Thursday, February 27, 2025

Barbara Nickless

Barbara Nickless is the Wall Street Journal and Amazon Charts bestselling author of Play of Shadows, Dark of Night, and At First Light in the Dr. Evan Wilding series, as well as the Sydney Rose Parnell series, which includes Blood on the Tracks, a Suspense Magazine Best of 2016 selection and winner of the Colorado Book Award and the Daphne du Maurier Award for Excellence; Dead Stop, winner of the Colorado Book Award and nominee for the Daphne du Maurier Award for Excellence; Ambush; and Gone to Darkness. Her essays and short stories have appeared in Writer’s Digest and on Criminal Element, among other markets. She lives in Colorado, where she loves to cave, snowshoe, hike, and drink single malt Scotch―usually not at the same time.

Nickless's new novel is The Drowning Game.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Her reply:
The Peacock and the Sparrow by I.S. Berry. This debut novel exploded onto the literary world, quickly scooping up acknowledgements as diverse as Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Award and a New Yorker Best Book of the Year. The prose leaps off the page, but it’s in world-weary CIA spy Shane Collins that we find the dark heart of any honest book on spydom: spying takes a terrible toll on its practitioners. Collins has become an alcoholic burnout just as the monarchy of Bahrain (an island country in the Persian Gulf) is under attack by Iran through their proxies (sound familiar?). Berry has real-world experience of Bahrain and the CIA, and this knowledge shines through. Bonus: Learning about a Middle Eastern country you might not have heard of and seeing it vividly portrayed through the eyes of the poverty-doomed locals, the jaded expat community, and in the glittering beaches, skyscrapers, and palaces of royalty and the well-to-do.
Visit Barbara Nickless's website.

The Page 69 Test: At First Light.

Q&A with Barbara Nickless.

The Page 69 Test: Play of Shadows.

--Marshal Zeringue