August Norman – Sins of the Mother: A Caitlin Bergman Novel
It’s been six years since I interviewed August Norman, and since it’s his birthday, I want to revisit our conversation about his addicting Caitlin Bergman novel, Sins of the Mother.
MJ Dyer – We Are Monsters
There is something almost Victorian about the origin story of M.J. Dyer’s We Are Monsters. It begins not with a candlelit manor or a governess on the moors, but in a hospital room, where the author, recovering from brain inflammation, began seeing three identical sisters.
Lee Goldberg – Murder by Design
Lee Goldberg has spent much of his career turning murder into an oddly companionable profession. He’s the sort of writer who speaks about craft as if it were both a calling and a chronic illness.
C. B. Wilson – The Water Diamond
In C.B. Wilson’s fiction, a diamond is never merely a diamond. It is a compressed biography and a great mystery. Cheryl’s newest novel, “Water Diamond,” the second installment in the Gem Hunter series, is built on precisely that premise.
Liz Lazarus – Dawn Before Darkness
The best suspense does not rely on shadows or sudden violence, but on the slow, suffocating realization that the systems meant to protect you may instead conspire against you. It is this more insidious terror that animates Liz Lazarus’s latest novel, Dawn Before Darkness.
Luke Preston & Alice Waddington – Anonymous Jane
Anonymous Jane, the collaboration between Australian novelist Luke Preston and Spanish film director Alice Waddington, appears to belong to that highly kinetic family of thriller that does not so much begin as detonate.
Tori Eldridge – Hawaii Rage
Hear the Conversation | Get the Book In Hawai‘i Rage, Tori Eldridge does not merely set a mystery against the backdrop of Hawai‘i. She lets the land breathe, brood, and remember. The result is a novel that feels less like a whodunit and more like a slow excavation, where each layer of soil...
Martha Conway – We Meet Apart
There is a special category of dread reserved for the traveler suspended 30,000 feet above the Atlantic. One is committed to the mercy of engines, weather, mathematics, and faith. For the novelist Martha Conway, this was more than metaphor.
Ashley Wren Collins and Jordan Rockwell – SHE WROTE, HE WROTE: A New York Love Story
In the long tradition of New York love stories, the collaboration between Ashley Wren Collins and Jordan Rockwell arrives with a kind of self-awareness that feels both modern and faintly nostalgic. Their novel, SHE WROTE, HE WROTE: A New York Love Story, is not merely about romance.
James Grady – Shadows on Sidewalks
There are writers who define a genre, and then there are those who quietly reshape it from the inside out. In this episode, I’m joined by legendary thriller author James Grady, whose breakout novel Six Days of the Condor originally introduced audiences to a world where paranoia, power...
Mario Cartaya – Journey Back Into the Vault: In Search of My Faded Cuban Childhood Footprints
There is a moment, late in Journey Back Into the Vault: In Search of My Faded Cuban Childhood Footprints, when author Mario Cartaya sits on a balcony in Havana and encounters a boy he once was. The scene unfolds as a memory, whole, insistent, and strangely alive.
Ralph DeFalco – The Counterfeit
What happens when history repeats itself and the global balance of power shifts overnight? I sit down with Dr. Ralph DeFalco, the “Renaissance man” and author behind the chilling political thriller, The Counterfeit.