Hank Phillippi Ryan: Truth Be Told It took me 2 tries to read this #3 in Ryan’s Jane Ryland series. Truth Be Told is half police procedural, from the POV of preppy Boston detective Jake Brogan, & half mystery, from the POV of mostly-TV journalist Jane Ryland. I hadn’t read …
We picked Killer Nashville because Pat and I — fellow Sisters in Crime — each had a finished mystery novel which was ready for the quantum jump off the computer screen into the arena of agents, editors, and marketing. Pat’s living in Georgia for the summer, near the Tennessee border; …
Started in 2006 by Clay Stafford as a charitable project of his media company American Blackguard, Killer Nashville is a terrific meeting place for authors, agents, and fans. Its website calls it an “International Thriller, Mystery, Crime Literature Writers Conference held annually in downtown Nashville, TN.” The actual location is …
The Only Witness by Pamela Beason An ingenious & charming mystery, starring improbably sympathetic characters: Brittany, a feckless teenage mother who leaves her baby in the car to dash into a store. Finn, a grumpy detective who’s saddled with his ex-wife’s menagerie & out of the loop in this grapevine-infested …
“Plenty of people got Iraq wrong, but plenty of people – experts and ordinary citizens – got it right. The problem was that it made no difference.” So states St. Louis-based writer Sarah Kendzior in “Iraq and the Reinvention of Reality” in today’s Al Jazeera. I’ve been teaching a course …
In a new mini-review in Public Books, author and scholar Bettyann Holtzmann Kevles alerts us to a scientific genius, overlooked in 21st-century America, who 200 years ago was exploring the world and 150 years ago was honored all around it. Alexander von Humboldt influenced Thomas Jefferson, Charles Darwin, Ralph Waldo …
In the early 1990s, Edward Gorey joined Susan Glaspell, Eugene O’Neill, and Tennessee Williams in the pantheon of Provincetown playwrights. For three summers, he designed and directed original full-length theater pieces he called “entertainments.” CRAZED TEACUPS is the third and last entertainment Edward staged in Provincetown. It’s also one of …
