Happy Wednesday! We made it halfway through another week. I had some good words for you today, but I realized this morning that I mailed my most recent book, The Transformation of Bartholomew Fortuno off to a friend without making note of the words! So annoying. There is one word in my current read, The Bucolic Plague that I can… Read more
Wow – it has been ages since I have been home on a Tuesday and able to post a Teaser! And this is a great week for it. I am reading one of the funniest books I have read in ages – The Bucolic Plague: From Drag Queen to Goat Farmer by Josh Kilmer-Purcell. It’s about a gay couple from… Read more
Okay, ladies, we’re all readers here, right? And we know that seeing a guy with a book instantly ups his appeal — we immediately know that we will have something to talk about (books!), he is smarter than the average bear (he’s reading, after all), and we can tell a lot about him by what he’s reading. Now, someone has… Read more
The premise behind The Dark End of the Street is simple: When we proposed this book to writers from both banks of the stream dividing crime writing and literary writing, we thought we had a particularly alluring idea. Write your heart out on the twin subjects of sex and crime. Define each however you want, take any approach you like.… Read more
I dearly love anything that gets people reading. While I wouldn’t read most of Oprah’s picks myself, there are some good books on the list and if they get people reading a book who would not otherwise make their way to the bookstore, I say GO OPRAH! I get even more excited when we’re talking about getting kids to read.… Read more
Little Bee is the sort of book I find hard to review. I want everyone to read this book — I want to tell you enough to encourage you to run out and put this on your wishlist. What I don’t want to do is spoil the story, and if I tell you too much, I will. The story at… Read more
Happy Wednesday! I’ve got some more new words for you from my latest books. Check out other new words over at BermudaOnion’s Weblog. These are from The Dark End of the Street: New Stories of Sex and Crime by Today’s Top Authors. It’s a great compilation of short stories and it as been really interesting to see how different authors… Read more
The prologue will give you nightmares. (Do you know what sort of sound human vertebrae make when they give way under pressure?) Other sections of the book made me want to cover my eyes and read through my fingers. The killer in Thomas White’s The Book of Matthew would give Hannibal Lecter a run for his money. This is not… Read more
These days, we talk about Banned Book Week and we talk about censorship in school libraries, but in the 1500’s, they were serious about censorship. Get caught reading something on the Vatican’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum (List of Prohibited Books) and your prize was an appointment with the local Inquisitor. Based on the true story of Giordano Bruno — an Italian… Read more
Last night’s episode of Criminal Minds struck a very scary chord for me. Back in 2009, I reviewed a book called Tattoo Machine: Tall Tales, True Stories and My Life in Ink by Jeff Johnson. It was a fun read, about — you guessed it — a tattoo artist. Lots of stories about their unique lingo, what it’s like working… Read more