Monday, August 27, 2012

Bill Crider

Bill Crider's new novel, Murder of a Beauty Shop Queen, is his 19th Sheriff Dan Rhodes Mystery.  In his review of the novel, Ed Gorman praised Crider's "skills with characterization and milieu" and called the author "a master plotter."

A few weeks ago I asked the author what he was reading.  His reply:
I just finished an ARC of Max Allan Collins’ new Nate Heller novel, Target Lancer, in which Heller helps prevent the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Chicago in November 1963. Not much has been written about that particular plot, and Collins does a great job of shining some light on it. The book is fiction, of course, but it’s based on real events. I’m not much of a conspiracy buff, but I really enjoyed the book.

Older books are always a part of my reading, and I write about one on my blog each week for Friday’s Forgotten Books, a meme started by Patti Abbott. Recently I’ve read and commented on Manhattan is my Beat, and early novel by Jeffery Deaver, published by Bantam back in 1989 when he was using Jeffrey Wilds Deaver as his by-line. The protagonist is a young woman named Rune who works in a video store that rents VHS tapes (anybody remember those?). When one of her customers is murdered, she becomes an amateur sleuth and appears to be in way over her head. Several good twists in this one. Before that one I talked about a fine collection of Robert Sheckley’s SF short stories from the 1950s, Citizen in Space.

I’ve now started reading David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, having gotten interested after seeing the trailer for the movie version. I’ve read the first two sections, and I still don’t know where it’s going. The trip looks like a lot of fun, however.
Learn more about the book and author at Bill Crider's website and blog.

Read the Page 69 Test entries for Crider's A Mammoth Murder, Murder Among the OWLS, Of All Sad Words, Murder in Four Parts, Murder in the Air, and The Wild Hog Murders.

Writers Read: Bill Crider (July 2011).

My Book, The Movie: The Wild Hog Murders.

--Marshal Zeringue