The Rap Sheet

Rennie Airth is currently five books into his trilogy of historical mysteries. Yes, you read that correctly. This South Africa-born journalist turned fictionist set out, in the late 1990s, to pen just three novels about early 20th-century Scotland Yard inspector John Madden, his family, and his police colleagues. But as the now 81-year-old Airth explains, “I found I had more to say about the Maddens and the people around them. They had come to fascinate me and I wanted to ...

There are some years when it’s pretty easy to pick out which first-quarter crime, mystery, and thriller novels are destined to become the Big Reads, those books that enjoy extraordinary promotions and generate the most word-of-mouth. Such is not the case heading into the initial three months of 2017. There are so many promising new works by so many familiar or highly touted authors due out in the States this season, that guessing which ones will be remembered fondly even ...

Last December, after posting my “favorite crime novels of 2015” list, I put together a rather different assessment of the year’s new offerings in this genre. Rather than confine myself to picking 10 books (all released in the United States) that I judged to have been particularly well-written and memorable—a traditional and potentially valuable, but admittedly limiting exercise—I expanded my criteria to spotlight an assortment of other meritorious mystery, crime, and thriller works, some of which had barely failed to ...

This is the fifth consecutive time I’ve assembled, for Kirkus, a year-end list of my favorite crime, mystery, and thriller novels published in the United States during the preceding 12 months. Nostalgia grips me warmly as I look back now at previous picks—from M.J. McGrath’s White Heat (2011) and Peter May’s The Blackhouse (2012) to Derek B. Miller’s Norwegian by Night (2013), Laura Lippman’s After I’m Gone (2014), and Conor Brady’s historical mystery debut, A June of Ordinary Murders ...

This is Election Day in the United States, with the principal attraction being the hyper-contentious race to succeed two-term President Barack Obama in the White House. So I’d planned to devote this column to crime, mystery, and thriller fiction featuring American presidents, presidents’ wives, presidential cabinet members, and maybe even presidential pets (remember Stuart M. Kaminsky’s The Fala Factor, in which Eleanor Roosevelt turns to 1940s Hollywood gumshoe Toby Peters for help in retrieving Franklin D. Roosevelt’s famous but ...

It seems you can take Peter May out of Scotland’s Outer Hebrides, but you can’t take the Outer Hebrides out of Peter May. After penning a Canada-set thriller titled Entry Island (2015), followed by Runaway (2016), about teenage musicians whose quest for rock-’n’-roll renown in London is seriously marred by murder, May returns, in his new standalone, Coffin Road, to the storm-swept chain of islands off Scotland’s west coast where he set the novel that gained him his greatest ...

Nowadays most crime-fiction readers probably recognize the Pinkerton National Detective Agency for having inspired—with its logo featuring a large, unblinking human eye and the slogan “We Never Sleep”—the term “private eye.” They might also remember that its founder, a Scottish barrel maker named Allan Pinkerton, who’d left Great Britain for the United States in 1842, started his snooping career by helping to take down a gang of counterfeiters northwest of Chicago, Illinois, and was subsequently appointed as the Windy ...

So this might be the funniest story to come out of Bouchercon 2016, the September 15-18 World Mystery Convention held in New Orleans, Louisiana.

As Icelandic crime novelist Yrsa Sigurdardóttir (Someone to Watch Over Me) writes on her Facebook page, she had been scheduled to hold a public meet-and-greet session on Friday afternoon during Bouchercon, along with fellow Reykjavik native Ragnar Jonasson (Snowblind) and Norwegian cop-turned-author Jørn Lier Horst (The Caveman). Their event was to take place in an establishment ...