Lev AC Rosen’s Evander “Andy” Mills mysteries have become one of the most refreshing, stylish, and emotionally resonant additions to the modern crime canon, making me think of the Joseph Hansen’s Los Angeles-based Brandstetter books of the 1970s through the early 1990s. Unlike the contemporaneous Brandstetter books, the Mills books are set in 1950s San Francisco.
I just learned that my thriller Tokyo Firewall was scraped by the AI company Anthropic to train its new large language models. To quickly amass the staggering amount of prose needed, Anthropic had the boneheaded idea to plumb websites hosting pirated books, scrape them, and feed the results to their AI beast.
If there were a phrase like bah humbug for Thanksgiving I'd be saying it. I know, many people love this fall holiday overshadowed by its seasonal siblings Halloween and Christmas, and commercially passed over for Black Friday, but I do not. Despite the delicious tradition of roast turkey and the lack of gifting pressure to recommend it, the holiday depresses me.
This month I struggled with nailing down a reading challenge topic. My original thought was paranormal. It fits with the time of year. I am reluctant to read stories that have a heavy paranormal undercurrent, but I do enjoy light paranormal, or as I like to call it, “paranormal intelligently done.” Two examples of this in popular culture would be Good Witch and Bewitched.
As the crisp autumn air settles in and Halloween approaches, there's no better time to delve into tales that intertwine suspense, the supernatural, and LGBTQ+ narratives. This season, queer mysteries, thrillers, and horrors offer readers spine-tingling adventures that resonate with themes of identity, resilience, and the unknown.
When I launched the KRL Coming Attractions Reading Challenge in January, the whole point was to task myself to read books with tropes I didn't gravitate to, authors that were new to me, and amateur sleuths I didn't necessarily identify with. So far, choosing a theme has been easy since I've only had to look as far as my list of ‘least liked’ reading tropes. But this month I found inspiration in an unusual place–a book box.
Stephen Cox, on behalf of King’s River Life Magazine, thank you for giving us a little of your time today, answering questions fans of the genre really want to know.
Throughout my childhood my mother was deathly afraid of cats. I don’t know if her fear stemmed from an adverse experience in her youth, or from her upbringing which was deeply rooted in cultural superstitions. But, I do know that I was taught to disregard cats as an objectionable animal, at least when I was around my mother. When I went riding at the equestrian barn it was a different story.
Every month, I look forward to sitting down, figuratively, with a queer mystery writer to talk shop—craft, crime, and character. These interviews have become a space for authors to reflect, readers to connect, and for us to showcase the talent shaping this thrilling, ever-evolving genre.
Mrs. McMahon was the ultimate matchmaker in my elementary school. She had an uncanny knack for putting the perfect book in each kid's hands. In my case, that meant Encyclopedia Brown, Harriet the Spy, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, and The Egypt Game.
