Investigate Crime Fiction This Summer

Edward McClelland's book reminds us of what has transpired in the heartland of America over the past 30 years.To drive these days through Great Lakes cities — Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit, among others — is to drive through the nation's industrial past. The iconic images have become Rust Belt cliché: weed-choked parking lots, windowless houses, cold factories stripped of their metals and open to the elements.

Twelve hours after surviving the cultural desecration that is "The Great Gatsby," it hit me: Baz Luhrmann's movie version could be the next "Rocky Horror Picture Show." I first saw "Rocky Horror" at the Tivoli Theater in St. Louis 30 years ago. Three friends and I from a neurotically strict Christian boarding school ventured to the Loop and joined a midnight crowd of Transylvanian transsexuals. For a kid who thought drinking coffee was a sin, it was a pretty shocking night. I'd never seen anything like it -- on or off the stage: obscene retorts, dancing in the aisles, flying toast. It was all fantastic. Read full article >>    

Author William Kent Krueger, known for his Cork O’Connor mysteries, has written “Ordinary Grace.”

A tiny piece of a divided Sri Lanka is the setting for this artful and character-filled novel.

Veronica Gonzalez Peña follows the lives of a middle-class Mexican family that has been shaped by absence, loss, sickness and dead dreams.Spectral girls and shadow fathers haunt the center and fringes of Veronica Gonzalez Peña's second novel, "The Sad Passions," but this isn't magical realism. These aren't spirits who visit in the middle of the night. These phantom girls and men are living, flesh-and-blood characters shaped by absence and loss, sickness and dead dreams. "The Sad Passions" knows that half-erased people are more devastating than any ghost.