Books to Help Keep New Year's Resolutions

At the start of every new year, we tend to make vows to do something to improve our lives or, more selflessly, the lives of others—something different, better, transformative. And then we have trouble keeping those promises to ourselves. It's why so many self-help books are published in January, as a recent recent Forbes magazine article points out. Indeed, our areas of desired change are so varied that Amazon has 28 self-help book categories, and so perhaps you should start with the January-release memoir Help Me! by Marianne Power, about reading self-help books to see if the promise of a "perfect existence" could be fulfilled! Forbes also makes some recommendations for achieving common resolution goals. For example, perhaps you want to improve your mental well-being via the popular "mindfulness" (being aware of and controlling your experience in the moment so you are acting not reacting to life), then you can read Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection by Barbara Fredrickson. Or perhaps you want to be more productive and efficient, so page through Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport. If you want to embrace a healthier lifestyle (better diet, more exercise, bad habits kicked), then Are You Fully Charged? The Three Keys to Energizing Your Work and Life, by Tom Rath, is the book for you. For women who feel glumly mired and need the confidence and will to move forward with any resolution, there is the aptly titled How to Stop Feeling Like Sh*t: 14 Habits that Are Holding You Back from Happiness by Andrea Owen. Maybe you've decided that 2020 is the year to declutter your house and your life, then it's time to turn to tidiness guru Marie Kondo and her best-selling The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing. Finally, you may want to think about issues beyond the self and, in an increasingly diverse and yet fractured and tribal society, understand the source of our divisions and solutions for increased inclusion. Then Our Search for Belonging: How Our Need to Connect Is Tearing Us Apart, by Howard J. Ross with Jonrobert Tartaglione, offers food for thought—and action. For more books that can help bolster your new year's resolutions, see https://www.forbes.com/sites/amberjohnson-jimludema/2020/01/03/new-years-resolution-book-list/#7143efd61592

'Tis the Season to Celebrate Bad Sex in Fiction

'Tis the season to be jolly, and the British Literary Journal's 2019 "Bad Sex in Fiction Award" has just come out to provide needed end-of-year chuckles. The annual award goes to sex scenes that miss the mark to evoke mirth, cringes or head-scratching in otherwise well-written fictional works by notable authors. This year the judges actually split top "honors" between two authors: Prix Goncourt winner Didier Decoin and British novelist John Harvey. Decoin won for passages in his novel The Office of Gardens and Ponds, a fable set in Japan 1,000 years ago, by describing, for example, how the heroine "seized, kneaded, massaged, squashed and crushed" (Ow!) her lover's genitalia and "felt as though she was manipulating a small monkey that was curling up its paws." Meanwhile, Harvey floundered erotically with passages in his novel Pax, such as a clunky connection of sexual and geographic heat with "More than torrid, more than tropical: they two were riding the equator," or an unappetizing allusion to a female praying mantis devouring her mate "mouthful by mouthful." A runner-up contender was The River Capture by Mary Costello, who turned sexual penetration into a weird anatomical exploration: "She begged him to go deeper and, no longer afraid of injuring her, he went deep in mind and body, among crowded organ cavities, past the contours of her lungs and liver, and, shimmying past her heart, he felt her perfection." Elizabeth Gilbert, popular author of Eat, Pray, Love, also made the short list by having her heroine proclaim in City of Girls, "I screamed as though I were being run over by a train." (Holy Ow!) For those who get excited by step-by-step direction, try Domenic Smith's The Electric Hotel: "The actual lovemaking was a series of cryptic clues and concealed pleasures. A sensual treasure hunt. She asked for something, then changed her mind. He made adjustments and calibrations, awaited further instruction." For more excerpts, see https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/nov/27/mouthful-by-mouthful-the-2019-bad-sex-award-in-quotes

Shopping Malls Can Be Sinister Places

It's that holiday gift-buying time of year when, even though most of my shopping has moved online, I may have one or two visits to the shopping malls. Though I dread the parking, the crowds, and trekking the maze of stores, I usually don't think of a mall as a sinister setting. Yet it doesn't take too much imagination to find their dark side. Consider What Was Lost by Catherine O'Flynn. The mystery starts in the 1980s when independent 10-year-old Kate, toting a toy monkey and a notebook of observations, plays detective in a newly opened shopping mall and befriends, Adrian, the 22-year-old son of a local shopkeeper. Then the little girl disappears and Adrian naturally comes under suspicion until, hounded by the press, he also vanishes. Jump to 2003. Now Adrian's sister Lisa is working as a manager at a discount record store in the same mall and becomes obsessed by security guard Kurt's surveillance-camera sightings of a little girl with a toy monkey. Lisa and Kurt develop an after-hours friendship as they join to investigate. Throw in Teresa, Kate's classmate who is now a detective, and you have a haunting mystery set in the eerie underground and locked stretches of the mall. In Silvermeadow, an entry in Barry Maitland's Brock and Kolla mystery series, a supermall outside London is the setting for two seemingly unrelated cases. A girl goes missing from the mall and then a violent criminal is spotted at the mall. Scotland Yard Detective Inspector David Brock and Detective Sergeant Kathy Kolla come to launch a manhunt for the wanted man centered on the mall, and their team uses the investigation into the missing girl as cover. But is there more than a coincidental connection? Finally, if you're looking for a thriller pro, try Nora Roberts' 2018 bestseller Shelter in Place, which starts with a mass shooting at a Portland, Maine, mall. After 8 minutes of carnage, the killers are taken down, but the terror doesn't stop for some survivors as they discover that another conspirator is lying in wait. Of course, it is the holidays, and for those who must brave the malls and so would rather keep their mall perspectives less disturbing, there are Laura DiSilverio's cozy Mall Cop mysteries: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=disilverio+mall+cop+series&i=stripbooks&ref=nb_sb_noss

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/