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I’m not by nature a prolific reader. A prolific imaginer, yes, but reader? Hmm. I’m slow, I’m picky, and I tend to want to turn everything into my own tale.

I can’t remember a time when I haven’t preferred the sanctuary of my own private, sometimes weird library of mind-stories to the extensive and fully utilized library my husband and I share in our…

We never get any trick-or-treaters. I can tell myself that it’s because we’re the only house on a dead-end street and surely, being off the beaten path is part of the problem. But if I’m to be completely honest, it’s because I know that little kids are afraid of our home.

Yes, we live in THAT house.

It’s the one we all dared each other to visit on Halloween. The…

Recently, I was asked to write about where I write and why. That got me thinking…so here are my thoughts.

My home office is, I suppose, a bundle of contradictions.

First of all, it is small.

It’s only half the size of my husband’s home office. I’m kind of like the wife who drives a Chevy while her husband gets the Cadillac.

But I wouldn’t have it…

My husband and I had a lot of fun before we had kids. I mean A LOT. We traveled, we spent money like crack whores, we had nooners for heaven’s sake.

And we also loved going out for cocktails. We probably met at some swanky bar, or curious hell hole, or trendy hipster joint five days a week after work.

It was fun.

And least of all because we got a little…

My Cold War thriller, The Bone Church, debuts on April 15th and I’m nervous, excited and more than a little bit relieved. Honestly, it feels like my daughter’s wedding or something.

Here’s an idea of what it’s about:

In the surreal and paranoid underworld of wartime Prague, fugitive lovers Felix Andel and Magdalena Ruza make some dubious alliances —…

Today, I welcome one of my favorite thriller writers both on and off the page – John Dolan.

John Dolan is fun. He’s dry, he’s politically incorrect – two traits that do it for me the way a pair of big breasts and a small vocabulary do it for some guys. In my review of his wonderful…

First, I want to thank all of you who have already said your piece, continue to weigh in, or will contribute your ideas for what you think half of our world’s population should be reading fiction-wise. This will be an on-going discussion, so please don’t think you’ve missed the boat.

Truth is, I am on a mission to get men reading fiction again.

Some 80% of…

According to recent statistics, men have all but stopped reading fiction. Do they watch great television? Yes. Do they read non-fiction? Some. But the novel – that great interior journey – seems to have been lost to them.

It wasn’t always this way.

The path from boyhood to manhood used to go something like this: Boys got dirty, played with plastic guns, disturbed…

A few weeks ago, I was asked to participate in the Iron Writer Challenge in which 4 writers are asked to write a fictional short story in 4 days time and are given 4 elements to work with and a 500 word limit.  Readers then get to vote on which story they liked the best.

I’ll be honest with you, I don’t even know if I won or not and I’m not sure I care all that much.  I…

Despite my almost unnatural love for the thriller – especially the spy thriller – my favorite novel of all time is actually Bram Stoker’s Dracula.  It is, in my humble opinion, the most highly original and genuinely terrifying story I have ever read.  Bram Stoker has brought into the public consciousness a character so confounding, erudite, and manly in the classical sense,…

First and foremost, I want to thank all of my new followers.  Your kind words after reading my Freshly Pressed essay, “That Cursed Ruby Box,” meant a lot.  In return, I promise to try my very best to provide consistently great content that inspires you to laugh, cry, run screaming, hide under your bed, take a shot of whiskey, hunt down an old lover and all sorts of things –…

In the family I grew up in, love was often misplaced, nearly always badly botched, but nevertheless there – taking us from day to day.  As a unit, we had every kind of bad luck you can imagine – Nazis, Communists, deaths big and small, petty humiliations and feature film-worthy fiascos.  It’s luck so bad my mom actually calls it a curse.  She believes that curse started…

Hi, Crimesters,

I posted this for the Bloody Valentine blog hop and thought it might suit us here as well:

Nicolai and Elena Ceaușescu – two of the wackiest Communist dictators of the Cold War era (and I don’t use the term “wacky” lightly) – were executed on Christmas day, 1989.  And to the bitter end, they were madly in love.

I was going to write…

Recently, I started a discussion here on Crimespace. I posed this question: Is there a place for humor in a hard-boiled thriller/noir? The answers I got were mixed, but there was a hesitancy that trended towards “No.” One Crimespacer quoted Otto Penzler – “Noir requires a sense of bleakness and despair, and characters so flawed, their failure is in their DNA.”

Maybe I’m…

In Prague, I lived in a building a lot like the one(s) in this photo from The Third Man.  Not enough light; the faucets barely worked; there was a weird film poster of “Nanuk of the North” left behind by the previous tenant.  And I mean weird.  Like a cockamamie merger of Eskimo soft-porn and man and dog buddy adventure.   But I loved that place, and it still gives me…

If you’re here and reading this, you probably have a thing for noir.  I know I do.  I love its style – the tipped fedoras, the fitted clothes. I love that a cigarette is more than a prop – it’s treated like a piece of jewelry.

But in the few short years after the end of the WWII, when cool was being codified, Hitchcock's blondes were running amok, and French noir was…

When I was a kid, ABC After School Specials were where middle class youth with troubled families could find themselves.  On most Wednesdays at 3:30 pm, alcoholism, divorce and every day dysfunction were portrayed by actors like Scott Baio.  I'm sure THE BOY WHO DRANK TOO…