Thanks to John and Shannon Raab I was featured in the International Thriller Writers' Readers Corner in the latest issue of Suspense Magazine. If you don't already subscribe to Suspense Magazine, you should. It's an outstanding publication filled with great articles, author profiles and interviews, story excerpts, and wonderful book reviews. And my own monthly column: FORENSIC FILES.
It's been a very busy few months. Conferences and signings and writing. Left Coast Crime in Portland was great and was followed by several library talks with my friend and Crime and Science Radio co-host Jan Burke. Then of course there was all the prep for ThrillerFest, CraftFest, and Master CraftFest at ITW's annual conference in July. Though always fun, ThrillerFest was particularly so this year.
Yet through all that I found time to write and complete my next two books. One is an update of FORENSICS FOR DUMMIES. This 2nd edition will be released by Wiley in February. The other was the beginning of a new series-a comedic thriller set on the Gulf Coast. It stars reluctant PI Jake Longly and is titled DEEP SIX. It will be coming from Oceanview Publishing in July.
But I still found time to read. Always do. Writers must read. And I found a handful of wonderful books. METHOD 15/33 was agented by my wonderful agent Kimberley Cameron. It's a quirky and disturbing thriller about a young pregnant girl who is kidnapped for her baby. But best laid plans being what they are, they picked on the wrong girl. Definitely the wrong girl. A pleasant discovery was THE WEIGHT OF BLOOD by Laura McHugh. Set in the Ozarks and populated by a cast of deeply flawed characters, it is a wonderfully written book. It won the 2015 Thriller Award for Best First Novel. Erik Larsen's wonderful DEAD WAKE, tells the story of the sinking of the Lusitania from both the ship's captain and the U-boat commander's points of view. An impeccably researched and wonderfully rendered story. Another excellent discovery was Paul Cleave's TRUST NO ONE, which asks the question-who can you trust if you can't even trust yourself? And last but definitely not least, I also caught up with my favorite author James Lee Burke's latest-WAYFARING STRANGER. Brilliant and epic. As his stories always are.
And now I'm waiting for two soon to be released books. THE GIRL IN THE SPIDER'S WEB will be the first post Stieg Larsson novel in the Millennium series. Can't wait to see what Lisbeth Salander is up to. And THE HANGING TREE, the next installment in Jussi Adler-Olsen's excellent Department Q series.