Diary of a SARS Quarantine
In 2003, I was quarantined for SARS, and wrote a funny story about it. I’m thinking we could all use a laugh right now, so I am publishing my short memoir on this blog, raw and unedited. Day 1 The Phone Call Have had hectic day. With four children between the ages of 2 and…
Bunny by Mona Awad
It is tough to nail down the genre of Bunny, A Novel by Mona Awad. Is it noir? Horror? Crime fiction? Is it an acid flashback from that tab you dropped stupidly in college? Or maybe we will just call it Literary, the great catch-all for all exceptionally well-written works that often defy description. Whatever…
Interview with Denise Mina
Bio After a peripatetic childhood in Glasgow, Paris, London, Invergordon, Bergen and Perth, Denise Mina left school early. Working in a number of dead-end jobs, all of them badly, before studying at night school to get into Glasgow University Law School. Denise went on to study for a PhD at Strathclyde, misusing her student grant…
Dying for Christmas By Tammy Cohen
I wanted to review a book with a holiday theme for the season, and thus selected the talented Tammy Cohen’s Dying for Christmas for my Yuletide noir read. I thought I’d get a hokey and tame mystery, perhaps the murder of a vicar at midnight mass, or a Boxing Day stabbing death with a sharp…
True Crime – Nannie Doss, the Giggling Grannie
Nannie Doss, born Nancy Hazel in Blue Mountain, Alabama in 1905, murdered so many people I had to make a chart to keep it all straight. Dubbed the Giggling Grannie and the Jolly Widow due to her gleeful laughter as she recounted her crimes, at first look she doesn’t look the part of a serial…
Interview with Mary Lou Dickinson
Mary Lou Dickinson has published four books, One Day it Happens, a collection of short stories, and three novels, Ile D’Or, Would I lie to You, and most recently The White Ribbon Man, a murder mystery set in downtown Toronto at a 171-year-old church hidden behind the Eaton Centre. Her short stories have appeared in numerous literary periodicals over the…
Hélène Jégado – The Pious Poisoner
Hélène Jégado was born in 1803 on a small farm in Brittany just after the end of the French revolution, which you might remember had a lot of peasants revolting and killing rich society types for suggesting they eat cake. But by twenty-four years of age, Hélène began staging her own little coup in the…
