Interview With The Author: Michael Kardos by John Dwaine McKenna With many thanks, our interview this week is with Michael Kardos, the Pushcart Prize- winning author of Bluff, who holds degrees from Princeton, Ohio State, and the University of Missouri. He lives in Mississippi, where he teaches creative writing at Mississippi State. Somehow, he’s also found the time to write three other novels, a story collection and a text
Spirits of the Heart by Frances Brown writing as Claire Gem Erato Publishing, PB, $13.95, 312 pages, ISBN 978-0-9974326-4-0 As the by-line shows, this will be a different—and special—MBR. It’s not within our usual purview of crime and punishment, or murder and mayhem, nor even an exploration of the dark side of human nature. Instead, it’s a goose-pimple inducing paranormal ghost and romance story which takes place at an
A Guest From Outside the Box - Claire Gem Today I have a very special guest with me on Emotional Journeys. Author John McKenna, who sometimes goes by the name Garritt O’Dwaine, writes nonfiction, crime fiction, and is also the mastermind behind the review website, Mysterious Book Report. Read the rest of the interview HERE. Claire Gem's links: FaceBook Twitter Amazon
Robicheaux by James Lee Burke Simon & Schuster, $27.99, 445 pages, ISBN 978-1-5011-7684-3 Whenever a new book by James Lee Burke is released, I can’t wait to get my hands on it and promptly read it cover-to-cover. It’s been that way since the early 1990s, when I heard him speak on NPR about a character he’d created; a fictional Cajun detective from New Iberia, Louisiana. He was unique, this
The Bone Labyrinth by James Rollins WM. Morrow/Harper Collins, $27.99, 471 pages, ISBN 978-0-06-238164-4 Anyone who’s passed by a mass-market paperback book rack has probably seen the name James Rollins, even if they have never read one of his many action-adventure yarns featuring Commander Gray Pierce and the Sigma Force Team. In Rollins’s fictional world, the Sigma Group acts as the operational arm of DARPA: the Defense Advanced Research
The Last Dawn by Joe Gannon Minotaur Books, $26.99, 278 pages, ISBN 978-1-250-04803-5 Unless you’ve recently vacationed in Costa Rica or Belize, the geography of Central America is pretty much terra incognita for most of us who live north of the Mexican border and speak English as our mother tongue. But back in the 1980s, the Central American nation of Nicaragua was a focus of attention by the US
Forty Thieves by Thomas Perry Mysterious Press, $26.00, 356 pages, ISBN 978-0-8021-2452-4 Start reading any type of great fiction, and you’ll soon realize that it’s based upon conflict . . . because conflict creates drama . . . and drama is what captures, then holds, our attention and keeps us reading. Why? Because we humans are innately curious—we have to see what happens next. In order to create conflict,
Dragonfish by Vu Tran W.W. Norton & Company, $26.95, 296 pages, ISBN 978-0-393-07780-3 Noir fiction “Emphasizes the human urge toward self-destruction,” and “Focuses on the villain,” according to crime fiction writers James Ellroy and Otto Penzler. Its about the down-and-outers, the losers, the hopeless, unforgiven and abandoned among us who often spend their entire literary lives trapped in self-imposed prisons of the mind. These characters—who attract and repel the
The Cartel by Don Winslow Alfred A. Knopf, Random House/Penguin, $27.95, 617 pages, ISBN 978-1-101-87499-8 PART ONE: Every now and then, a fictional novel comes along that informs as it entertains, and in doing so, the-word-of-mouth buzz about it creates a public dialogue of national significance where none existed before. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe, The Gulag Archipelago, by Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Ironweed, by William Kennedy are
I Am Pilgrim by Terry Hayes Emily Bestler Books/Atria-Simon & Shuster, $26.99, 612 pages, ISBN 978-1-4391-7772-3 On occasion, a work of fiction comes along which can only be described as riveting. Enthralling, arresting, gripping, fascinating, absorbing, captivating, hypnotic, engrossing or spellbinding . . . but the single best and most descriptive word for MBR No. 181 is riveting. It will drill a hole into your consciousness, insert a red-hot