You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Our 95th issue has a lot of fun stuff—starting off with an original mystery by Robert Lopresti (thanks to Acquiring Editor Michael Bracken). Also on the mystery side, “Haitian Divorce,” by Simon Wood, courtesy of Acquiring Editor Barb Goffman, as well as a pair of classic novels by Hulbert Footner and R. Austin Freeman...plus a solve-it-yourself puzzler from Hal Charles. On the fantastic side of things, A.R. Morlan has a modern tale of clones, Alfred Coppel has a scientific monster, Seabury Quinn has a weird horror, and Fritz Leiber has a comic mermaid tale. And there a classic science fiction novel by John Taine. Good stuff! Here’s the complete lineup: Mysteries / Suspense / Adventu...
This issue features three original stories—a pair of mysteries (by Mindy Quigley and Mark Thielman, thanks to Acquiring Editors Michael Bracken and Barb Goffman), plus John Gregory Betancourt's “Sympathy for Invisible Men,” part of a series of meditations on classic monsters he has been writing for about 30 years now. Plus—if you’ve been following the lamentations of science fiction magazines about AI submissions—you will find Norman Spinrad’s essay on the subject fascinating. And of course there is plenty of great reading from old masters like Robert E. Howard and Marie Beloc Lowndes and (relatively) newer writers like Robert Abernathy, Stephen Marlowe, and Louis Carbonneau. O...
Food, Consumption, and Masculinity in American Hardboiled Fiction draws on three related bodies of knowledge: crime fiction criticism, masculinity studies, and the cultural analysis of food and consumption practices from a critical eating studies perspective. In particular, this book focuses on food as an analytical category in the study of tough masculinity as represented in American hardboiled fiction. Through an examination of six American novels: Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep, Leigh Brackett's No Good from a Corpse, Dorothy B. Hughes's In a Lonely Place, Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me, and Rex Stout's Champagne for One, this book shows how these novels reflect the gradual process of redefining consumption and consumerism in America, which traditionally has been coded as feminine. Marta Usiekniewicz shows that food and eating also reflect power relations and larger social and economic structures connected to class, gender, geography, sexuality, and ability, to name just a few.
It is one thing to draw a line in the sand but another to enforce it. In this innovative new work, Jessica Lauren Taylor follows the Native peoples and the newcomers who built and crossed emerging boundaries surrounding Indigenous towns and developing English plantations in the seventeenth-century Chesapeake Bay. In a riverine landscape defined by connection, Algonquians had cultivated ties to one another and into the continent for centuries. As Taylor finds, their networks continued to define the watery Chesapeake landscape, even as Virginia and Maryland’s planters erected fences and forts, policed unfree laborers, and dispatched land surveyors. By chronicling English and Algonquian attem...
The most visited site in the National Park system, the 469-mile Blue Ridge Parkway winds along the ridges of the Appalachian mountains in Virginia and North Carolina. According to most accounts, the Parkway was a New Deal "Godsend for the needy," built without conflict or opposition by landscape architects and planners who traced their vision along a scenic, isolated southern landscape. The historical archives relating to this massive public project, however, tell a different and much more complicated story, which Anne Mitchell Whisnant relates in this revealing history of the beloved roadway.
Ashes to Ashes, Crust to Crust is the second book in Mindy Quigley's delectable Deep Dish Mystery series, set in a Wisconsin pizzeria. Newly single pizzeria owner Delilah O’Leary is determined to keep her restaurant afloat in the picturesque resort town of Geneva Bay, Wisconsin. To boost her bottom line, she sets her sights on winning the hefty cash prize in the town’s annual “Taste of Wisconsin” culinary contest. In her corner, she’s got her strong-willed, “big-boned” cat Butterball, her wisecracking BFF, her cantankerous great-aunt, and a nearly-flawless recipe for Pretzel Crust Deep-Dish Bratwurst Pizza. But while Delilah and her team have been focused on pumping out perfect pizza pies, her ex-fiancé has cozied up to a new squeeze, juice bar owner Jordan Watts—Delilah’s contest rival. When one of Jordan’s juice bar customers is poisoned by a tainted smoothie, Delilah lands deep in the sauce. Accusations fly, suspects abound, and a menacing stranger turns up with a beef over some missing dough. Between kale-juicing hipsters and grudge-bearing celebrity chefs, Delilah must act quickly before another one bites the crust.
Looking for a new cozy series? In the latest edition of Cozy Case Files, Minotaur Books compiles the beginnings of nine charming cozy mysteries publishing in Winter 2024 for free for easy sampling. The twentieth edition of Cozy Case Files features cozies from the following authors: Ellie Alexander, Rhys Bowen and Clare Broyles, Olivia Blacke, Jennifer Chow, Anastasia Hastings, Olivia Matthews, Gigi Pandian, Mindy Quigley, and Paige Shelton. Cook up some delicious treats with a variety of culinary cozies! On the menu, you'll find killer West Indian pastries in Coconut Drop Dead, deadly deep dish pizzas in Public Anchovy #1, fatal fortune cookies in Ill-Fated Fortune, and suspicious spiced curry buns in A Smoking Bun. Get with the groove and catch a killer while you're at it with Rhythm and Clues. Solve your way out of a deadly booby trap while racing against time in A Midnight Puzzle. Discover the mystery behind an antique Crusader Sword in The Poison Pen. Getaway to the Catskills with In Sunshine or in Shadow. And infiltrate a scandalous cult in historical Britain as you read Of Hoaxes and Homicide.
Fresh mozzarella, tangy tomato sauce, and murder: the perfect recipe for a delicious first entry in Mindy Quigley's Six Feet Deep Dish, a delectable new series... Delilah O’Leary can’t wait to open her new gourmet deep-dish pizzeria in Geneva Bay, Wisconsin—a charming resort town with a long history as a mobsters’ hideaway, millionaires’ playground, and vacation mecca. Engaged to a hunk with a hefty trust fund, Delilah is poised to begin a life that’s just about as delicious as one of her cheesy creations. Just before opening night, though, Delilah’s plans for pizza perfection hit the skids when her fiancé dumps her and leaves her with a very large memento from their relationship—Butterball, their spoiled, plus-sized tabby cat. Delilah’s trouble deepens when she discovers a dead body and finds her elderly aunt holding the murder weapon. Handsome local police detective Calvin Capone, great grandson of the legendary gangster, opens an investigation, threatening to sink Delilah’s pie-in-the-sky ambitions before they can even get off the ground. To save her aunt and get her pizza place generating some dough, Delilah must deliver the real killer.
Public Anchovy #1 is the third book in Mindy Quigley's delectable Deep Dish Mystery series, set in a Wisconsin pizzeria. While Geneva Bay’s upper crust gets ready to party down at a Prohibition-themed fundraiser, pizza chef Delilah O’Leary is focused on seeing her struggling restaurant through the winter slow season. The temperature outside is plummeting, but Delilah’s love life might finally be heating up, as hunky police detective Calvin Capone seems poised to (finally) make a move. But Delilah’s hopes of perfecting a new “free-from” pizza recipe for a charity bash are dashed when a dead body crashes the party. Soon, Capone, Delilah, and her entire staff are trapped in an isolated mansion and embroiled in a dangerous game of cat and mouse. To catch an increasingly-desperate killer, Delilah will have to top all of her previous crime-solving accomplishments, and a few pizzas, too.
Lindsay Harding, a young hospital chaplain in the tiny town of Mount Moriah, North Carolina, just wants to help people. But her eagerness to help draws her into a dark world of secrets and lies when a beloved Civil War re-enactor is murdered in front of hundreds of on-lookers. As Lindsay races to find the killer and avoid becoming the next victim, she draws upon her courage, her friends, and her own irreverant brand of religion. All the while Lindsay is torn between her attraction to the hospital's new doctor, an Adonis in surgical scrubs, and her fractious, flirtatious relationship with the (sort-of) married detective investigating the murder. When Lindsay threatens to expose century-old sins that shaped the very soul of Mount Moriah, the murderer gets to close for comfort and threatens Lindsay's chance at a happy ending.