B.J. Hollars' book is a quirky primer on some of the Midwest's oddest stories
The Thread's Must Read
Three Thrillers To Keep You Up
I just finished Daniel Silva’s 2018 spy novel,“The Other Woman” and it’s both historical and contemporary.
Mossad super-spy Gabriel Allon is tracking the love child of the British traitor Kim Philby because he’s convinced the child has been raised by the Russians to follow in her father’s footsteps. The novel is chock-full of delicious detail about how the real Kim Philby operated for years as a Russian spy and was finally unmasked by a close friend.
I guess I’ve been yearning for some London fog and a spot of tea this summer because my next thriller is set in war-time London. “Black Out” is the first in a series of novels by John Lawton that features Scotland Yard’s Inspector Frederick Troy. Now, I’m a bit late to the “Lawton” party — he’s been publishing these books since 1995 — and all the better because that means there is a deep backlist!
Inspector Troy dodges Luftwaffe bombs and Yard politics to investigate a murder that the killers tried to conceal in the destruction of the Blitz. He’s taciturn, inventive and relentless.
Finally, I have to mention the novel “Lola”by Melissa Scrivener Love. The lead character, Lola Vasquez, could’ve easily fit on my summer list of most intriguing females of fiction. The story is set in an impoverished South Central L.A. neighborhood where Lola has risen, through a combination of cunning and savagery, to run a small cadre of drug dealers and cartel wannabes. Tell me what thrillers you're reading on Twitter @KerriMPR.
MPR and the Star Tribune are proud to announce the 20th season of Talking Volumes. This season will feature interviews with Alice Hoffman, Saeed Jones, Tim O’Brien, Karen Armstrong, Lindy West and Tracy K. Smith.
Rob Hart's new dystopian cyberthriller imagines a near-future America in a state of semi-collapse, where the only jobs available are in company towns built by an enormous conglomerate called Cloud.
Author Isabel Quintero and illustrator Zeke Peña worked together on "My Papi Has a Motorcycle," a homage to Quintero's childhood in California's Inland Empire, and to her hard-working father.
In Stacey Lee's new novel, an opinionated and talented Chinese American girl makes her way in Reconstruction-era Atlanta while preserving her secret work as an advice columnist in the local paper.
Rokuro Inui's mosaic novel is set in a lush alternate Japan, full of cricket fighting tournaments, beautiful automata and intricate webs of plot and counter-plot around the mysterious Eve.
Caleb Crain's perceptive novel examines the ways we're all under surveillance by corporations and computers, every move and click tracked, and the ways that intersects with how we watch each other.
Edwidge Danticat's new story collection explores the ways people deal with death, from a woman whose barely known father is dying to a man facing his last seconds as he falls from a construction site.
