I'm definitely starting 2011 on an up note and I'm unashamedly celebrating.

The Cutting...same book, new cover...comes out in the UK this week. Penguin UK is introducing McCabe to British readers with lots of great display in some of the top stores and supermarket chains.

Pat Conroy. Tami Hoag, Alan Furst, C.J. Box and Me! Pretty good company!  The Chill of Night will follow in July.  

A Brit friend found the attached display in WH Smith in…

In the mood for a good thriller, my wife Jeanne and I went to see George Clooney’s latest star turn, The American. All I can say is don’t bother. While I

don’t normally write movie reviews, I do write thrillers (The

Cutting, The Chill of Night) and, as a

thriller-writer, I expect a thriller to have a plot. Not necessarily a great plot. Not even a good plot.…

Genre fiction, they say, is plot driven. Literary fiction is “character driven.”…

Like a lot of people who write mystery and suspense novels for a living, I regularly comb the news for true crime stories that might someday form the basis of either a down-the-road Mike McCabe thriller or

possibly a stand-alone. When I find one, I cut and paste it into something I

call my “What If?” file. When the news recently broke about the murders

recently committed by Dr. Amy Bishop, I thought to myself this might be the basis

of something…

Insomnia and The Fine Art of Writing Murder Mysteries.

Did you ever wonder what it takes to write a successful murder mystery? Or a series of murder mysteries or suspense thrillers featuring the likes

of Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch, Tess Gerritsen’s Jane Rizzoli or

Sara Paretsky’s V.I. Warshawski? One answer is not sleeping. Ms.

Paretsky once noted the secret to her success as a writer (or at least

one secret) was the…