| Last week we brought you three crime thrillers and today we have more you might have missed. One of these writers is an old hand at the publishing rodeo. One of them broke out last year with a novel about Agatha Christie. And this novel from Atlanta writer Wanda Morris is her second time out after a smashing success with her debut. Wanda Morris plunges us into the Jim Crow violence of Mississippi in 1964 in her novel, “Anywhere You Run.” Violet Richards knows that as a Black woman her allegations of rape against a white man won’t be believed. When she kills her rapist, she has to flee her hometown and her sister will help her escape. Morris has said she imagined the plot as a cat and mouse chase and wrote it exactly has it unfolded in her imagination. There’s a cat and mouse element to Nina de Gramont’s "The Christie Affair." In this fictionalized story that draws from the autobiography of Agatha Christie, Agatha vanishes after discovering her husband’s affair. And indeed, when the acclaimed writer disappeared in 1962 for 11 days, it was international news, particularly after her car was discovered nose down in a pool of water. De Gramont spins up a suspenseful story of what Christie was doing during her disappearance and gives us lots of intriguing detail about Agatha Christie’s life. Finally, a novel from a writer who has appeared several times in my Thread recommendations because I will read anything Don Winslow writes. His previous novels have investigated the Mexican drug cartel and the culture of crime and policing on the East Coast. But in "City on Fire," Winslow has returned to his childhood home of Rhode Island and the novel is intimate and full of moral complications.
— Kerri Miller | MPR News | 