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FIRST BOOKS: Blood on the Common - Anne Fuller & Marcus Allen
"I got a feeling that I'm goin' to have to arrest one of my neighbors this time, and I never done that. It's hell to be a constable sometimes."Dan Morgan in Blood on the CommonSmall Town, USA. It's...
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FIRST BOOKS: Bedeviled - Libbie Block
THE STORY: The malicious, exploitative and deeply disturbed wife of Willem Himbert, symphony conductor, becomes the target of Elizabeth Beel's undying animosity when the wife begins to concoct a...
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MOONLIGHTERS: Victor Wolfson - A Playwright Dabbles in Gothic Dread
A little digging is a dangerous thing, to paraphrase Alexander Pope. His original quote about a little learning continues: "Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring." Often I find that my digging...
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IMPOSSIBLE PROBLEMS: Still Life with Pistol – Roger Ormerod
In Still Life with Pistol (1986), the second outing featuring ex-police detective Richard Patton and his paramour Amelia, we find the two taking part in a private art teaching seminar sponsored by...
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SWAN SONG: The Intimate Journal of Warren Winslow - Jean Leslie
Today I introduce a new category for the blog -- the "Swan Song" post. This will be devoted to a writer's final book in the crime fiction genre if not their final book altogether. Often I read a last...
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MOONLIGHTERS: E. L. Withers - The Man Who Used His Wife’s Name
Pseudonyms are a funny thing. In mysterydom we often find women hiding behind androgynous or obvious male names. Anthony Gilbert, Leslie Ford, Craig Rice and John Stephen Strange are all women using...
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FIRST BOOKS: One Cried Murder - Jean Leslie
It's too bad that the striking cover illustration at left for this debut mystery novel by Jean Leslie, and the introduction to her decades long association with Doubleday Doran's Crime Club, is no...
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FFB: Murder's Burning - S. H. Courtier
Stewart Hamilton revisits the site of a devastating fire in Murder’s Burning (1967) Several years ago fire raged over an Australian ranch destroying multiple homes, killing livestock, and claiming the...
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The Pretty Sinister Influence, or News on Reprints & Reissues
Lots of news on my overwhelming influence in getting books back into print. OK, that's an exaggeration. But suggestion and influence seem to commingle these days.First. the Bruce Graeme Project of...
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FFB: Fatal Friday - Francis Gerard
THE STORY: What at first appears to be a straightforward shooting followed by a confession by the confused gun toting Lord Colchester turns into a puzzling murder. When the autopsy proves that the...
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FIRST BOOKS: Somebody's Walking over My Grave - Robert Arthur
I may be cheating calling this a First Book, but it most definitely is this writer's only crime novel written for an adult audience. So it's a qualified First of sorts. And yes, it's the very same...
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Moonstone Press Giveaway - A Case for Solomon
What makes September a happy month? Another book giveaway, of course.As announced last month A Case for Solomon, the third of Bruce Graeme’s Theodore Terhune series of detective novels and reprinted by...
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Winners of Terhune Book Giveaway...
Chosen using an extremely unscientific but completely random method here are the winners of last week's book giveaway. May I have the envelope please? And the free copies of A Case for Solomon go to......
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FFB: No Questions Asked - Edna Sherry
Police procedural gives way to domestic melodrama then morphs into a full blown cat-and-mouse thriller in No Questions Asked (1949), Edna Sherry’s sophomore novel in name only. No “wise fool” at all...
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LEFT INSIDE: A Variety of Bookplates
Pandemic boredom led me to amassing about three boxes of books (most of them still not read) and I noticed in reorganizing them and cataloging them that many had some intriguing bookplates. And here...
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GIVEAWAY: Pray for the Dawn Released!
Two book giveaways in one month? What is the world coming to? (BTW, there was almost a third,...but I'm saving that one for October) For that matter what is this blog turning into? Seems as much as...
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Winners of Pray for the Dawn giveaway...
The winners of the two copies of the new Ramble House reprint of Pray for the Dawn were chosen entirely at random using our arcane method of colored tokens and coded entrant names. And they are:1....
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HALLOWEEN SPECIAL 1: The Women Swore Revenge - Inez Haynes Irwin
THE STORY: Four women make a pact to bring to justice the murderer of their dear friend Lizbeth More who stabbed on Halloween after a terrifying night of a poltergeist encounter and a visit by a...
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FFB: False Witness - Helen Nielsen
Publishing executive Markham Grant has been sent to Norway to secure the rights to the memoir of renowned resistance fighter Tor Holberg. While riding a funicular up to a well known tourist spot in...
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NEW STUFF: Who Is Maud Dixon? - Alexandra Andrews
Who Is Maud Dixon? by Alexandra AndrewsLittle, Brown & Co.ISBN: 978-0316500319336 pp. $28Publication date: March 2, 2021 I imagine many people have often said “I wish I had his/her life” at a low...
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