Booklist Online: More than 130,000 book reviews for librarians, book groups, and book lovers - from the trusted experts at the American Library Association

Not content with her success as a writer and producer of popular British TV shows (Prime Suspect just for starters), Lynda La Plante started writing books, many of which have become international best-sellers. Her Anna Travis series has been consistently strong (see Silent Scream, 2010) and, though we won’t run our review of the next entry, Blind Fury, [...]

My new year’s resolution was to read more widely, even wildly; I asked REaD ALERT subscribers what I should read and received many strong suggestions. From these suggestions I created a short list. Given my reviewing duties at Booklist, I was sure it had to be a short list, and I was right; it wasn’t until my [...]

The authors we’ve been hearing from this month are all very accomplished but, if I’m not mistaken, only Tana French can boast that she’s batting 1.000 with Booklist. Three books—In the Woods (2007), The Likeness (2008), and Faithful Place (2010)—three starred reviews. Oh, and she won the Edgar for Best First Novel, too. Of the [...]

Most of the awards we post here on Likely Stories are for book-length works of fiction and nonfiction—and most of the winners are not first-time authors. But there are some contests for beginners, too. The L. Ron Hubbard Writers and Illustrators of the Future contest is designed to give an early-career boost to aspiring sf authors [...]

Reviewing his debut, The Knife Itself (2007), Booklist called Marcus Sakey “a writer to watch.” Watchers—and readers—have been rewarded with a string of intelligent and compulsively readable thrillers that seem to be getting better and better: next month’s Two Deaths of Daniel Hayes earned Sakey his first Booklist star. (Thomas Gaughan calls it ”an insightful, emotion-packed, suspenseful, and [...]

The 2012 Hans Christian Andersen Award nominees have been announced. The International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY) aims to  recognize authors and illustrators “whose complete works have made an important and lasting contribution to children’s literature.” The finalists, representing 33 countries, include Author Paul Fleischman and Illustrator Chris Raschka for the US, Author Eoin [...]

Ted Dekker used to be a big name in the Christian-fiction market, and now he’s a big name in the fiction market, period. With more than five million copies of his books in print, he’s got big sales and big readership—and critical plaudits, too. David Pitt’s Booklist review of The Priest’s Graveyard begins, “Dekker’s new thriller [...]

Kill the Irishman, the new movie directed and co-written by Jonathan Hensleigh, is based on To Kill the Irishman, a 1998 book by Rick Porrello. The book chronicles the rise and fall of Danny Greene, an Irish-American who, in the 1960s and ’70s, muscled in on the Cleveland Mafia’s turf (he was also, for a [...]

I’ve been reviewing Duane Swierczynski‘s books for Booklist since The Wheel Man (2005). Of that one, I wrote, “Fast-moving and funny, The Wheel Man is a Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride in an R-rated amusement park.” Since then, I have struggled, with only modest success, to find different ways of describing his books as being fast-moving, funny, [...]

I shook hands with Brad Parks a few years ago at Bouchercon (in Baltimore, I think), where he told me that he had a book, Faces of the Gone, coming out soon and he just wanted to see what the whole crime-fiction biz was like. When I saw him again at last year’s Bouchercon, he was walking around [...]