Blog Posts by Subject: Mysteries, Crime, Thrillers

If I had to pin down my favorite genres of fiction they would be: numero uno mystery/thriller, followed closely by romance and historical fiction (I love fantasy and sometimes sci-fi too but that is another blog post). I know I have found my own personal nirvana when I find a book that has all three! There has been a recent resurgence of great teen mystery titles in the past few years in teen book publishing. Books that have classic mystery plots and where teen detectives are at the forefront of the story.

Here are some of my new favorites that are in collections 

Gentlemen by Michael Northrop

Micheal Benton (his parents spelled “Michael” wrong and never got around to fixing the birth certificate) and his friends Tommy, Bones, and Mixer aren’t stupid, but they aren’t the school type:

"Tattawa is a small high school. We call it the Ta-Ta’s or the Tits—another long day at the Tits, we’d say. There are four levels of classes at the Tits, and R is the last one. 10R is tenth grade, remedial. It’s not too hard to 

Not having a good book to read can be a crime. Inspired by the new release of Sherlock Holmes starring Robert Downey Jr., here is a list of recommended crime and detective fiction.   

 

The Complete Stories of Dorothy L. Sayers by Dorothy L. Sayers. A collection of stories by Sayers with many featuring two of her detecting sleuths, Lord Peter Wimsey and Montague Egg.

The Hound of the Baskervilles by 

Wilkie Collins’s Armadale is one of the Sensation Novels of the Victorian era, full of the kind of 19th-century drama that, especially at the time, had readers on the edges of their seats. Some of the shocking plot developments that made this novel so much of the time were: the character of Lydia Gwilt, a red-headed villainess addicted to laudanum who poisons her husband (and has an unbecoming surname, besides), the “ripped from the headlines” approach that Collins uses to reference newspaper scandals, and the shiny new technologies of the penny post and the 

About 20 yards from the Bronx Library Center is the Edgar Allan Poe Cottage. Nestled quietly in a corner of the Poe Park, this small wooden farmhouse built in 1812 shows no sign of the great legacy of its occupant. It was here that Edgar Allan Poe spent the last 3 years of his life. Poe penned some of his famous poems in this cottage ( "Annabel Lee,” “The Bells” and “Eureka”). And it was in this cottage he experienced his greatest heartbreak - when Virginia died in 1847. Preserved by the Bronx Historical Society, the bed she died in can still be viewed by visitors as well as the 

"The people of the village began to gather in the square, between the post office and the bank, around ten o'clock" — from "The Lottery"

Shirley JacksonI had an encounter at the library a few weeks ago which returned Shirley Jackson to the forefront of my thoughts.

She is always there, one way or another. Some writers never loosen their grip on you. Especially those discovered during your formative years, when the brain is at its most absorbent, and reading can still seem a transformative experience. I remember the exact moment when I encountered Shirley Jackson’s 

When her parents decide they can no longer live in Nixon's US, Bliss is shipped off to Atlanta to live with her grandmother while her parents flee to Canada in Bliss (2008) by Lauren Myracle. The year is 1969 and after spending most of her life living on a commune, or wherever else her parents decided 

Halloween is fast approaching, as is the opening of the new film, The Box, starring Cameron Diaz and James Marsden in early November. Of course, many great books have been made into movies, and sure, there's the Twilight series and Cirque du Freak, both book 

As a professional librarian at the main reference desk, I do whatever it takes to respond to a particular question, and I never become judgmental about the quality of that question. That’s Library School 101. I will admit, however, to wondering sometimes where certain questions come from, or what it might mean for the culture at large when a number of people start asking the same question at the same time. For instance, what should I make of the fact that there have been several requests lately--by New Yorkers, no less!-- for books about vampires? Is it because Halloween is coming? 

In previous posts chronicling my reading habits and tastes, I’ve invoked the names of authors like Dickens, Proust, Flaubert, Austen, and Shakespeare, perhaps giving the impression that I invariably spend my time with only the best that literature has to offer. Before you brand me an elitist (and ruin my chances at a future presidential bid), let me state for the record that I also have my guilty reading pleasures, and they often run right alongside my more literary pursuits. A difficult question is what makes certain fiction “popular” and other fiction 

I’m a more-or-less rational person. Anything with even a whiff of mysticism strikes me as a great yawn. And I believe dead is dead. Case closed. La commedia è finita. Curiously, I’m also a fan of ghost stories. Contradictory? Maybe it’s that I’ve been working at the New York Public Library for so long, I’ve come to feel like a ghost myself, haunting its marble corridors.

Not to split genre hairs, but I’m not so enamored of horror stories--or movies, for that matter--particularly not modern ones, whose main purpose seems to be to 

I was one of those kids who visited his neighborhood library in Brooklyn several times a week and always came away with an armload of books. It was a profound rite of passage when I graduated from a children’s card to an adult card and was allowed into the sanctum which contained Lady Chatterley’s Lover and other such mysterious things; until then, however, there was more than enough to beguile me in the children’s room. 

The Tottenville Book Discussion group met this past Monday night to discuss The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson. We had a pretty good discussion, but I think I liked the book a whole lot more than most of the group. They liked it, but they didn’t think it was fabulous like I did. It was one of the best books I have read in a long time, and I loved how he interwove the story of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and of the serial killer, H.H. Holmes. (This is a nonfiction book that read like 

Easy Rawlins is very near and dear to my heart. If he was real I would be in love. Instead I must admire him from afar, through the written word. The man I have the biggest crush on exists only on the page and in my mind’s eye. He is the protagonist of the acclaimed Easy Rawlins series created by noted author Walter Mosley.

I discovered Mosley by accident. I was visiting friends a few years back and I was hungry for something to read, something fun. We got on the topic of books and I mentioned my desire. Mosley was suggested with the added endorsement of Bill Clinton