I'm thrilled to partner with author J. Aaron Sanders for a spectacular giveaway of his debut novel, Speakers of the Dead, published by Plume Books! I have 5 print and 5 audiobooks SIGNED by the author to award to 10 lucky winners!! Visit @sleuthsandspies on Instagram to enter!

Part hardboiled noir, part Southern Gothic, Niceville is a chilling depiction of the trauma, iniquity, and injurious memories suppressed under the pretense of small-town values.

Murder by the Book, an indie bookshop specializing in crime fiction, sustained damage during recent Houston floods. Please make your next purchase through www.murderbooks.com to support a great bookstore!

With its convergence of realism, romanticism, and transcendentalism, Speakers of the Dead mimics the aesthetics and movements that Walt Whitman's poetics so seamlessly intersect. Sanders crafts a compelling mystery that thus contains multitudes.

Starting Every Dead Thing meant staying up all night to finish reading or else trying to sleep with the lights on. 😱 I chose the first option!

While Gold of Our Fathers is best read in succession with the first three Darko Dawson books instead of as a standalone novel, its particular merit lies in the compelling representation of the relationship, at turns symbiotic and antagonistic, between the Ghana and China.

As a literary British Harlequinade, Agatha Christie‘s The Mysterious Mr. Quin blends aspects of medieval morality plays and Italian commedia dell'arte to create a drama of crimes of the heart, recasting the buffoonish harlequin as an enigmatic figure who rectifies the plights of aggrieved lovers.

For Locke, this fiction of a deteriorating American Dream is of a representative, transparent body politic, which she intricately analyzes and dissects in the bureaucratic machinations that exploit a young woman‘s death and unapologetically implicate an innocent man.

One of Highsmith's few short stories that doesn't filter domesticity through a male perspective, The Heroine confronts feminine issues of people-pleasing, inclusion, normality, and the fear of ending up like one's mother.

Chandler criticizes the irrational logic and implausible characterization of British Golden Age detective fiction, championing instead the hardboiled tradition that takes a "sharp, aggressive attitude to life." I think both styles have a place in crime fiction, but Chandler makes a sound argument.

Featuring a sleuth and a spy! 🕵🏻🔫 W. Somerset Maugham was the first espionage author to blend fact and fiction, so it's fitting that Philip Kerr's new novel, The Other Side of Silence, fictionalizes the author-spy being blackmailed, possibly for his secret service past.

A wonderful friend in the UK sent me the best gift of book mail, including a Raymond Chandler mug, Penguin postcards, and two British Library Crime Classics! Have you read any of the British Library reissues?

Agatha Chris-tea, anyone? 📖☕️ I'm halfway through The Mysterious Mr. Quin for my Maidens of Murder reading group, and I've been exploring the Mr. Quin app. It's remarkable how easily Christie's story updates to a modern setting and medium.

Despite its overt homage to Conan Doyle, The Tokyo Zodiac Murders is no mere recasting of Holmes and Watson as Kiyoshi Mitarai and Kazumi Ishioka. Rather, by blending the locked-room mystery with an arcane mysticism and self-reflexive narrative, Shimada creates a unique form of logic problem.