This week,  CrimeSpree and  Friday Reads Facebook page, are giving away copies of  FALLOUT by Sara Paretsky and MAD by Chloe Esposito   FALLOUT by Sara Paretsky Award-winning, bestselling Sara Paretsky brings her legendary investigator V. I. Warshawski back in a puzzling case that will take the private investigator out of her comfort zone and into deadly new territory as she searches for a young film student and a former film star who are on the run in the heart of the Midwest LEE CHILD says she’s “a genius.” P.D. JAMES called her “the most remarkable” of today’s suspense writers. STIEG LARSSON loved...

The Washington Post has announced their best of 2015. There are a number of categories, but our own interest is on one area, the Best Mystery Books and Thrillers. A BANQUET OF CONSEQUENCES, by Elizabeth George (Viking) BRUSH BACK, by Sara Paretsky (Putnam) DARK CORNERS, by Ruth Rendell (Scribner) ROGUE LAWYER, by John Grisham (Doubleday) THE WHITES, by Richard Price as Harry Brandt (Henry Holt)

My girl Callie came to us when she was 10 weeks old. She was active, playful, lived to swim. Like all Goldens, she needed a lot of time with her people. If I was working too long and she was feeling lonely, she would hide something of mine, like a shoe, and then come stand in front of me, grinning, to let me know I had five minutes to find the object or she would chew it to bits. She was a total mama’s girl, stuck with me day and night, had a special nose-wrinkling look when she greeted the handful of people who mattered most to her. I took her swimming almost every morning (Lake Michigan is a 10-minute walk from my house.) My...

This is our 5th  in a series of author’s sharing photos of where they work when they create the great books we love to read. I find it interesting that the work spaces seem to be a different at the writing styles. If you click on the photos you can see them larger.

When Gavin Grant asked if I would do a conversation with Peter Dickinson for The Poison Oracle, I jumped at the chance. Dickinson is one of the premier writers of the Twentieth Century. His language is meticulous, his narratives carefully thought out, his characters vivid and credible. I should have looked before I leapt: it’s one thing to be an admiring reader, another to conduct a conversation. Besides, the act or art of writing feels like a delicate watch, something like the handmade one with all the little moving parts that tennis great Rafael Nadal wore and lost. If you start tinkering with the mechanism, you destroy the watch. Sara...