Category Archives: thriller

Who’s In Charge Here?

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For the blog tour I’m doing in connection with publication of my new thriller, She Knew Too Much, one of the bloggers asked an intriguing question. Do I ever feel like my characters are taking over or that I’m always in charge?

People do talk about characters taking the reins of the story and steering it off into unexpected directions, but I’d never thought about that actually happening in my writing. Reflecting on the question, though, I realized that may be partly a result of the way I work. I’m what they call a “pantser,” which means I write by the seat of my pants. I let the story grow organically, rather than plotting everything out in advance and channeling my characters into predetermined actions and results. Even though characters come out of my own head and you might think I’m directing the action like a puppeteer, in fact, for the characters to be realistic, at times they have to do something unexpected. Unexpected, even by me—in the sense of “unplanned.”

A good example is the relationship between the two main characters in She Knew Too Much—an American travel writer named Genie Clarke who gets into trouble in Rome and a Polizia di Stato Detective, Leo Angelini. Leo and Genie are obviously attracted to each other, but will they get together? I didn’t decide that beforehand, I let them work it out. They were both so preoccupied with keeping Genie safe from the mafiosi pursuing her and stopping the plot the mafia is trying to hatch, a relationship between them was never a slam-dunk. As in real life, a lot can interfere.

My approach is to develop the characters and, when they are thrust into a situation, I ask myself, “what would a person like this, with their unique attributes, do in these circumstances?” In fact, the ways they surprise me are one of the joys of writing!

It takes a bit of writing to get to know my characters well enough to understand how they would behave in certain situations. I couldn’t possibly know that beforehand. Then the job is to set up believable scenarios that let them be who they are, for better or worse.

In She Knew Too Much, several characters do the worst possible thing or come to the worst possible conclusions at every turn, sometimes to humorous effect. These hapless people are fun to write too!

I can’t say enough about how much I appreciate the welcoming blog hosts and the early reviewers of She Knew Too Much. The book is available from Bookshop.org, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and elsewhere.

Meet Amit Madoor . . .

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When reading my new novel She Knew Too Much for the umpteenth time–not as a Word document this time, but as a “real book” for proofreading–I was struck again by how much I liked not just the main characters, but also the secondary ones.

One of my favorites has always been Amit Madoor, the mafia’s Moroccan fence. He has a way of getting top dollar for stolen goods, and I was so fascinated by how his career might have started, I wrote far too much! I took out the passages not essential to the novel and turned them into a standalone short story, with its own arc and resolution, which takes place almost thirty years before the novel.

It involves a case that has always fascinated me–the still (in real life) unsolved robbery of Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. The precious artworks stolen constitute the largest property theft in history, and they have never been recovered. Experts say that stealing artworks is child’s play next to trying to dispose of them afterward. That’s where Madoor excels.

In my short story, “Above Suspicion,” published in Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine, I hewed carefully to the exact details of the crime. Of course, I invented the thieves, but I think my theory about who they might have been and why they’ve never been caught holds up. You can read it here!

Meanwhile, to learn about Amit Madoor’s vital role in the plot threatening American travel writer Genie Clarke, read She Knew Too Much, available from Bookshop.org, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other notable booksellers. The novel takes place in Rome, where Madoor now lives, and involves a handsome Italian police detective and a whole cast of intriguing characters.

Meet Oliver Harmon . . .

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Oliver Harmon, a secondary character in my new Italy-based thriller She Knew Too Much, was particularly fun to write. A well-meaning Anglican priest, he’s vitally important in the first chapter when he interrupts a violent attack on Genie Clarke, the novel’s main character. From there on, he appears intermittently, but again is crucial in the climax.

What I enjoyed about writing him is he’s one of those people—and we all have known someone like this—who talks on and on, with only the slenderest connection between topics. He’s a walking run-on sentence. Yet, he’s also a particular friend of the second-most important character in the story, Leo Angelini, chief detective of Rome’s Polizia di Stato.

Writers are challenged to make their characters both interesting and believable. Real people, not cardboard cutouts. For Harmon, I tried to think what the preoccupations would be of someone like that, transplanted from his home country, who’s a not-perfect fit with his superiors, someone whose parishioners might find a wee bit tiresome, but good-hearted at the core. Genie actually find him quite entertaining, and she needs the kind of lift to the spirits he provides as she goes up against some of the most dangerous criminals in the city.

If you’d like to read a bit more about Oliver Harmon—more than you’ll actually even find in the book, you can find the story here.

She Knew Too Much will be published February 15, and is available for preorder on Amazon now. Enjoy them both!

Vicarious Adventures for the Snowbound

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If the impulse to hibernate becomes just too strong over the next two weeks, here are two adventures stories that will get that sluggish body moving again—of course, you’ll have to occupy a chair to read them.

Come and Get Her by Bruce Conord

I raced through the pages of Bruce Conord’s new suspense thriller Come and Get Her to find out what deadly hazard would our hero, Jesse Arroyo, face next and whether he’d finally take one risk too many. His first-person story starts with a gripper. Jesse says it’s “the call that no parent should receive.” In the middle of the night, his ex-girlfriend Debi is on the phone telling him their daughter Sheri is missing. She and two friends crossed the Texas border to Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, to visit a night club. Leaving late, they were kidnapped, but one of the girls escaped and gave the police in Laredo, Texas, the sketchy details.

Sheri was the result of a one-night stand some twenty years earlier, and a longer-term relationship between Jesse and Debi proved impossible: too much social distance. Jesse joined the Army, buried himself in Afghanistan and the clandestine services for the better part of two decades, and communication between him and Debi is rare.

The Laredo police and the FBI are upbeat about Sheri’s safety and confident of the cooperation of the Nuevo Laredo authorities. They are sure a ransom demand will come, and if the family pays it, which of course Debi’s wealthy father will, Sheri will be set free. Jesse is far less optimistic. Nuevo Laredo is wracked by drug cartel violence, and two blonde Americans are prime targets for trafficking. He’s not counting on help from the Mexican police, who are too often in cahoots with the cartels. Just as bad, he doesn’t trust Debi’s dad to pay up.

Conord writes convincingly about the effects on Jesse of twenty years’ operating in a hostile environment where trust was scant on the ground, unlike regrets, which were plentiful. When Jesse goes after Sheri himself, you know this is a long-shot endeavor, even for someone with his skills and savvy.

Unlike Don Winslow’s The Cartel and The Border, the book doesn’t tackle head-on the problems created by the drugs, guns, and money sloshing back and forth across the US-Mexican border. Yet, that reality is here and makes the story feel all-too-real. That impression is aided by Conord’s portrayal of the intransigent attitudes and tactics of US immigration and border patrol personnel. The action is non-stop, and the frustrations baked into the system are acute, so that, by the last page, you may feel you need a long winter’s nap. Exciting!

The Hunted by Steven Max Russo

Another nail-biting adventure is the new thriller The Hunted by Steven Max Russo. I’ve liked his previous books, The Debt Collector and The Dead Don’t Sleep for his engaging characters and clever plots. The Hunted does not disappoint.

Ophelia Harris, a former CIA analyst working in Afghanistan for the private security firm GSG (think Blackwater), was the only survivor of an operation that went south in Afghanistan. She escaped with, worth mentioning, two suitcases stuffed with cash. What she learned before the shooting started was that the Americans were being ambushed, something only someone on the inside at the company could have engineered. Because she escaped, she knows the suspicions point to her, and she’s on the run.

Because GSG is a security operation and has an inside track with military and espionage agencies, it has the resources to find her, wherever she hides. And has. First in Florida and now, as the story opens, in New Jersey. What the company’s leaders also have is motivation, not just because they suspect her of betraying her team, but also because, unbeknownst to Ophelia, one of the Americans killed in the operation was the boss’s son.

A chance meeting of someone from Afghanistan leads to an uneasy partnership in which Ophelia and former Army Ranger Austin Medford flee across Pennsylvania. The head of GSG and two of his crack assassins are hard on their heels. The fugitives have skill and nerve on their side, while their antagonists have all that, plus virtually unlimited access to surveillance technology. It’s a crackerjack story that like Come and Get Her, leaves you breathless.

My new thriller, She Knew Too Much, is on sale now (Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc.). An American travel writer on assignment in Rome stumbles on deadly information.

Jenny Kidd by Laury A. Egan

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Need to escape from this gloomy January weather? How about a vacation in sunny Italy—Venice to be exact. In her new book, Jenny Kidd, author Laury A. Egan recreates La Serenissima so believably, you’ll be surprised when you look up from her pages and discover it’s still the middle of winter!

Jenny is visiting Venice in order to pursue her desire to become painter and, it’s fair to say, to escape her overbearing father in America. Though she’s twenty-five, he’s convinced she shouldn’t be so far away, unsupervised, much less pursuing a career in the arts that is most likely to come to nothing. So he believes. And tells her, repeatedly.

At a gallery visit, she meets another young woman with an odd British accent and sketchy details, Randi Carroll. Randi is congenial but overly familiar—flirtatious actually—and tells Jenny about a costume party planned for that evening. The parties are held once a month at the palazzo of the wealthy Barbon family. Jenny decides to go, rents a costume, and it’s an unsettling, lavishly described event.

The guests don’t remove their masks, and she can’t tell if she’s dancing with a man or a woman. Having too many drinks doesn’t help. She does dance with one unmasked person, a beautiful woman wearing a distinctive rose-colored satin gown. Dancing with her is surprisingly sexy. This reaction, after the flirtatiousness of Randi unsettle Jenny.

In a day or two, she has occasion to meet the costume party hosts, Caterina Barbon and her younger brother, Sebatiano. Caterina is exceptionally beautiful, and she and Jenny agree she should paint Caterina’s portrait. To her delight, it’s turning out quite well. Through Caterina’s many connections, Jenny meets a Venetian art dealer who wants to see more of her work. Her excitement over these promising new friendships and career developments—and her determination to not give in to her father’s worldview—outweigh what, in other circumstances, might be natural caution. In fact, she ignores the warning signs: her flat has been robbed and, much worse, the delectable woman in the rose satin gown has turned up dead, floating in the lagoon.

You may think Jenny’s father’s judgment is not so off-base when she takes up residence with the seductive and aristocratic Barbon siblings, who turn out to be pansexual. Surprising herself, she and Caterina begin a relationship, and it isn’t until she realizes she cannot leave the house—bars on the windows, locked doors, that her suspicions start to grow. From there on, the book takes on a heightened emotional intensity and unexpected twists that will leave you breathless.

The sexual energy in Egan’s work is undeniable. And she’s not afraid to include characters who are complex and diverse. I’ve read four of her books and find that she doesn’t add a particular trait because it might be trendy, her characters are fully rounded.

And, I note that the cover of the first of her thrillers I read, The Psychologist’s Shadow, featured several elaborate Venetian carnival masks. Thinking about these four books, the idea of masks is a very apt theme for her work. You’ll be hoping Jenny can see behind them in time.

The Final Episode by Lori Roy

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I’ve missed a few posts lately because I’ve been creating an index for my family history. How detailed? What’s most helpful? These are questions I don’t have the answers to. Having studied family histories other people have assembled, I know an index is invaluable, and the best I can do may be to strike a middle ground between obsession and gloss. Future users will have to rate my success, though I probably won’t hear about it.

But I do want to tell you about a book I really enjoyed, Lori Roy’s The Final Episode. It’s one of a string of books that enter meta-territory, in a way, in that they’re about television, its coverage of true-crime and the impact of that on people involved in the original tragedy. Others in this string that I’ve reviewed are The Murder Show by Matt Goldman, Kill Show by Daniel Sweren-Becker, and one of the best, The Pain Tourist by Paul Cleave. Each interesting in its own way and each highlighting significant downsides to the genre.

I can’t always pinpoint why one story totally captures my attention and another doesn’t. It’s some ineffable yet powerful characteristic that goes beyond plot, character, and setting. For whatever reason (reasons?), The Final Episode, kept me spellbound.

Roy provides a great set-up—a true crime television series is reinvestigating the mysterious disappearance of Francie Farrow, taken from her Florida bedroom some twenty years earlier. It happened during a sleepover with twelve-year-old Nora Banks. Feigning sleep, Nora saw and heard the man who took Francie and threaten to take her to the nearby Florida swamp.

Three families’ futures and fates are entangled in this devastating crime. For Francie’s parents, the slow-moving investigation and not knowing what happened to their daughter, where she is, whether she’s alive is, in the long run, more corrosive than the worst possible news.

The neighborhood becomes a pressure-cooker, and Nora and her parents escape to her mother’s childhood home on the fringe of the Big Cypress Swamp, with its venomous snakes, alligators, crocodiles, bears, bobcats, and cougars.

There, Nora’s family find the protagonist of the story, almost-eleven-year-old Jennifer Jones. Jenny and her two best friends are simultaneously lured by the swamp and obsessed by its terrors. Every girl in South Florida knows about Francie Farrow—the posters and news coverage are unavoidable—and learning that Nora has an intimate knowledge of the event makes her friendship all the more alluring and destabilizing. The disastrous season trudges on—hot, humid, reeking of swamp smells, and plagued by insects. Worse is the maelstrom of accusations, revelations, and manipulations that the families endure. At the end of the summer, another kidnapping occurs, and everything is changed for them all.

The story of the girls’ explorations and their evolving relationships is backdrop to the story of the grown-up Jenny, trying to make a living, out of touch with her childhood friends. But now that the television series is airing, the heartbreaks of that summer are uppermost in the minds of everyone, including Francie Farrow’s poor mother Beverley, increasingly unhinged. With the television series lurching toward a conclusion, no one knows how it will end. Will it reveal what really happened to Francie, and who will be blamed for it?

Author Roy keeps the girls well plugged into the plot. As they go about conditioning their hair and painting their nails, their actions are not only realistic, but to a purpose that isn’t immediately obvious. The male characters are well developed too, including the police officers and FBI agents, the fathers of Francie, Jenny, and Nora, and the adult Jenny’s sometime-boyfriend, Arlen (who has his secrets too). I particularly enjoyed Jenny’s aging grandmother, Dehlia, who never loses faith in her family, her history, and her portents. A real page-turner!

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A Bag Full of Stones – by A. Molotkov

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In one of those crime stories that you hope isn’t based on real-life events, but expect it could be, A Molotkov’s new novel explores what might happen when a person whose mental faculties are teetering at the edge of chaos is exposed to an unrelenting stream of vitriol. Especially fear and loathing aimed at people who are perceived to be enemies. Right now, not only in the United States, it seems that the conditions for the kinds of crimes Molotkov has envisioned in fiction simmer barely below the surface in reality.

In this novel, set in Portland, Oregon, in 2019, a volatile mix of identity politics has created an environment where one man feels morally bound to take corrective action. He even refers to himself as The Corrector. He’s a weak vessel to effect social change, however, and on a steeply downward spiral. He drinks too much bourbon. He lives with his mother, who is dying in a hospital bed in their living room, and he’s haunted by the insults his dead father directed at him. He has no friends. His antagonisms cost him his job. What he has been successful at is murder.

As the story opens, police detectives Brenda Smith and Dmitry Volkov are investigating the death of an elderly Yemeni engineer. A plain red business-sized card found on the body indicates that his death may be linked to the murder of a South Asian woman a year earlier. Within days, a third victim—this time an American nurse who is Muslim—is found, bearing the same red calling card. Conditions are ripe for citywide panic.

The detectives are not without complicated, distracting lives themselves. Volkov is deep in gambling debt; Smith is starting a new relationship, which may be doomed when her partner learns she’s a cop. Each character’s story is told in short snippets, sometimes only a page or two, which for me became rather disjointed. Yet, it’s a practical way to handle such a large cast of characters—the two cops, the Corrector, and the victims, living and dead. Yes, in this story, the dead withdraw only gradually from the world of the living and continue for a time to have thoughts and observations. The thoughts of the murdered Yemeni engineer and the nurse focus on bringing their murderer to justice. When Detective Smith has a flash of intuition about the case, now and again, perhaps the dead’s messages are reaching their target. How often must real-life detectives wish the victims in their investigations could talk to them!

Anti-immigrant sentiment, uncontrolled gambling, complicated relationships—that’s a lot to tackle, but Molotkov isn’t through. The mixed emotions and difficulties the Corrector faces in caring for his dying mother are a commentary on a further dysfunctional aspect of American life: the health care system. To the good, the mother is enrolled in hospice, and a nurse comes to check on her every few days, equipment has been brought in, and her pain appears to be managed. At the same time, the deteriorating home environment and the instability of her sole caregiver (her drunken son) should be obvious to any health professional. In one of the most moving scenes in the story, the Corrector tells his mother about his murders, expecting her to be proud of him. Instead, she is clearly horrified, yet helpless to do anything about it. She never speaks to him again.

The depth of character development in this crime story make it a stand-out. Termed a “literary crime story,” A Bag Full of Stones and its unvarnished appraisal of the tragedies latent in the current political moment provide a great deal to think about.

The Lizard by Dominic Stansberry

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Domenic Stansberry’s new noir mystery takes it slow, unraveling in beautiful prose the confounding situation its protagonist, political ghostwriter SE Reynolds. Stansberry—who hasn’t published a novel in almost a decade—has won numerous prizes, including an Edgar Award (Mystery Writers of America) and a Hammett Prize for his past books.

The Lizard isn’t a typical thriller that keeps the action pulsing and the pages flying. Instead, Reynolds is caught in a net that ever-so-slowly tightens around him. When the book begins, he’s already on the run in a desolate sector of Southern California. It’s La Bahia, a town worn out and on its last legs. Just like the old Hotel La Bahia, destined for the wrecking ball. Just like Reynolds himself? Why anyone would go to this godforsaken place, willingly, is another mystery, yet someone may have followed him there. Or is his paranoia acting up?

Reynolds’s trouble started when a New York literary agent called to persuade him to help out an old friend—Max Seeghurs, another former investigative reporter—who’s supposed to be writing a book about a defunct New Mexico retreat called Sundial. Sundial was a popular destination for people on the make financially, politically, or in Hollywood. Sex and drugs. Alas, Sundial’s owner and his twenty-something son both died under dubious circumstances, the retreat closed down, and Seeghurs wants to pull the band-aid off. Expose the rot. But Seeghurs is having trouble pulling the book together; maybe Reynolds can be his manuscript doctor.

Reynolds isn’t keen on this potential assignment because Seeghurs is notoriously difficult to work with. And, because the last time they met up a couple of years back in Miscoulga, Nebraska, Reynolds had an affair with Seeghurs’s wife, now his ex-wife. But Reynolds’s latest candidate is not committing to hiring him, the money is attractive, and he finally agrees.

It takes some effort to track Seeghurs down out somewhere near the ocean on Coney Island. It’s not an easy thing finding him, the landlord hasn’t been paid and isn’t happy about it. But Reynolds persists and finds Seeghurs, all right. Dead. Trying to find out what happened takes him back to Miscoulga and eventually to the crumbling Hotel La Bahia—a sad place to make a last stand.

For a person who ends up so alone, he has some good relationships. Some of the spirited conversations with his ailing parents are among the funniest in the book. Not the typical mile-a-minute thriller, but one where you’ll want to savor the prose. And, you may find yourself pondering the possibilities, even after you turn the last page.

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Down and Out in the River City by Wm Stage

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Down and Out in the River City, the third crime thriller by Wm Stage, is a refreshing change of pace in both setting and characters, with a strong feel of gritty reality. Contemporary society’s schisms and Americans’ careless assumptions and prejudices are on full display. This well-paced story puts St. Louis, Mo., special process server Francis Lenihan in the precarious position of having to break the law if he wants a devious serial killer to get justice. St. Louis has as many swirling currents as the mighty Mississippi flowing alongside it, and some are just as dangerous.

River City is one of the city’s many nicknames. A good bit of the action takes place in a homeless encampment that has sprung up in the riverside park surrounding the city’s most famous manmade attraction—the Gateway Arch. Stage doesn’t neglect the city’s troubled racial history, notably the 2014 death of Michael Brown by police in nearby Ferguson. That event created the backdrop of interracial resentments, fear, and anger for this story’s opening.

When Lenihan walks out of the Civil Courts Building, he finds himself in the midst of an incipient riot. A former police officer accused of murdering a 24-year-old Black man has just been acquitted. Caught up in the melee, Lenihan is rounded up with everyone else, and must sit in jail until he can be processed.

Lenihan’s views on this and other examples of racial discord are not easy to pigeonhole. He seems to be on first one side, then the other. Maybe at all times he’s simply on the side that will give him the quickest path out of it. What I particularly valued in this book is that, through Lenihan and the people he drinks with, you hear the full range of attitudes about race and social issues, for better and worse. It’s no shade of polemical.

Lenihan works for the sheriff’s office, delivering legal papers to people involved in landlord disputes, divorces, court cases, and the like. As you can imagine, although a process server has no authority to arrest people, the recipients of these notices can be unhappy to see him. Lenihan goes about his day-to-day work during the course of the story and how he works is an interesting window on a behind-the-scenes job.

The story starts in earnest when Lenihan receives a call from the father of a young murder victim. Lenihan’s business card was in the dead man’s pocket. The father wants to know more about his son’s last days and, desperate, asks Lenihan to investigate. This takes him to the homeless encampment, where Lenihan hopes to pick up the young man’s trail. There, Lenihan connects with a Black preacher named Cleo looking for his brother. Through Cleo, Lenihan meets some of the colorful characters who make the camp their home. Chasing down fragments of information of wildly varying reliability leads in a direction that threatens Lenihan himself. I liked this book a lot. The setting and characters are fresh and well-developed, and a nuanced understanding of the process server’s life grows out of author Stage’s own background as a licensed process server in St. Louis.

Victorian Psycho by Virginia Feito

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Virginia Feito’s new gothic thriller, Victorian Psycho, has attracted the attention of readers and commentators for its originality, as well as for its in-your-face macabre violence. It’s graphic. It’s bloody. And in this book, the first-person narrator is the serial killer. She doesn’t murder at a discreet distance, either. No poison here. When toward the end of this short book (190 pages) she tells you she’s holding a cleaver, well, you know . . .

It’s also worth saying that much of it is highly comic, poking fun at the aristocracy and its Victorian-era pretensions. The heroine, Winifred Notty (which I invariably read as “naughty”) is posing as a governess and was hired to deal with the two children of the Pound family: Drusilla, an angsty teenager, and the young heir, William, insufferably puffed up with his future importance.

Their mother, a faded woman imprisoned by the constraints of her social situation, is unable to think beyond them. Though she senses something off about Miss Notty, she grabs hold of the wrong end of the stick when she believes the governess is trying to seduce her husband. Mr. Pound may actually be interested in being seduced—something you justknow won’t turn out well.

You gradually assemble a sort of understanding of Winifred’s background. She was illegitimate; her father refused to marry her mother. Her mother moved to another town and passed herself off as a widow, marrying a local Reverend who grew to think of his stepdaughter as the incarnation of evil. She was sent to a girls’ school, but after The Incident (which I’ll leave you to discover on your own), she was returned home.

The foods the Pound family is served are described in sometimes lascivious detail, as the governess perceives them. But then she has something of an oral fixation—prone to biting or licking or sucking on various objects and people.

I came to think of this story as akin to a gruesome fairy tale, in which all sorts of outlandish and grotesque occurrences are possible. You must decide for yourself how much is literally true and how much is in Miss Notty’s mind. It’s gory, but good. The book is being made into a feature film, scheduled for release next year, starring Maika Monroe, Thomasin McKenzie, and Jason Isaacs.