Not every mystery is a thriller, but when a book is called terrifying, mesmerizing and pulse-pounding it’s bound to qualify. All those adjectives fit SILENCED, the latest novel from Allison Brennan. In this fast paced mystery prostitutes who cater to a high profile clientele are turning up dead all over Washington D.C. The story follows Lucy Kincaid’s efforts to learn who killed one high-priced call girl linked to a powerful Congressman.
Four books into a successful series, Lucy Kincaid is still a budding detective at the beginning of her career. Still waiting to begin her training at the FBI Academy, she pursues her own crusade. She’s a fascinating character, in part because she doesn’t like crowds, and isn’t comfortable in most social events.
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Donna Del Oro earned a Global eBook Award nomination for her “Born to Sing” series. The prolific author now has two recent releases. THE DELPHI BLOODLINE is a contemporary thriller, and A BODYGUARD OF LIES is an espionage thriller introducing a new protagonist, FBI analyst Jake Bernstein.
In THE DELPHI BLOODLINE, Athena Butler, the descendant of an ancient bloodline of female psychics, finds herself a target after her mother disappears. The FBI finds no explanation for nationwide disappearances of other psychics. A mysterious stranger who claims to be one of the bloodline’s Guardians helps uncover what is a diabolical plot to extinguish forever this powerful bloodline.
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OSI Agent Jericho Quinn made his debut in NATIONAL SECURITY. Now he’s back, riding his BMW motorcycle and rooting out Central Asian moles who have infiltrated American government at the highest levels.
Author Marc Cameron recently took time out of his busy schedule to answer some questions for TheBigThrill:
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By John Rabb
Lisa Brackmann is back with her second novel GETAWAY. After the success of her first novel ROCK PAPER TIGER, which made a number of year’s end “best” lists, including Amazon’s top one hundred novels and top ten in mystery/thrillers, Lisa brings us a new story with her latest character Michelle Mason.
Lisa is no stranger to the entertainment field—she worked as an executive at a major motion picture studio, an issues researcher in a presidential campaign and was the singer/songwriter/bassist in an LA rock band. Now, novel writing is another successful credit to add to her resume.
Lisa’s love for writing starts back when she was five-years-old, but in 2010 she received the wonderful news every aspiring author loves to hear, that her book ROCK PAPER TIGER was picked up by Soho Press for publication.
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By Paula Tutman
It’s hard to say which is the more fear-provoking thrill in Raymond Benson’s latest book, THE BLACK STILETTO: BLACK AND WHITE released May 2012 by Oceanview Publishing. You’ll have to choose between the fact that his masked heroine is about to be betrayed by her own heart and discovered, or the authentic ride the reader is taken through in her old-age.
No thriller or murder mystery is as terrifying as the disease of dementia, and Benson weaves cold hard fiction with cold hard fact by forcing the reader to suffer the cold slap of wind in the face while riding, hands up and screaming in the front seat of the Alzheimer’s roller coaster.
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By George Ebey
“Geiger was an apostle, a slave to the specific. He was constantly breaking down, distilling, and defining parts of the whole, because in IR—information retrieval—the details were crucial. His goal was to refine the process to an art, which was why every single thing that happened from the moment Geiger walked into the room had its own degree of significance and required recognition. Each facial expression; each spoken word and silence; each tic, glance, and movement. Give him fifteen minutes in the room with a Jones and nine out of ten times he would know what the reaction to a particular action would be before the Jones made it: fear, defiance, desperation, bravado, denial. There were patterns, cycles, behavioral refrains. You just had to pay very close attention to see them all.”
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By Jeremy Burns
Steve Berry is a thriller writer who needs no introduction. A perennial NEW YORK TIMES bestselling author, his books have garnered rave reviews across the globe and have sold more than ten million copies. His upcoming novel, THE COLUMBUS AFFFAIR, sees a wholly new cast of characters step into the spotlight, but promises an adventure every bit as exciting and action-packed as his Cotton Malone books. Steve recently sat down with THE BIG THRILL to discuss THE COLUMBUS AFFAIR.
This is your first standalone thriller since launching your highly successful Cotton Malone series six years ago. Why did you choose to make THE COLUMBUS AFFAIR a standalone instead of a part of your established Cotton Malone canon?
One day last summer, Cotton called me on the phone and asked if he could take a year off. Seems I’ve been blowing up his bookshop, causing him problems with his employees, his insurer won’t cover the building anymore. Lots of stuff. So I gave him a vacation to get things back in order. I haven’t written a stand alone since THE THIRD SECRET in 2005, so it was fun creating a new world, with new characters. Same type of story — action, history, secrets, conspiracies, international settings — but different motivations. Tom Sagan is an interesting protagonist.
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By J.N. Duncan
I’d like to welcome Jeremy Bates to the ITW list of authors with his debut thriller, WHITE LIES, a knock-out, twisty story about the trouble caused by one, little white lie. Degreed in English Literature and Philosophy, Jeremy has traveled the world and taken up residence in half a dozen different countries, but the broad scope of his life doesn’t keep him from focusing in on small, normal places, where equally normal people can find themselves involved in big-time terror. Welcome, Jeremy! Let’s get to the good stuff.
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As a medical examiner, Samantha Owens knows her job is to make a certain sense of death with crisp methodology and precision instruments. But the day the Tennessee floods took her husband and children, the light vanished from Sam’s life. She’s pulled into a suffocating grief no amount of workaholic ardor can penetrate—until she receives a peculiar call from Washington, D.C.
On the other end of line is an old boyfriend’s mother, asking Sam to do a second autopsy on her son. Eddie Donovan is officially the victim of a vicious carjacking, but under Sam’s sharp eye the forensics tell a darker story. The ex-Ranger was murdered, though not for his car.
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By Andrew Zack
Shortly after I started chatting with author R. Barri Flowers, who writes under his own name and also as Devon Vaughn Archer, I realized ITW could do a great panel discussion on authors and race. Flowers is an African-American writer and his books are often packaged for the African-American audience, even if the plots might have wider appeal. Take his upcoming novel, DANGER AT EVERY TURN:
When retired FBI forensic psychologist Spencer Berry and his dog break up a scuffle between gang members, in the process of chasing one with a gun, they end up discovering the nude remains of a young woman partially submerged in a creek behind the home of police spokeswoman Deidre Lawrence. The deceased appears to be the victim of the Pelle Park Killer, a serial murderer terrorizing Sinclair Heights, Oregon over the past three years.
As a result, Spencer and Deidre find themselves involved in the case, while being drawn to each other.
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In April, Robert Liparulo, the best-selling author of COMES A HORSEMAN, GERM, and THE DREAMHOUSE KINGS series of adventures for young readers, will release his contemporary thriller THE 13TH TRIBE (Thomas Nelson, Inc.). The trade paperback original features a group of immortal vigilantes roaming the earth and killing criminals. When they cross paths with Jagger Baird, head of security for an archaeological dig, Jagger has to stop them to save his family and the tribe’s next target: an entire city. But can one man stop these timeless, high-tech killers?
Liparulo, a former journalist, is currently writing an original screenplay with Andrew Davis, the director of THE FUGITIVE. After that, he’ll work on the sequel to THE 13TH TRIBE and another YA series. He recently sat down for an interview:
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By Karen Harper
COME HOME is an emotional thriller about Jill Farrow, a typical suburban mom who has finally gotten her life back on track after a divorce. She has a beautiful teenage daughter and is about to remarry when Abby, her former stepdaughter, appears on her doorstep and asks her to help solve a murder – of her ex-husband! Beyond the twists and turns, and the surprise ending, COME HOME asks the question, do you ever stop being a mother? Can you have an ex-child?
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By Terry DiDomenico
Introducing ITW 2012 Debut Author Brian Andrews and his novel, THE CALYPSO DIRECTIVE. According to Brian, the occasion is worthy of coining a new term – excitifying – the combining of exciting with terrifying.
I learned Brian is a Navy vet who served as an officer abroad a nuclear submarine in the Pacific. So when I burrowed deeper into my assignment, subconsciously I was expecting a novel played out against either a military or a seaworthy background. So I was surprised to learn I was wrong on both counts – surprised, not disappointed.
Brian’s THE CALPYSO DIRECTIVE puts the reader smack in the middle of a moral, ethical, and medical conundrum involving the human genome, patents, and greed. And did I mention assassins and a shadowy organization called the Think Tank?
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Brenda Hill’s absorbing new novel, WITH FULL MALICE, begins in a restaurant parking lot when a woman, wearing a disguise and latex gloves, carries out an execution-style murder of a man named Jeff Hawley: two shots to the chest, one to the head. We don’t know the identity of the woman or why she targeted Hawley. All we know is that the woman had been mailed a letter with “today’s date stamped below an elaborately scripted header, The Ruby Red Society.”
Enter Madison Young, a newspaper reporter, usually the paper’s food critic, who is assigned to cover the crime. Still haunted by the murder of her own parents when she was a young girl, Madison is ill-suited for the assignment. She’s a fragile woman, afraid to come home to a dark house, afraid to take chances in life. But by happenstance she was at the restaurant the night of Hawley’s murder, and her editor insisted that she cover the gruesome crime scene.
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Almost every thriller promises action and intrigue. Many novels go astray trying to push their heroes’ exploits to that level, but once in a while a book comes along that really delivers on that promise. Assassin’s Code by Jonathan Maberry is one of those books.
The action kicks off as Echo Team, led by Joe Ledger, rescues a group of American college students being held in Iran. Instead of arresting Joe, the Iranian government asks Ledger’s team to accept a far more dangerous mission: find six stolen nuclear weapons hidden in Mideast oil fields.
Joe Ledger is the kind of hero who’s easy to like and cheer for. He has a snarky sense of humor and loves baseball, pop culture, and a good American beer. But as Maberry says, he’s also damaged goods.
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By Karen Harper
Broke and jobless after graduating from university, Arthur Pender and three friends turn to kidnapping to survive. Their strategy: work quickly, demand low ransoms, and always keep moving. It works perfectly, until they kidnap a Detroit mobster who somehow winds up dead.
Suddenly, Pender and his gang find themselves pursued by two opposite factions: the law, in the form of veteran state investigator Kirk Stevens and hotshot FBI agent Carla Windermere, and an organized crime outfit looking for payback. All three groups criss-cross the country, playing a terrifying game of cat and mouse that leads ultimately to an explosive and brutal conclusion.
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POISON FLOWER, a contemporary thriller, is Thomas Perry’s seventh novel in the Jane Whitefield series. Thomas now shares his insights into the suspense/thriller genre and expands on his thoughts, regarding his main protagonist, Jane Whitefield.
The author recently sat down to discuss his latest book:
What draws you to the suspense genre?
I think we all end up writing something like the books we most enjoy reading. Part of the attraction for me is that I like stories that test and explore the nobler aspects of human nature. The genre allows us to plausibly depict people engaged in the most extreme tests of their courage, wisdom, cleverness, and persistence. I often write about people who are very imperfect, but who–for at least in this one moment of their live–show us something about bravery or self-sacrifice. In writing about them we get to celebrate a little. At the same time, the genre requires that we invent convincing dangers, enemies, and obstacles for these people, so we get to explore the other side of human nature too.
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Frankly, I’ve been getting a little tired of interviewing authors. I mean, ‘Tell me a bit about yourself? Why did you start writing? How did you manage to get published? What’s your writing process?’ Blah, blah, blah. Seriously, folks, let’s face it, pounding keys isn’t exactly magic. And these questions aren’t going to draw out any deep dark secrets. No, the only people that have the real answers are your main characters. They’re pieces of you and your sordid little fantasies, so instead of interviewing Cat Connor the author, I’m hauling kick-ass Supervisory Special Agent Ellie Conway out of Cat Connor’s closet.
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Unraveling the madness behind L.A.’s most baffling and brutal homicides is what sleuthing psychologist Alex Delaware does best.
And putting the good doctor through his thrilling paces is what mystery fiction’s #1 bestselling master of psychological suspense Jonathan Kellerman does with incomparable brilliance. Kellerman’s universally acclaimed novels blend the addictive rhythms of the classic police procedural with chilling glimpses into the darkest depths of the human condition. For the compelling proof, look no further than Victims—Kellerman at his razor-sharp, harrowing finest.
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By Ethan Cross
Mike Cooper is an award-winning author whose newest work, CLAWBACK, has been described by #1 NYT Bestselling Author Brad Thor as “fantastic” and “my kind of thriller.” It delves into the heart of America’s economic system, exposing a small part of the corruption and villainy that have thrown the world into economic turmoil.
America might be slogging through its worst recession in seventy years, but Wall Street is back in glory – until the killing starts.
As CLAWBACK opens, an assassin has begun shooting the country’s worst-performing financiers. A bottom-ranked investment manager; a hedge fund partner down ninety percent; a rotten banker. Someone’s slogan seems to be, “Don’t bail them out, take them out!”
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By Nate Kenyon
Megan is a suburban soccer mom who once upon a time walked on the wild side. Now she’s got two kids, a perfect husband, a picket fence, and a growing sense of dissatisfaction. Ray used to be a talented documentary photographer, but at age forty he finds himself in a dead- end job posing as a paparazzo pandering to celebrity-obsessed rich kids. Jack is a detective who can’t let go of a cold case-a local husband and father disappeared seventeen years ago, and Jack spends the anniversary every year visiting a house frozen in time, the missing man’s family still waiting, his slippers left by the recliner as if he might show up any moment to step into them.
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By Ian Walkley
Best-selling crime author and Nero Wolfe Award winner Dick Lochte is a character almost as big as those in his novels. He is as prolific as ever, with his fourteenth novel, BLUES IN THE NIGHT, being released in February by Severn House.
According to Kirkus Reviews, “Few capture California better…” and in this first of a new series by Lochte, ex-con Dave Mason returns to Los Angeles expecting to help an old friend out of a jam. But the friend is harboring a secret and before long Mason is being chased through the city’s mean and tinseled streets by an oddball British hit man, a homicidal porn star, several CIA agents, a Russian mob boss, a superstar-computer game creator and a beautiful woman who’s more dangerous than all the rest.
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In the year since the CIA trained and then unleashed him, Mitch Rapp has been steadily working his way through a list of men, bullet by bullet. With each swift and untraceable kill, the tangled network of monsters responsible for the slaughter of 270 civilians in the Pan Am Lockerbie attack become increasingly aware that someone is hunting them. Rapp is given his next target, and finds the man asleep in his bed in Paris. In the split second it takes the bullet to leave Rapp’s silenced pistol, the trap is sprung and he finds himself in the fight of his life.
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In four days, someone is going to kill me . . .
Detective D. D. Warren is hard to surprise. But a lone woman outside D.D.’s latest crime scene shocks her with a remarkable proposition: Charlene Rosalind Carter Grant believes she will be murdered in four days. And she wants Boston’s top detective to handle the death investigation.
It will be up close and personal. No evidence of forced entry, no sign of struggle.
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By Jeff Ayers
TWO SECONDS LATE is Eric Wilson’s follow up to ONE STEP AWAY. After a chance encounter at a Nashville book festival, Natalie Flynn starts dating a suave, young politician, Reuben Black. Natalie has no idea Reuben is friends with some very dangerous people. These friends deal in information, and knowledge is their form of gold. Recent technological advances have allowed for widespread use of RFID tagging (radio-frequency ID), and Reuben’s friends are growing richer by the day. To do so, though, they are endangering the lives of society’s mentally and financially destitute. TWO SECONDS LATE is a tale of modern characters faced with ethical and life-altering decisions. Natalie, in some parallels to the biblical story of Esther, has been positioned for “such a time as this,” but every second counts, and already she may be too late. Eric Wilson talked to ITW about his new novel and his earlier works.
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By Paula Tutman
Court is in recess.
John Lescroart, known for his smart, compelling legal page turners like A CERTAIN JUSTICE, THE 13TH JUROR and, HARD EVIDENCE to name just a few of his nearly two dozen novels—tips the scales in a new direction for his latest book, THE HUNTER, released January 2012, published by Dutton.
Private Investigator, Wyatt Hunt returns to the fingertips of the NEW YORK TIMES bestselling author in a not-your-typical-whodunit-and-why, but an emotional thriller in which Wyatt Hunt of THE HUNT CLUB and TREASURE HUNT reopens his painful past by running down a forty year old murder case. And this time everything is personal. Because the murder victim who’s seemingly taken up residence in the cold-case files is his own birth mother.
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By L.J. Sellers
Rick Mofina has been writing about crime—both as a reporter and a novelist—for three decades, and his skill is evident. His thrillers have been highly praised by the best in the business, Michael Connelly, James Patterson, and Tess Gerritsen, to name a few, and his stories have been published in 17 countries with two million books in print.
His latest, THE BURNING EDGE (featuring reporter Jack Gannon) follows a single mother as she witnesses the horrific murder of four men, including an FBI agent, then works with the bureau to find the assassins. Here’s more about story in the author’s own words:
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Accountability. Responsibility. When things go wrong, someone has to pay. In this case, that someone is Rennie Vogel.
Hung out to dry for the debacle of the Tajikistan mission, Rennie finds herself on the outside of the system with no hope of return. To make things worse, Hannah Marcus has moved on, seemingly willing to consign their interrupted relationship to the past.
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C.E. Lawrence, aka Carole Bugge, writes it all – cozies, prize-winning plays and poetry, Sherlock Holmes pastiches – but for now she’s concentrating on her series set in New York City and featuring serial killer profiler Lee Campbell. In her new book, SILENT KILLS, which follows SILENT SCREAMS and SILENT VICTIM, Lawrence pits Campbell against a unique killer, a modern-day Steampunk vampire who uses technology to drain his victims of blood.
Publishers Weekly calls SILENT KILLS “a dark, intriguing thriller” and J.T. Ellison describes it as “an intense psychological ride.” Cody McFadyen says the third Lee Campbell novel is “startlingly suspenseful… an extraordinary page-turner.” Recently Lawrence answered our questions about her new book and her writing life.
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GJ Moffatt’s thrillers have been described as “white knuckle adrenaline rides” that should be devoured in one sitting. BLINDSIDE, his gripping third novel, makes no exception.
When a passenger jet crashes in Denver, Colorado, nobody survives.
In Glasgow, Alex Cahill is surprised to receive a phone call from the wife of an old Secret Service colleague who was supposedly travelling on the doomed plane. But there is no record of his name on the passenger list. Cahill uses his connections to find out what has happened but no one is talking. Not even to him. Enlisting the help of his friend, Logan Finch, Cahill is determined to get answers and travels to Denver for a confrontation with the FBI.
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