When making New Year's resolutions, always pick those you will love keeping. For lovers of crime, mystery, suspense and thriller writing in particular, here a a few short reviews of books that I hope will whet your reading appetite.
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How to Write a Mystery: A Handbook from Mystery Writers of America, edited by Lee Child with Laurie R. King
How to Write a Mystery is a handbook, not a formulaic cookbook. It opens with a section entitled "The Rules and Genres," then cheekily discusses ways to subvert them. Genre rules, it seems, are far from laws of nature. They're subject to being stretched, merged, sometimes even outdated and best forgotten, as in Rule #5 from the 1929 list by British author Ronald Knox: "No Chinaman must figure in the story."
What? Park your racial slurs far, far away (unless, as a modern Black author states, they're necessary). Crime/mystery/suspense/thrillers are open to all!
There are, however, gentle suggestions for writing the likes of stories about amateur sleuths, police procedurals, noir, historicals, medical and spy thrillers, as well as the inevitable crossed-genre stories. As well as discussions of how to write mysteries for children and teen, graphic novels, and short stories. And though the writing that most often come mind are fiction, true crime stories -- "nothing but the facts" also claim their due.
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Razorblade Tears, by S.A. Cosby
Cops knocking at the door are never a good sign. But for Ike "Riot" Randolph, their news is far worse than he fears. It's not an inquiry into his own past crime, but the death of his son, murdered execution style along with his white husband. Ike and his son had parted on bad terms, Isiah determined not to become a man of violence like his father. Now Ike's tears for all that his son's loss means -- to himself, his wife, and the daughter his son and son-in-law left behind, feel like razorblades slicing his face.
Ike is not surprised when the cops who brought word of Isiah's death tell him the case is inactive, that nobody wants to talk to them about it. Why would anybody in rural Virginia care about the death of a black man, of a pair of gay men? Nobody except Ike and to his surprise, the white father of Isiah's husband.
Ike reluctantly agrees to Buddy Lee Jenkin's request for help solving the murders of their sons. He doesn't trust Buddy Lee, an ex-con like himself. But no one else is willing to bring their sons' killers to justice. Or to consider that it might have been Isiah's work as an investigative reporter, not his sexuality, that led to his death. But the trail leads far deeper, into far more dangerous territory than even "Riot" Randolph could have expected.
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From rural Southerners to wealthy, urban Northerners, here's something completely different -- a high-society suspense mystery by Lynn and Valerie Constantine, writing as Liv Constantine.
The Stranger in the Mirror, by Liv Constantine
It should have been the happiest occasion in Addison Hope's life -- her engagement to the love of her life. But how can she be sure this handsome, wealthy man truly is her only love? She can't remember anything about her life more than two years in the past, when a truck driver found her bleeding beside the highway.
And although Addison's fiancé insists nothing in her past matters because he knows what a kind and caring person she is, his mother's suspicions have her digging into Addison's antecedents.
Meanwhile, not
far away, a prominent doctor assures his small daughter that the mother who disappeared two years ago -- a mother who bears an uncanny resemblance to Addison -- will return one day. Could the kind, caring, Addison really have deserted her child and loving husband? Just when readers think they've found the connection, the Constantine sisters upend everything. And the twist is more terrifying than Addison -- or the readers -- could have imagined.
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Next: Do literary agents really want writers to do their work for them? What I learned during the pandemic.
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