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2021 Edgar Award Nominees
The 2021 Edgar Awards nominees were announced yesterday by the Mystery Writers of America. The Edgar Awards take their name from Edgar Allan Poe, considered to be one of the inventers of the detective genre. The winners will be presented in New York City later this year. The nominees come from usually around 2000 submissions […]
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What Is A Cozy Mystery?
A cozy represents escapist reading at its grandest. Slipping inside the book will take you away to a prettier, happier place with friendly people. Just ignore the taped outline on the floor.
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Dashiell Hammett
Although Dashiell Hammett only wrote five novels, he is known as one of the pioneers of detective fiction. He brought us Sam Spade, Nick and Nora Charles, and the Continental Op. Many of the best-selling mystery writers, including Raymond Chandler, say that they were influenced by his style and stories.
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What’s Your Genre?
A genre is a category of artistic composition, like literature, characterized by similarities in form, style, or subject matter. It allows us to group similar books or separate books by their differences..
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Critical Review of The Last Mile
The Last Mile is the second entry in David Baldacci’s Amos Decker series. Amos Decker is a former NFL football player who, just as his pro career started, received a traumatic brain injury. The injury not only knocked him out of football but, also, left him with a disorder in which he remembers everything, including […]
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How Scott Turow Got His Start
It is always interesting to hear how a bestselling writer worked their way into their career. Some writers knew they wanted to write in grade school. Others didn’t pick it up until much later. And often there are many starts and restarts as a writer struggles to find their niche. In My First Thriller on […]
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Ellery Queen-a mystery himself
Whether it’s from his novels, films, radio, short stories, or TV, Ellery Queen is one of the premier names in the world of mysteries. He has been read, watched, or listened to all over the world. But answering who Ellery was, that is a little more complicated. Ellery Queen the Character Ellery Queen was the […]
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Judge Deborah Knotts
The rural farmland of North Carolina is one of the last places one would go to find the lead in a modern mystery series. Yet that is exactly where Margaret Maron finds the lead of her Deborah Knotts series. The series lasted over 20 books and had a very promising start with the first book in 1992, Bootlegger’s Daughter, winning four of the top awards given out each year in the mystery field, the Edgar, the Anthony, the Agatha, and the Macavity.
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Jennifer Dornbush’s Hole In the Woods
Based on a true story, this book is about a police officer who investigates the cold case of the murder of a seventeen-year-old girl thirty years ago