Interview with C.J. Cooke
C.J. Cooke is the award-winning author of The Boy Who Could See Demons (2012), critically appraised by The New York Times, The Guardian, Booklist, Publisher’s Weekly, and The New York Review of Books. She is also the author of I Know My Name, a No. 1 iBooks bestseller. Her latest novel, The Lighthouse Witches, has…
Women in the Mob
In Starr Sign, my second novel in the Candace Starr Crime Series, Candace infiltrates her estranged Detroit mafia family, the Scarpellos, in search of her mother, Angela. In honour of the fictitious Scarpello clan (and Candace), I bring you some real-life women who made their mark in the male-dominated world of organized crime. Virginia Hill…
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…
Divorce is Murder By Elka Ray
Divorce is Murder. I can attest to that. Although despite the messy demise of an ill-fated starter marriage in my twenties, no one seemed driven to committing an actual homicide (note to self: cancel outstanding professional contract hit on ex-husband arranged during a night with friends and too much Sangria). But when Josh Barton walks…
Book Review: The Chalk Man by C.J. Tudor
Okay, this time I wasn’t going to be fooled by initials into reviewing a book that was really written by a dude. C.J. Tudor’s first name is Caroline. Her friends call her Caz. I also write under initials my initials. My first name is Carole. The only nickname I had that ever stuck was the…
The Perfect Nanny by Leila Slimani
I am really getting into these English translations. As with The First Prehistoric Serial Killer by Teresa Solana, The Perfect Nanny was originally written in another language. In this case, French rather than Spanish. The author is Moroccan born but Parisian living, Leila Slimani. She won France’s most prestigious literary prize, the Goncourt for this…
The Forty Elephants Gang
If you think girl gangs are something new, you should know that sisters have been doing it for themselves in the criminal world since Victorian times. The Forty Elephants gang was an all-female organized crime collective active in London’s Elephant and Castle District from at least 1873 right into the 1950’s. They specialized in shoplifting,…
The First Prehistoric Serial Killer & other stories By Teresa Solana
What a great bunch of fiction, well written and witty, and full of unnatural death. You can’t ask for much better entertainment for a girl like me. Teresa Solena is one of Spain’s best known crime writers, and while her stories are often dark, they are always funny. And none of that humour gets lost…
Interview with Elka Ray
Elka Ray is a Canadian/UK author, editor, and illustrator. For adults, Elka writes crime, and is the author of three novels – the upcoming romantic mystery Divorce is Murder, due out with Seventh Street/Prometheus in June 2019; Saigon Dark (2016), a noir thriller; a lighter mystery, Hanoi Jane (2011); and a collection of short crime…
Snap By Belinda Bauer
There are a lot of scary stories told from the perspective of children these days. Whether it is the resurrection of Stephen King’s IT or the mass popularity of Stranger Things, young people are at the forefront of bad things happening. I think it is a result of people getting tired of the “terrified woman”…
