Robinson Heats Up a Cold Case in 'Watching the Dark'

When I first interviewed Peter Robinson, back in 1999, the British-born Canadian crime writer was still largely unknown and underappreciated. Even after publishing a dozen novels, a couple of which had captured major awards.

But that was the year his “breakout book,” In a Dry Season—his 10th police procedural featuring dogged and hunch-trusting Yorkshire Det. Chief Insp. Alan Banks—reached stores. The recipient of widespread critical acclaim, it boosted his profile significantly, not only in the United States, but also in the UK and mainland Europe. Ever since, he’s been regular contender in fiction-prize competitions on both sides ...

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Preliminary Investigation: 6 Crime-Fiction Leads for 2013

Now that we’ve survived yet another predicted end of the world, and are finally winding down the holiday season in a polychromatic flurry of wrapping paper and New Year’s party hats, it’s time to look forward to what works of crime, mystery and thriller fiction 2013 will offer. Or at least what you’ll see in stores over the next three months.

Many of the best-known contributors to this field, from both sides of the Atlantic, have new books scheduled for release between January 1 and the end of March. Those include Robert Crais (Suspect) and Charles ...

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A Spy Is Born in Sansom's Fascist Britain

It’s likely true of anybody who’s interested in history: he or she wonders what might’ve happened had the rush of time executed different swerves now and then.

But novelists are the people most prone to play those scenarios out to their logical extremes. Thus, readers have been invited over the years to envision England being conquered by Spain in the 16th century (Ruled Britannia, by Harry Turtledove), “Honest Abe” surviving his 1865 visit to Ford’s Theater (The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln, by Stephen L. Carter), Alaska becoming a Jewish homeland (The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, by ...

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Col. Oliver North on the 'Heroes' of the Near Future

From time to time, Kirkus Reviews has to go a long way to land an author interview. This month, we sent questions all the way to a combat outpost in Afghanistan, where retired United States Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North has been capturing stories from the front lines for Fox News. With limited access to the outside world, Col. North sent answers by email to offer our readers great insight into his new novel, Heroes Proved. Set in 2032, this futuristic thriller combines North’s patriotic fervor with the high technology from his other recent consulting project, Call of Duty: Black ...

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You're the Tops: 2012's 10 Best Crime Novels

Accept my apologies right off the bat for having not read every crime novel published during the last 11 months. I’m only one person, after all. And I have to sleep sometime. Fortunately, my all-too-human limitations haven’t prevented me from enjoying a wide range of distinctive and even memorable works within the genre. Herewith, my favorites of the bunch, most of them from U.S. publishers, but a couple from across the pond.

The Blackhouse, by Peter May: Fleeing a crumbling marriage in Edinburgh, Det. Sgt. Fin Macleod hies off to the Isle of Lewis, in Scotland’s ...

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Sex, Sects and Scandal in the Last Frontier

British-born Melanie McGrath first came to widespread critical notice after the publication of her non-fiction book The Long Exile: A Tale of Inuit Betrayal and Survival in the High Arctic (2006). It recalled Canada’s forced relocation, in 1953, of three dozen Inuit natives from their traditional home on mammoth Hudson Bay to the frigid, Great North wilds of Ellesmere Island, in what’s now the province of Nunavut.

But it was her chilling (in more ways than one) debut novel, last year’s White Heat—which she published as “M.J. McGrath”—that turned the heads of crime-fiction readers ...

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Fowl Play in Max Byrd’s Jazz Age Paris

Every reader has his or her own appetite for detail in historical fiction. Personally, I tend toward gluttony. Give me a wordy but wholly verisimilitudinous re-creation of some city of yore, a forgotten rural landscape or an archaic industrial enterprise, and I shall gleefully dine upon it page after glorious page. I do have my limits, and some novels manage to exceed it; Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian comes immediately to mind. However, I can be very forgiving of an author’s earnest efforts to transport me, through the supple vehicle of English expression, into a period, place and culture ...

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Background Check: Investigating Crime Fiction’s Creators

Even before I began reviewing crime fiction for a living, back when I was just a reader with a much smaller library, I was fascinated by books about this genre. Like the motion-picture fans of the early 20th century who devoured each issue of Photoplay magazine, or the omnivores of superstar quidnuncery who continue to keep People afloat, I was curious to know more about the folks—authors, filmmakers and TV producers alike—who brought me my favorite entertainment in all its forms.

Thus it was that I found room on my shelves for biographies of Raymond Chandler, Agatha Christie ...

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The Case of the Celebrity Sleuths (Part II)

As I explained in my previous column, the crime-fiction genre—not content with introducing wholly imagined private eyes, cops and part-time mystery solvers—has, over the last several decades, recruited many genuine historical figures into its plots. The majority of those have made cameo appearances or played secondary parts. But some have been cast as series snoops, detouring from the known timeline of their lives to pursue killers, kidnappers and assorted other troublemaking types.

Of that latter group, a number have acted as independent amateur detectives. Their numbers include singer Elvis Presley (the star of four mysteries by Daniel Klein ...

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The Case of the Celebrity Sleuths (Part I)

It’s hard to know for sure who was the first author to conscript a real-life historical character as an amateur detective in mystery fiction. Often, though, credit is laid at the feet of Lillian de la Torre, a onetime president of the Mystery Writers of America.

Beginning in the early 1940s, she published more than two dozen short stories—later collected in several volumes—that cast 18th-century poet, editor and lexicographer Samuel Johnson and his renowned biographer, James Boswell, as Holmes-and-Watson-type partners, solving myriad transgressions of the law through the force of their superior intelligence and with the aid ...

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Lee Child's 'A Wanted Man'

Thriller writer Lee Child (born Jim Grant) spent almost two decades working in television in his native Britain before threats of industry downsizing convinced him that the time was right to re-create himself as a novelist.

His first book, Killing Floor, was published in 1997 and introduced the character who has gone on to star in every one of his novels since: Jack Reacher, a former military policeman—and aspiring knight errant—who drifts from one American town to the next, getting involved in various troubles and trying to win justice for people in need. And if a modicum of ...

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D.E. Johnson Finds Death and Insanity in Old Detroit

D.E. “Dan” Johnson says he didn’t start out as an author determined to compose historical thrillers. “The first book I wrote, in 2006-2007, was a religious satire,” he recalls sheepishly. “How I thought I might get that published is a historical mystery to me now. I think it was something I just had to get out of my system.”

After failing to find an agent for that book, he took a different path, combining his interest in “great historical fiction” with his fondness for “smart crime fiction by people like Elmore Leonard and Walter Mosley.” The result has ...

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10 Hot Crime Novels for Colder Days

September always seems to throw open a floodgate of fresh fiction in the United States and Britain, with publishers trying to circulate as many books as they can before people start making holiday gift lists.

This year is no different. Between now and the end of 2012, crime-fiction lovers will find it difficult to carve out time enough to enjoy forthcoming works by Deon Meyer (Seven Days), Lene Kaaberbøl and Agnette Friis (Invisible Murder), Dennis Lehane (Live by Night), Laurie R. King (Garment of Shadows), Arnaldur Indridason (Outrage), Frances Fyfield (Gold Digger), Michael Connelly (The Black Box), Russell D ...

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Ariel S. Winter and the Power of Pastiche

Not many crime-fictionists precede their debuts in the genre by releasing a work of fiction for preschoolers. But that’s exactly what Ariel S. Winter did.

The 32-year-old Baltimore resident and former bookseller saw his first children’s picture book, One of Kind, released in June. This month he follows that up with a dramatically dissimilar offering, an almost 700-page-long novel—The Twenty-Year Death—that’s really three self-contained (and individually titled) volumes in one, each set in a different decade of the 20th century and composed in a style reminiscent of a different mystery-writing master: Inspector Maigret creator Georges ...

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Carter Tests the Bounds of Crime Fiction with ‘The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln’

Seeking to delineate the limits of crime, mystery and thriller fiction using these stories’ manifest commonalities only sounds like a simple endeavor. In fact, it’s as difficult and frustrating as trying to put together a perfect list of must-read books from the genre. Every time you think you’ve satisfied all possible criteria, some additional work challenges your descriptive boundaries.

Ask yourself this: Why is it that the novels of Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Dorothy L. Sayers, Jo Nesbø and Sue Grafton are automatically shelved in bookshops under Crime Fiction, yet other no-less-compelling tales of mayhem and mystery—such ...

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Rescue and Redemption Drive ‘Die a Stranger’

If Steve Hamilton has ever written a boring book chapter, he must have consigned it to the yawning recesses of a desk drawer someplace—back there with furry old Tootsie Rolls and mangled Post-Its—because I’ve certainly never read it.

More often, I’m impressed by the high-pitched tension, multilayered plots and character enrichment that he brings to his tales about former Detroit cop Alex McKnight. I’ve even come to enjoy McKnight’s persistent bitching about the cold weather. He does, after all, live in Michigan’s remote Upper Peninsula.

In a town called Paradise, of all things ...

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3 Thrillers Inspired by Watergate

Forty years ago this month—in the wee hours of June 17, 1972, to be exact—operatives linked to Republican President Richard M. Nixon’s re-election campaign broke into Democratic National Committee headquarters on the sixth floor of the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C.

They wore rubber surgical gloves, carried photographic equipment and pen-sized tear-gas guns, and were part of what newspapers termed “an elaborate plot to bug the offices.” Police discovered those five burglars in the act and placed them under arrest.

Three months later, the same five—together with Nixon re-election committee general counsel G. Gordon Liddy ...

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Gone, Baby, Gone: Gillian Flynn’s Awesome Whodunit

A man comes home one day to find his front door wide open, the house in disarray and his wife missing. He calls the police, but he’s been acting so, well, suspiciously.

The panic and concern seem a little rehearsed, and there are a few things he’s being less than upfront about. What the police think is a possibility becomes an obvious certainty once the media and the public get involved: this man killed his wife.

Read more new and notable fiction.

Except, you know, well, maybe. In Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, she plays with the obvious ...

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Summery Judgment: 10 Not-to-Miss Crime Novels

Anyone who can’t find a new crime, mystery or thriller novel to enjoy over the next three sunnier months simply isn’t trying. My initial sweep of book catalogues and online sources turned up 175 novels in the genre I’d like to read between now and Labor Day. Not that I’ll have the opportunity or stamina to do so.

Read the Rap Sheet’s interview with J. Robert Janes, the author of ‘Bellringer.’

Below, I’ve culled out just 10 of those books I think will be sure winners. In the process, I’ve ignored such heavily ...

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At Last! Janes' Wartime Sleuths Make a Comeback

For J. Robert Janes, World War II continues to ravage the face of Europe. Adolf Hitler remains in power in Berlin, still confident of creating a new German Empire. Allied bombers persist in menacing Axis strongholds across the continent. And France, occupied by German military forces since 1940 and with octogenarian Philippe Pétain as its head of state, has become a place of misfortune and desperation, compounding its own sorrows by collaborating with its attackers. For many French citizens, their homeland has become unrecognizable, a foreign country.

Even as they suffer through the great crime of war, though, the ...

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