All books or writers posted on the website are in this category. Other tabs are effectively subsets or other connections. (Word & Film, musicians or artists who also write, etc.) The authors shown are a growing selection of what might be called the Roaming the Arts Reading List. It is what we read. Some a growing interest and others their entire output. The arts are a passion. Who you, the browser, choose to read, or listen to the music of, depends on your interest and passion.
Florida author Tom Corcoran’s “Guava Moon Revenge” is the eighth and most recent novel in the Alex Rutledge Series. His books, which include “Octopus Alibi,” “Air Dance Iguana,” “Hawk Channel Chase,” and “The Quick Adios,” are set primarily in the Florida Keys. Tom also recently wrote a series spin-off mystery, “Crime Almost Pays,” which features the private eyes known as “The Bumsnoops.”
After graduating in 1974, she researched a postgraduate doctorate on American Literature. She later taught at Dundee and began writing short stories in 1981. She began writing for women’s magazines after winning the 1986 Woman’s Own Short Story Competition. She was runner-up for the Bridport Short Story Prize in 1990 and won an Ian St James Award in 1993 for her short-story Karmic Mothers, which she later adapted for BBC2 television as part of its ‘Tartan Shorts’ series. Her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum (1995), won the 1995 Whitbread Book of the Year award, beating Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh and Roy Jenkins’ biography Gladstone. The book is set in Yorkshire, narrated by Ruby Lennox, who takes the reader through the complex history of her family, covering the events of the twentieth century and reaching back into the past to uncover the lives of distant ancestors. The book has been adapted for radio and theatre, and has been adapted for television by the author. Her second novel, Human Croquet, was published in 1997 and relates the story of another family, the Fairfaxes, through flashback and historical narrative. Her third novel, Emotionally Weird, was published in 2000, and in 2002 a collection of short stories, Not the End of the World.
Kate Atkinson has written two plays for the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh: a short play, Nice (1996), and Abandonment, which premiered as part of the Edinburgh Festival in August 2000. She currently lives in Edinburgh and is an occasional contributor to newspapers and magazines. The four books Case Histories (2004), One Good Turn (2006), shortlisted for the British Book Awards Crime Thriller of the Year, When Will There be Good News? (2008) and Started Early, Took My Dog (2010), form a crime series featuring ex-policeman Jackson Brodie. These books were adapted for television and a 6-part series starring Jason Isaacs as Jackson Brodie was broadcast in 2011. In 2013 she published Life after Life, winner of the Costa Novel Award and the South Bank Sky Arts Literature Prize; and A God in Ruins (2015), a companion novel to Life After Life, featuring several of the same characters. In 2019 Jackson Brodie returned in Big Sky, and Atkinson also published Transcription.
(British Council – Literature)
Michael Connelly is an American author of detective novels and other crime fiction, notably those featuring LAPD Detective Hieronymus “Harry” Bosch and criminal defense attorney Mickey Haller. Connelly is the bestselling author of thirty-one novels and one work of non-fiction
Lou Berney is the author of November Road (a Washington Post Best Book of 2018), The Long and Faraway Gone (winner of the Edgar, Anthony, Barry, Macavity, and ALA awards), Whiplash River, and Gutshot Straight, all from William Morrow. He’s also written a collection of stories, The Road to Bobby Joe, and his short fiction has appeared in publications such as The New Yorker, Ploughshares, and the Pushcart Prize anthology. He teaches in the MFA program at Oklahoma City University.
David Rosenfelt is an author who has written nineteen novels and three TV movies. His main character in most of his mystery books is Andy Carpenter, attorney and dog lover. Wikipedia
More recently David has added a new character series, Doug Brock, N.J. State Police Homicide Detective suffering from memory loss. Both series take place around Rosenfelt’s home town, Paterson, N.J.
In 1995, he and his wife started the “Tara Foundation” which has saved almost 4,000 dogs. He is a dog lover and supports more than two dozen dogs.
Steve Ulfelder is the author of four mystery novels featuring unlikely hero Conway Sax. He’s also a freelance writer and co-owner of an auto-racing business.
Archer Dixon: 37 years old, Ivy educated, smart, funny, well read – but he never has amounted to much. He’s been reduced to bartering handyman services for a roof over his head. Having staggered all his life from job to job, Arch is a newly minted private detective. His first case looks easy-peasy – but when he starts digging, things quickly grow tangled. Before Arch knows it, he’s in the middle of a gang war between Nigerian car thieves and murderous Russians.
A nationally bestselling author of 11 mystery novels, Ryan has won multiple prestigious awards for her crime fiction: five Agathas, three Anthonys, the Daphne, two Macavitys, and for The Other Woman, the coveted Mary Higgins Clark Award. National reviews have called her a “master at crafting suspenseful mysteries” and “a superb and gifted storyteller.”
Wallace Stroby is an award-winning journalist and the author of eight novels, four of which feature professional thief Crissa Stone, whom Kirkus Reviews named “Crime fiction’s best bad girl ever.”
A Long Branch, N.J., native, he’s a lifelong resident of the Jersey Shore. His debut novel THE BARBED-WIRE KISS, which The Washington Post called “a scorching first novel …full of attention to character and memory and, even more, to the neighborhoods of New Jersey,” was a finalist for the 2004 Barry Award for Best First Novel.
His 2010 novel GONE ‘TIL NOVEMBER was picked as a Kirkus Best Book of the Year, as was the second Crissa Stone novel KINGS OF MIDNIGHT. In 2012, the Crissa Stone novels were optioned by Showtime Networks for development.
Edgar, Shamus, Macavity and Lefty nominee Timothy Hallinan has written twenty-one published novels, all thrillers and mysteries, all critically praised. He currently writes two series, one set in Los Angeles and the other in Bangkok, and in 2017 he also revived his earlier series, written in the 1990s about the overeducated slacker private eye Simeon Grist. The new book, the first since 1995, is “Pulped.”
His 2014 Junior Bender novel, “Herbie’s Game,” won the Lefty Award for Best Comic Crime Novel of the year. His 2010 Poke Rafferty Bangkok novel, “The Queen of Patpong,” was nominated for the Edgar as Best Mystery of the Year.
The Junior Bender mysteries chronicle the adventures of a burglar who moonlights as a private eye for crooks. Six titles have been published to date, and “Herbie’s Game” (2015) won the Lefty Award for Best Comic Crime Novel. The other titles in the series are “Crashed,” “Little Elvises,” “The Fame Thief,” “King Maybe,” and “Fields Where They Lay,” which was on many “Best Books of 2016” lists. Coming in 2018 is “Nighttown.”
The Junior Bender books are presently in development as a primetime television series.
In 2007, the first of his Edgar-nominated Poke Rafferty Bangkok thrillers, “A Nail Through the Heart”, was published. “Hallinan scores big-time,” said Kirkus Reviews, which went on to call the book “dark, often funny, and ultimately enthralling.” “Nail” was named one of the top mysteries of the year by The Japan Times.
Rafferty’s Bangkok adventures have continued with “The Fourth Watcher,” “Breathing Water,” “The Queen of Patpong,” “The Fear Artist,” “For the Dead,” and “The Hot Countries.” Coming in 2017 is “Fools’ River.”
In the 1990s he wrote six mysteries featuring the erudite private eye Simeon Grist, beginning with “The Four Last Things,” which made several Ten Best lists, including that of The Drood Review. The other books in the series were well reviewed, and several of them were optioned for motion pictures. The series is now regarded as a cult favorite and is being revived, in one sense of the word, with “Pulped.”
He has also edited two books. “Shaken: Stories for Japan” contained original stories by top mystery writers and raised more then $100,000 for tsunami relief efforts, with every penny going straight to Japan. “Making Story: 21 Writers and How They Plot” contained practical ideas on plotting by well-known mystery and thriller writers.
Hallinan divides his time between Los Angeles and Southeast Asia, the setting for his Poke Rafferty novels. (Amazon)
American writer of short stories and novels whose characters, having come of age in the 1960s, often have difficulties adjusting to the cultural values of later generations. Beattie graduated from the American University in Washington, D.C., in 1969 and received a master of arts degree from the University of Connecticut in 1970. Her short stories were published in The New Yorker and other literary magazines beginning in the early 1970s. She published her first collection of stories, Distortions, in 1976. Her first novel, Chilly Scenes of Winter, also appeared in 1976; it was subsequently adapted as the film Head over Heels (1979), which was later rereleased as Chilly Scenes of Winter (1982).
