Stacy Willingham, author of A Flicker in the Dark

Goodreads: Summarize your new book in a couple of sentences.

Stacy Willingham: A Flicker in the Dark tells the story of Chloe Davis, a psychologist in Baton Rouge who, at 12 years old, uncovered a piece of evidence that convicted her own father as a serial killer in their small Louisiana town. Twenty years later, Chloe has managed to piece her life back together—she runs a successful private practice, owns a home, and is engaged to be married—but on the eve of the anniversary of her father’s killings, girls start to go missing again. 

GR: What sparked the idea for it?

SW: I’ve always been interested in psychology, specifically criminal psychology, and that led to a pretty dark fascination with serial killers. I tend to obsess over trying to understand why they do the horrible things that they do, and one day, I realized that if I had a hard time wrapping my mind around a serial killer, I couldn't imagine how their families must feel. The original spark for A Flicker in the Dark came from me wanting to understand what it would feel like to be the daughter of a serial killer—and, not only that, but explore how I might react if his crimes started happening again.

GR: Who are some of your all-time-favorite mystery and thriller writers?

SW: There are too many to name! I fall in love with everything Gillian Flynn writes, truly. I have all her books, and the pages are so worn from the number of times I’ve read them. I also love Karin Slaughter, Tana French, Lucy Foley, Megan Miranda, and Lisa Jewell.

GR: What are some new mysteries you've been enjoying and recommending to friends? 

SW: I’m currently reading The Collective by Alison Gaylin and The Book of Cold Cases by Simone St. James, and I can already tell they’re both going to be two new favorites! I just finished Eight Perfect Murders by Peter Swanson and really enjoyed that, too—it was published in 2020, so it’s fairly new and does an amazing job of feeling fresh while also paying homage to Agatha Christie and other classic mysteries. Some other recent favorites include Jean Korelitz Hanff’s The Plot, Ashley Winstead’s In My Dreams I Hold a Knife, and Laurie Elizabeth Flynn’s The Girls Are All So Nice Here.

GR: What's one unsolved mystery you can’t get out of your head?
 
SW: The Zodiac Killer! There is an endless supply of rabbit holes to go down on that one: questions around his identity, of course, but also analyzing his ciphers. The fact that some of them took over 50 years to crack is crazy to me—and some of them are still unsolved! There is also an abundance of great books, movies, and documentaries about the case, and they never, ever get old to me. The most recent one I watched is called The Most Dangerous Animal of All on Hulu—highly recommend!
 

Alex Finlay, author of The Night Shift

Goodreads: Summarize your new book in a couple of sentences.

Alex Finlay: On New Year’s Eve 1999, four teenagers working at a Blockbuster Video in Linden, New Jersey, are attacked, and only one inexplicably survives. Fifteen years later, more teenage employees are attacked at an ice cream store in the same town, and again only one makes it out alive. In the aftermath, the lives of the survivors intersect, revealing the secrets of both nights.

GR: Who are some of your all-time-favorite mystery and thriller writers?

AF: I always struggle with this question since I’m a huge fan of the genre and there are too many names to list. So here I’d like to instead single out Lee Child. He not only created one of the most iconic characters in fiction, he’s been a generous and tireless supporter of writers. 

GR: What are some new mysteries you've been enjoying and recommending to friends? 

AF: I’ve read some great debuts this year, including Stacy Willingham’s A Flicker in the Dark and Hannah Morrissey’s Hello, Transcriber. Other recent reads I’ve told friends about: Julie Clark’s The Lies I Tell, Samantha Downing’s For Your Own Good, Lisa Gardner’s One Step Too Far, Shea Ernshaw’s A History of Wild Places, Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen’s The Golden Couple, and Gigi Pandian’s Under Lock & Skeleton Key. 

GR: What's one unsolved mystery you can’t get out of your head?

AF: I recently was asked to blurb a terrific anthology, The Best New True Crime Stories: Unsolved Crimes & Mysteries. All the stories were haunting, but one that stayed with me was about Karina Holmer, a 20-year-old Swedish au pair who was found—cut in half—in a dumpster in Boston. They never found the bottom half of her body or her killer. Before her murder, Ms. Holmer had written a letter to a friend back home in Sweden: “Something terrible has happened. I cannot tell you right now what it is. But I will tell you when I get home.” If that doesn’t raise the hairs on the back of your neck, nothing will.
    

Brendan Slocumb, author of The Violin Conspiracy

Goodreads: Summarize your new book in a couple of sentences.

Brendan Slocumb: A young man discovers that his old family fiddle is actually a priceless Stradivarius violin, which catapults him into superstardom. On the eve of the “Olympics” of classical music, the Tchaikovsky Competition, someone steals his instrument, and only he can get it back.

GR: What sparked the idea for your latest book?

BS: I’ve been walking around with stories to tell for most of my life. I know, being in the classical music world, that there are a lot of people just like me, with similar stories, and we’ve never had the opportunity to tell them before. Nobody really cared how hard it was to play the violin or felt sorry for me if I couldn’t take private lessons. Which is fine: I don’t need people to feel sorry for me. But they didn’t seem to want to hear what I faced, as a Black man.

My perspective was vastly different from what they were used to, and by “different” it seemed that it also meant that my perspective was wrong. When I told people about things that happened in my life, people would say, “No you’re exaggerating, no that doesn't happen, absolutely not.”

Finally, the tragic events of 2020 made it seem like this was a moment when I could tell my stories and that people would actually listen to me, acknowledge my experiences, and not deny that my perspective was as valid as theirs.

GR: Who are some of your all-time-favorite mystery and thriller writers?

BS: I love the classics: Agatha Christie and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Death on the Nile is one of the first mysteries I read cover to cover, when I was in junior high school. I was angry for days that I couldn't figure out who did it. The Hound of the Baskervilles to this day is one of my favorite Sherlock Holmes stories. A missing shoe, dogs howling on the moors: CLASSIC.

GR: What are some new mysteries you’ve been enjoying and recommending to friends? 

BS: I’ve been busy with The Violin Conspiracy, but two books are on the top of my TBR pile: The Golden Couple by Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanenis, which sounds awesome (a couple goes to a therapist and all three have secrets; when the secrets come to life, a lot more than their marriage is in danger) because it seems like a book you have to really read carefully and pay attention to. The second is These Deadly Games by Diana Urban. A girl’s sister is kidnapped, and the girl is forced to do bizarre tasks to her friends. If she doesn’t finish the tasks, the sister will die; but if she does, then she hurts her friends. Which seems like an edge-of-your-seat, page-turning read, which I love.

GR: What's one unsolved mystery you can’t get out of your head?

BS: Who stole my 1953 Lehman violin in 1989. 

Violin theft is very personal to me. One weekend during my senior year of high school, my family and I returned from a family trip and found our house ransacked. Someone had broken through a bedroom window. I went straight to my storage spot under my bed, and discovered my 1953 Eugene Lehman violin, which I kept hidden there, was gone. The police said that it was likely someone who knew that I had a violin—someone who knew what to grab. Several other pieces—TV sets, kitchen appliances, a radio, and some jewelry—were missing as well, but all I cared about was my violin. It felt like a piece of my soul had been ripped away. I don’t think I’ve ever had a more empty feeling when I saw it wasn’t there. I checked my hiding spot, then checked again: as if, on the third time, the violin would magically be there and I’d somehow missed it.

I thought then that maybe someone was playing a sick joke on me and that my violin would turn up in another part of the house—hidden behind the couch or on the porch. I hunted through the house, then hunted again. Every passing second was agonizing. The optimist in me knew—knew—that I would find it in the next place I looked. Meanwhile the realist in me knew that I'd never see my Lehman again.

That instrument was supposed to take me through college. It was the first violin that I owned outright. I never truly got over losing that violin. Even today, 30-plus years later, I still hold onto a glimmer of hope that I will be reunited with it. I can dream, can't I?
    

Grace D. Li, author of Portrait of a Thief

Goodreads: Summarize your new book in a couple of sentences.

Grace D. Li: Portrait of a Thief is an Asian American heist novel about college students stealing back looted art from Western museums. It’s inspired by the true story of Chinese art disappearing from museums around the world and examines art as power, the American dream, and the pressures placed on immigrants and the children of immigrants.

GR: What sparked the idea for it?

GDL: Real life! Over the past several years, a string of thefts have occurred across Europe, all targeting Chinese art that was originally looted from Beijing’s Old Summer Palace. No one knows who’s behind these robberies, but as a Chinese American—and a lover of heist movies!—I wanted to write a book about what it’d be like if the thieves weren’t expert criminals but Chinese Americans in their 20s, like me, and what it’d mean for them as part of the diaspora to bring this lost art back home.

GR: Who are some of your all-time-favorite mystery and thriller writers?

GDL: Jean Kwok writes such beautiful, literary, unputdownable mysteries, and I love how scathingly Layne Fargo writes about female rage. Jesse Q. Sutanto’s books are the dramatic, laugh-out-loud rom-com/murder mystery mashups I never knew I needed. I’ll also read anything by Ashley Winstead, who writes incisive, bold, terrifyingly smart thrillers. In the YA space, June Hur’s atmospheric, haunting Joseon-era Korea mysteries are must-reads, and so are Katie Zhao’s thrilling, fast-paced campus murder mysteries.

GR: What are some new mysteries you've been enjoying and recommending to friends? 

GDL: I recently finished Ashley Winstead’s The Last Housewife and can’t stop thinking about it. A Texas housewife is convinced she’s left her harrowing past behind, but after the alleged suicide of another one of her college friends, she’s forced to revisit the cult she once escaped from. I also loved Danya Kukafka’s thoughtful, intimate Notes on an Execution, about a serial killer’s last days, and have just started Delilah S. Dawson’s immensely clever The Violence. Something to look forward to in the next year is Em X. Liu’s The Death I Gave Him, a gorgeous, genre-defying mystery inspired by Shakespeare’s Hamlet, set over 24 hours in a locked scientific laboratory.

GR: What's one unsolved mystery you can’t get out of your head?

GDL: As anyone who loves art (or art crime!) will tell you, there’s a great unsolved art heist that dates back to 1990. On a cool spring morning, two thieves pretended to be police officers and broke into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Over the next hour, they’d steal 13 pieces of art, valued at a total of $500 million. To this day, no one knows who was behind the theft, and the pieces have never turned up. Something particularly interesting, though, that few other people talk about, is that one of the stolen pieces was a bronze Chinese vessel. In theory, this piece is only worth a few thousand dollars…so why did the thieves choose to take it when they left so much more behind?
   

Nita Prose, author of The Maid

Goodreads: Summarize your debut novel in a couple of sentences.

Nita Prose: The Maid features Molly, a socially awkward hotel maid whose life is turned upside down when she finds an infamous guest very dead in his bed in the posh Regency Grand Hotel. This is a novel about what it means to be the same as everyone else and yet entirely different. It’s a locked-room mystery, but it’s also an uplifting read, too, one in which the mystery can only be solved through connection to the human heart.

GR: What sparked the idea for it?

NP: The idea for The Maid came to me during a business trip to London in 2019. I was staying at a hotel, and one day, after a breakfast meeting, I returned to my room and completely surprised the maid who had come to clean it. I remember her gasping and taking a step back into a shadowy corner. This maid was holding up my sweatpants that I'd foolishly left in a tangled mess on the bed. It occurred to me in that moment what an intimate and invisible job it is to be a room maid. Simply by cleaning my room day after day, she knew so much about me. But what did I know about her?

A few days later, I was on the plane home when it came to me: Molly's voice—clear, clean, precise—"polished to perfection.” I grabbed the napkin from under my drink, and I wrote the prologue in a single burst.

I didn't know it then, but I'd just begun my debut novel.

GR: Who are some of your all-time-favorite mystery and thriller writers?

NP: Agatha Christie, Richard Osman, Anthony Horowitz, Lisa Jewell, Louise Candlish, Ashley Audrain.

GR: What are some new mysteries you've been enjoying and recommending to friends?  

NP: I’m a voracious omnivore when it comes to my reading proclivities. While I most certainly enjoy a good mystery, I also enjoy a wide range of genres and writers. Here are a few great books that have recently piqued my interest:
 
Wahala by Nikki May—a witty, boldly contemporary, character-driven thriller about female friendships and frenemies.
 
A Lady’s Guide to Fortune Hunting, publishing in May 2022: Plucky, witty and bright, this Regency bonbon has one dainty lady's slipper poised in the present and another one firmly rooted in the past. Readers of Jane Austen and fans of Bridgerton will swoon and fan themselves as they devour this frolicking romp.
 
Breathless by Amy McCullough—gripping, page-turning, and aptly pitched as “murder on a mountain.” An expert climber wants to reach the top of the world’s tallest mountain, but when she discovers a body on the cliffside, she knows something sinister is happening on this highest of peaks.

GR: What's one unsolved mystery you can’t get out of your head?

NP: I am obsessed with the mystery of the missing Fabergé eggs. Thousands upon thousands of Fabergé pieces were taken from the palaces of the Romanovs when the imperial family was executed in 1918. Most of those precious antiquities are now ensconced in various private and public collections all around the world. But several exquisite and priceless jewel-encrusted eggs remain missing, their whereabouts unknown to this day.

I often imagine a hapless garage-sale enthusiast rooting around a box of junk on someone’s front lawn, pulling out a tarnished trinket that despite its coating of dust and grime somehow feels electric in the palm of their hand.

“How much do you want for this?” they ask.

A price is given, a negotiation happens, and the impossibly lucky garage-sale enthusiast walks down the street with a used plastic bag containing a priceless antiquity paid for with pocket change.

Truthfully, I’ve always dreamed of being that garage-sale enthusiast. Who knows? In reality as in fiction, anything can happen.