Over at Galleycat yesterday, I confessed my New Year’s Resolution: “to read an honest-to-goodness potboiler, complete with smokin-guns and dark-cloaked villains.” I’ve sort of avoided mysteries and thrillers for my entire adult reading life. The last mystery I remember reading is from the Nancy Drew series! So, along comes a book that might give me the kick I need, Tamara Silver Jones’s Threads of Malice, a continuation of the series that began with her debut novel, Ghost in the Snow. The novel contains corpses, mysterious disappearances, a trail of clues, and a tantalizingly ticking clock. Oh, and here’s an idea I wish I’d thought of. On her website, Jones has a map of the ranch where the dirty deeds take place! One reviewer says, “For a nice Midwestern housewife, Jones is one sick lady.†Sounds like just what I need!
For more crime fiction, check out the blog Confessions of an Idiosyncratic mind.
And this just in from Karin Gillespie, founder of the Girlfriends Cyber Circuit:
f you’re a traditionally published female author who has an established blog (three months or more) and who blogs at least once a week, you may be interested in joining the GCC. We now have a couple of openings but they are bound to go fast. The GCC will tour your book on 25 well-established blogs like this one with no cost to you. In exchange you will tour a couple of authors a month on your blog. If you’re interested in being nominated for the GCC, please contact kgillespie@knology.net
I was recently having a similar conversation, with a mystery writer, no less… I told him I hadn’t read a bonafide mystery in years (“Motherless Brooklyn” doesn’t count). Mentioning my teenage fondness for Agatha Christie, he told me to check out Ruth Rendell, who apparently writes very tight whodunits. Might be a place for you to start. (Hey, maybe we should start a temporary book club: Mysteries for writers who don’t read mysteries.)
Thanks, Karl. I’ll try this one. Hey, I like that idea–we could call it the unmystery mystery club…or something.