Posts Tagged: thrillers

You’ve no doubt heard the terms crime fiction, mysteries and thrillers – but is there really a difference? The way books are categorized is influenced by a wide range of factors, from an author’s reputation to marketing goals to the space on a store’s shelves. However, there are definable differences between crime fiction, mysteries and thrillers – and understanding them can help you find exactly what you want to read. Crime fiction is the blanket term used to describe books that deal with any aspect of crime – including those who commit and solve it. If a book deals with detectives, police officers, lawyers, and of course, criminals, as a general rule, it’s a crime fiction... more

Read More of Thrillers vs Mysteries: What’s The Difference?

The Juan Doe Murders by author Noreen Ayres

The Juan Doe Murders could have spun right off today’s headlines. Back in the ‘90s when I was living in Southern California, I was touched by the fate of Hispanics who arrived without, shall we say, government permission. Driving south just twenty miles from my home, I’d see highway signs with the black silhouettes of a running man and a woman just behind him grasping the hand of young child whose pigtails are flying as she seems lifted nearly off the ground; above them, the word “Caution.” The signs were to notify drivers that illegal aliens were told by their “coyotes” to jump out of vehicles near the immigration checkpoint and run across the freeway to hide in the shrubs... more

Read More of Writing the JUAN DOE MURDERS: What’s Old is New, What’s New is Old

The day after Labor Day, 1986, I sat down at my desk in the cramped room I called, without a pinch of irony, my “study,” and faced one more time the terror of the blank page. More accurately, one last time, for with three and a half rejection-dusty manuscripts on a shelf behind me, I had pledged to myself this would be my final attempt at fiction writing. Another failure and I would settle in my dwindling years for the genteel poverty of the academician’s life, complete with a variety of harmless hobbies and arcane interests. After all—a 56 year old first novelist? Seemed preposterous, a bad joke. Nevertheless, a promise is a promise, and so I set to work, and slowly, painfully,... more

Read More of Creating Waverly: The Story Behind MICHIGAN ROLL

Treasure Coast by author Tom Kakonis

We're only a few days from our Sept. 2nd launch and already we're getting a lot of positive buzz. We were thrilled by an interview with our co-founders, Lee Goldberg & Joel Goldman, in Kirkus Reviews. Here's an excerpt: The Brash editions I’ve seen so far are handsome, trade-size paperbacks, with bold cover imagery and elegant interior design. “Joel and I decided right off that we were either going to do this ‘first-class’ or not at all,” says Goldberg, “with high-quality covers that vividly and definitively establish a franchise for each author or series that we are publishing. We also decided that our covers would be contemporary, regardless of when the stories take... more

Read More of Brash Words: Lots of Positive Buzz Leading Up to Our Sept 2 Launch

Jared Shurin reviews books for one of our favorite websites, Pornokitsch. Today he shares his admiration for Stan Lee's darkly funny espionage thriller Dunn's Conundrum. First, to clear away any misconceptions, this is not the Stan Lee that appears in all those awful Marvel movies, this is a completely different Stan Lee - an advertising man, in fact, who wrote a couple political thrillers in his spare time. In fact, if you had to compare this Stan Lee to someone in the comics industry, the best choice would be Warren Fucking Ellis, as Dunn's Conundrum is a tangled, blackly comedic thriller about espionage and the dangers of information. Certainly there's great power AND... more

Read More of Dunn’s Conundrum: A Real Find

Justice Never Sleeps by author Bob Forward

The Owl books were a lot of fun to write. The concept of a private detective who didn’t sleep spawned itself almost naturally from my lifestyle at the time. I was young enough (and dumb enough) so that I would routinely stay awake for three nights in a row. I’m sure you’ve been there. You start by pulling an all-nighter for some test or work deadline. Then you stay up a second night celebrating the successful completion of aforementioned test or deadline. At which point, you are running on fumes and probably not making the best decisions. So you decide to stay up a third night just to see if you can do it. Justice Never Sleeps Somewhere in there (probably during one of those... more

Read More of THE OWL: Pulling the Ultimate “All-Nighter”