.com/2015/09/03/10-shocking-cases-involving-munchausen-syndrome-by-proxy/