Books

Poet and young adult author Raquel Vasquez Gilliland’s adult debut, Witch of Wild Things, is a story of family legacies and complicated sisterhood, told with romantic and lush magical realism.  For the entirety of Sage Flores’ life, she’s known three things. First, the old gods have no love for Flores women and have thus cursed

Mara (They/Them) has accidentally on purpose made their entire life about books and stories. Mara graduated with a B.A in creative writing and theatre and is halfway through an MFA in Creative writing. In addition to writing for Book Riot, Mara also has written for The Independent Book Review, Wargamer, and The Other Half, to

Anthony Ryan is a successful fantasy author, cleaving more towards the ‘grimdark” style of Joe Abercrombie and George RR Martin. For Red River Seven he has switched styles and written near-future dystopian novel that crosses into action thriller territory. Seven strangers wake up in a boat at sea to find that humanity’s survival is at

What would Hansel and Gretel be like as adults? Kell Woods’ inventive retelling explores the answer to this question, following Hans and Margareta “Greta” Rosenthal as down-on-their-luck German peasants struggling to make a living in a world still recovering from the Thirty Years’ War. Greta has never felt like she fit into Lindenfeld, a little

Susie (she/her) is a queer writer originally from Little Rock, now living in Washington, DC. She is the author of QUEERLY BELOVED and the forthcoming LOOKING FOR A SIGN from Dial Press/Random House. You can find her on Instagram @susiedoom. View All posts by Susie Dumond Susie (she/her) is a queer writer originally from Little

Liberty Hardy is an unrepentant velocireader, writer, bitey mad lady, and tattoo canvas. Turn-ons include books, books and books. Her favorite exclamation is “Holy cats!” Liberty reads more than should be legal, sleeps very little, frequently writes on her belly with Sharpie markers, and when she dies, she’s leaving her body to library science. Until

The inimitable Nikki DeMarco is as well-traveled as she is well-read. Being an enneagram 3, Aries, high school librarian, makes her love for efficiency is unmatched. She lives in Richmond, Virginia, and is passionate about helping teens connect to books. Nikki has an MFA in creative writing, is a TBR bibliologist, and writes for Harlequin,

Erica Ezeifedi, Associate Editor, is a transplant from Nashville, TN that has settled in the North East. In addition to being a writer, she has worked as a victim advocate and in public libraries, where she has focused on creating safe spaces for queer teens, mentorship, and providing test prep instruction free to students. Outside

Most of Tirzah Price’s life decisions have been motivated by a desire to read as many books as humanly possible. Tirzah holds an MFA in Writing for Children & Young Adults from Vermont College of Fine Arts, and has worked as an independent bookseller and librarian. She’s also the author of the Jane Austen Murder

Brent Butt is a Canadian comedy icon. For years he worked as a stand-up comic, performing all over the place, from small town venues to large festivals, but is best known for Corner Gas, a sit-com set in a small town in Saskatchewan he created and starred in. Viewers enjoyed the quirky characters and humorous

Kelly Jensen is out this week, so Erica Ezeifedi and I are filling in on censorship news. Unfortunately, none of us can be Kelly, even with our forces combined, so we’re trying something a little different in the censorship news round-up. Instead of one big story and dozens of bullet points, we have each picked

It’s a good week if you’re looking for crime novels offering something a bit different. We’re pretty confident you’ll find the new novels by Boston Teran, Caimh McDonnell and Carey Keith Green in this news report come straight out of left field. Plus, we’ve got an espionage thriller and a domestic thriller for you to

Veteran narrators Michael Kramer and Kate Reading return to this fantastical world, along with a new POV portrayed by Marisa Calin.V. E. Schwab, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, opens another door to a new fantasy series set in the dazzling world of Shades of Magic. Prepare for tangled schemes and perilous

Today, the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Norwegian novelist and playwright Jon Fosse. Fosse’s work has been highly acclaimed across Europe, and is gaining more and more of an audience in English-speaking portions of the world. The Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded for entire bodies of work, and Fosse’s win comes as

Recent years have truly witnessed the rise of the female serial killer. Literarily speaking, anyway. From How to Kill Men and Get Away With It to My Sister the Serial Killer, How to Kill Your Family to Bad Men, women are finally breaking through the blood-soaked glass ceiling and joining the ranks of serially murderous

Irish author Amanda Cassidy is a freelance journalist and former Sky News reporter, and she certainly knows how to pull her readers into a story from the get-go. It’s the week before Christmas when a fire breaks out at the Wills family home in County Kerry in the Republic of Ireland. Returning home to find

Peter Swanson has written a criminous Christmas tale? His twisted, unsettling mysteries such as The Kind Worth Killing and The Kind Worth Saving don’t bend towards sentimentality or good will for that matter. But then this novella is for people who aren’t wedded to the idea that Christmas stories should serve up murder in cosy

Seaside landladies are the stuff of British folklore and the butt of many a 1970s comic’s jokes. They’re depicted as tough, unwielding, no-nonsense types, who delight in cutting corners and have little or no sense of humour. Thankfully, Helen Dexter, the heroine of Glenda Young‘s Seaview Hotel series, set in the English north eastern holiday

Yes, it’s true, we are too close to our subject, but we do love it when mysteries themselves entwine authors, manuscripts, plot lines and other literary elements so that crime fiction begets crime fiction begets crime fiction… and so on. Anthony Horowitz is a master in this respect, and Catriona Ward’s Looking Glass Sound is

In October, November and December, we’ll be carrying an advertising campaign that’s a bit different. The Canadian indie author Ed Green has booked one of our leaderboard positions on the site to promote his novel Murder is a Dying Art. “Nothing exciting about that,” you might think. “It’s straightforward web advertising with an image you

For Phoebe Wong, exchanging the miserable British weather for the balmy Florida Keys with her new boyfriend for a few weeks seems like the ideal vacation, even though she only met Carter 11 months ago on LinkedIn and they haven’t spent much time together. He’s the perfect boyfriend who even gets along with her Malaysian-Chinese

Valley of Refuge, the new thriller by John Teschner, starts off more like a mystery. At least it was a mystery to me, with three intriguing stories evolving at once. First, social media magnate Frank Dalton is doing something big on the Big Island of Hawai`i, then there’s a woman flying to the state who

The Crime Fiction Lover Awards are back for the third year running. We want to celebrate the best in crime fiction, and we are going to involve the people who really matter when we do so. For us, the people who really matter to this fine genre are its readers – that’s YOU! We want

Author Daniel Sweren-Becker must have been well tuned in to the zeitgeist when he conceived Kill Show, his newly published ‘true crime’ novel, as it delves into growing critiques of the genre. Before you think that description is an oxymoron, this is definitely fiction, but written in the style of a television documentary script. It

Ann-Marie Cahill will read anything and everything. From novels to trading cards to the inside of CD covers (they’re still a thing, right?). A good day is when her kids bring notes home from school. A bad day is when she has to pry a book from her kids’ hands. And then realizes where they

The Irish author Catherine Ryan Howard won the Irish Book Award in the crime fiction category in 2021 for her novel 56 Days. One of the first books in the genre to really countenance the COVID pandemic, it was a nerve-tingling thriller exploring the intensity and intimacy of the seclusion of lockdown and its shadowy

“I’m looking for people to participate in a huge book exchange. You can be anywhere in the world. All you have to do is buy your favorite book (just one) and send it to a stranger (I’ll provide their details through a private message). You’ll receive a roughly maximum of 36 books back to you,

It is March 2020, the COVID pandemic has begun, and Colette ‘Coco’ Weber is about to test the validity of the truism that you can never go home again. As the prospect of the first lockdown looms large, she is reluctantly returning to her childhood home in Catalina Island, off the coast of California. Her

Carolina Ciucci is a teacher, writer and reviewer based in the south of Argentina. She hoards books like they’re going out of style. In case of emergency, you can summon her by talking about Ireland, fictional witches, and the Brontë family. Twitter: @carolinabeci View All posts by Carolina Ciucci Carolina Ciucci is a teacher, writer

Bonnie and Clyde: a notorious pair of killers and robbers who terrorised central USA in the time of the Great Depression. Their crimes made them famous, and that fame was rekindled in the late 1960s with a movie starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, and a song that gave Georgie Fame a number one hit