Pulp: After producing a subset of novels exploring the origins of his Los Angeles detective characters Elvis Cole and Joe Pike, and taking a break from those characters with a stand-alone novel (2006’s The Two Minute Rule), Robert Crais returns ...

Sometimes we have a writer who is so good and so reliable that we forget exactly how amazing his prose can be. Perhaps he makes the bestseller lists, but rarely peaks at number one; or she never goes out of ...

For all its cultural familiarity, there’s never been a full, high literary telling of the story of the Trojan War. Some people may not think an ongoing comics series is an appropriate form for such an epic undertaking, but those ...

John Connolly is easily one of the finest practitioners of the supernatural-tinged mystery story, with a series of books featuring the literally and metaphorically haunted P.I. Charlie Parker. Two of the supporting characters in that series now have a book ...

Despite its mere 294 pages, Aleksandar Hemon’s The Lazarus Project appears to contain three times that. Launched from a historical moment in 1908, the novel provokes a dozen voices spanning a century and two continents. Additionally, The Lazarus Project is ...

Charles Maldonado goes where even angels fear to tread (angels over 17, at any rate)—the Young Adult section of a local bookstore. There, Charles considers some current examples of the genre, with input from his... younger self? We're starting to ...

A few locals take the time to give us their insiders' short-lists on the topics they know best.

It's our annual summer reading issue: We've surveyed the hippest of Knoxville's (elusive) hiperati, and asked them what books are on their must-read list this year at the beach or on the lake or in the lawn chair. Be sure ...

Near the end of All Things Must Fight to Live: Stories of War and Deliverance in Congo, author and journalist Bryan Mealer describes breakfast in a train’s dining carriage as “one of my happiest moments. Because it was the first ...

In the early 1980s, Andrew Holleran wrote a column called New York Notebook for the magazine Christopher Street. His subject, at first, was gay New York. By 1982, when the AIDS crisis hit the city, that became his subject—the disease, ...

Crime novels can be travel guides to a sense of place, a way to experience both the familiar and the unfamiliar through a grimy lens that just happens to rack its focus from the gutter. A city like Dublin, Ireland, ...

What might have been considered a horror book a few years ago is now often considered “urban fantasy.” Urban fantasy novels tend to weave horror, romance, fantasy, and mystery into a gumbo of spicy provenance, but there’s so much of ...

There’s a timely relevance to Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy’s 1939 memoir A Journey Round My Skull. TV’s medical mysteries have become our classical drama, their sequence of gore, gadgetry, and unconcealed patient disregard recalling Aristotelian unities. In Round My Skull, ...

Tara Chace, the protagonist of Greg Rucka’s Queen & Country series of espionage comics, has been shot, targeted by assassins, used by her bosses as bait for those same assassins, kidnapped and assaulted by Georgian terrorists, lost a former lover, ...

The California crime novel is a specialized trope of the genre, and it takes a special skill of painting with sunlight and noir to pull it off well. One of the best California mystery writers, T. Jefferson Parker, also happens ...