S.J. Rozan

S.J. Rozan has won multiple awards for her fiction, including the Edgar, Shamus, Anthony, Nero, and Macavity, the Japanese Maltese Falcon, and the Private Eye Writers of America Lifetime Achievement Award.

Her latest Lydia Chin/Bill Smith mystery is Family Business.

Recently I asked Rozan about what she was reading. Her reply:

My next book will be set in, and in many ways will be about, New York City, my home town. I've been using that fact as an excuse to read NYC books and city books in general.

NK Jemisin, The City We Became

Jemisin, writing urban fantasy here, blew me away. Setting up a situation where NYC as a whole, and each borough individually, chooses a human avatar to do battle with a powerful evil force, she absolutely nails the personality of the city and its constituent parts. Glad to know this is the first volume of a new trilogy.

Geoff Manaugh, A Burglar's Guide to the City

A non-fiction journey through streets and buildings as a burglar would look at them, written by an architectural/urban space journalist with a fascination for the ways the built environment can help, hinder, or even suggest crimes.

Craig Taylor, New Yorkers: A City and Its People in Our Time

A series of interviews with people who make up the fabric of the city. Taylor picks his subjects unerringly: a novel could be written about each one.

China Miéville, The City & the City

Okay, this is a re-read, but I loved it when I first read it and it fits right in with my current, er, research. Two cities exist within co-terminus boundaries, but buildings in one, even if next door to a building in the other, are not "seen" by the residents of the other -- I can't do it, you'll have to read it. It's absolutely worth the effort.

James Russell, The Agile City

Russell, an architect and journalist, makes the case that a building-by-building approach to climate change isn't enough, but change on the level of the metropolis is not only necessary, it's possible. For my purposes, a good overview of how a city actually works.

Naomi Hirahara, Clark and Division

A different city, a different time, but a great story of a seldom-visited dimension of history, and I can read what I want, right?

Visit S.J. Rozan's website.

The Page 69 Test: Paper Son.

The Page 69 Test: The Art of Violence.

Q&A with S. J. Rozan.

--Marshal Zeringue