The Authors
Lori Rader-Day is the Edgar Award-nominated and Anthony and Mary Higgins Clark award-winning author of The Lucky One, Under a Dark Sky, The Day I Died, Little Pretty Things, and The Black Hour. She lives in Chicago, where she is co-chair of the mystery readers’ conference Murder and Mayhem in Chicago and the national president of Sisters in Crime.
Learn more at loriraderday.com.
Samantha Downing is the author of the bestselling My Lovely Wife, nominated for Edgar, ITW, Macavity, and CWA awards. Amazon Studios and Nicole Kidman’s Blossom Films have partnered to produce a feature film based on the novel.
Her second book, He Started It, was released on July 21, 2020 and became an instant international bestseller. She currently lives in New Orleans.
Learn more at www.samanthadowning.com.
Hammett Award and Nero Prize-winning novelist Stephen Mack Jones is the author of the critically acclaimed thrillers August Snow and Lives Laid Away. Lives Laid Away was short-listed for the CWA-UK “Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award.”
Once-upon-a-time he worked in advertising and marketing communications for which he is deeply sorry and promises never to do that again. Mr. Jones lives in suburban Detroit and has three adult children that mostly like him.
Visit his website at www.stephenmackjones.com.
Weaned on the images of Kirby and Steranko in comics and Hammet and Himes in prose, Gary Phillips was born under a bad sign and only through writing does he hope to get out from under. His latest novel is Matthew Henson and the Ice Temple of Harlem.
For more of his work, please visit his website at: www.gdphillips.com.
Your Host
Karen Dionne is the USA Today and #1 internationally bestselling author of the award-winning psychological suspense novel The Marsh King’s Daughter published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons in the US and in 25 other countries and The Wicked Sister (August 2020), also from G.P. Putnam’s Sons. The Marsh King’s Daughter was named a 2018 Michigan Notable Book, took home the Barry and the Crimson Scribe Awards for Best Novel, and was chosen as one of the best books of 2017 by iBooks, Hudson Booksellers, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, The Irish Independent, The Florida Sun-Sentinel, Library Journal, Shelf Awareness and many other booksellers and reviewers and is in development as a major motion picture.
In a starred review, Publishers Weekly calls The Wicked Sister “A devastating, magic realism–dusted psychological thriller . . . Dionne paints a haunting portrait of a family hurtling toward the tragic destiny they can foresee but are powerless to stop.” Visit Karen at www.karen-dionne.com
Authors’ Books
The Lucky One by Lori Rader-Day
Most people who go missing are never found. But Alice was the lucky one…
As a child, Alice was stolen from her backyard in a tiny Indiana community, but against the odds, her policeman father tracked her down within twenty-four hours and rescued her from harm. In the aftermath of the crime, her family decided to move to Chicago and close the door on that horrible day.
Yet Alice hasn’t forgotten. She devotes her spare time volunteering for a website called The Doe Pages scrolling through pages upon pages of unidentified people, searching for clues that could help reunite families with their missing loved ones. When a face appears on Alice’s screen that she recognizes, she’s stunned to realize it’s the same man who kidnapped her decades ago. The post is deleted as quickly as it appeared, leaving Alice with more questions than answers.
Purchase The Lucky One from an independent bookstore near you.
Purchase The Lucky One online at www.bookshop.org.
The Wicked Sister by Karen Dionne
From the bestselling and award-winning author of The Marsh King’s Daughter comes a startling novel of psychological suspense as two generations of sisters try to unravel their tangled relationships between nature and nurture, guilt and betrayal, love and evil.
You have been cut off from society for fifteen years, shut away in a mental hospital in self-imposed exile as punishment for the terrible thing you did when you were a child. But what if nothing about your past is as it seems? And if you didn’t accidentally shoot and kill your mother, then whoever did is still out there. Waiting for you.
Purchase The Wicked Sister at an independent bookstore near you.
Purchase The Wicked Sister online at www.bookshop.org.
He Started It by Samantha Downing
Beth, Portia, and Eddie Morgan haven’t all been together in years. And for very good reasons—we’ll get to those later. But when their wealthy grandfather dies and leaves a cryptic final message in his wake, the siblings and their respective partners must come together for a cross-country road trip to fulfill his final wish and—more importantly—secure their inheritance.
But time with your family can be tough. It is for everyone.
It’s even harder when you’re all keeping secrets and trying to forget a memory, a missing person, an act of revenge, the man in the black truck who won’t stop following your car—and especially when at least one of you is a killer and there’s a body in the trunk. Just to name a few reasons.
But money is a powerful motivator. It is for everyone.
Purchase He Started It at an independent bookstore near you.
Purchase He Started It online at www.bookshop.org.
Lives Laid Away by Stephen Mack Jones
Detroit ex-cop August Snow takes up vigilante justice when his beloved neighborhood of Mexicantown is caught in the crosshairs of a human trafficking scheme.
When the body of an unidentified young Hispanic woman is dredged from the Detroit River, the Wayne County coroner gives her photo to ex-police detective August Snow, insisting August ask around his native Mexicantown to see if anyone recognizes her. August’s good friend Elena, an advocate for undocumented immigrants, immediately pinpoints the girl as local teenager Isadora del Torres.
It turns out Izzy isn’t the only young woman to have disappeared during an ICE raid only to turn up dead a few weeks later. Preyed upon by the law itself, the people of Mexicantown have no one to turn to but August. In a guns-blazing wild ride across Detroit, he will put his own life on the line to protect the community he loves.
Purchase Lives Laid Away at an independent bookstore near you.
Purchase Lives Laid Away online at www.bookshop.org.
Matthew Henson and the Ice Temple of Harlem by Gary Phillips
This re-imagined pulp novel follows the Doc Savage-style adventures of the first black man to reach the North Pole —Matthew Henson.
The tail end of the Roaring 20s. Harlem. Hired by controversial spiritual leader Daddy Paradise to retrieve his adult daughter who has been kidnapped, adventurer Matthew Henson does just that. Then he must safeguard the two until the firebrand can deliver a momentous speech at a mass rally. Henson must employ all his survival skills to fulfill his task—skills that kept him whole in forbidden jungles, across Asia, and in sub-zero ice storms when he first reached the North Pole.
Henson’s charge brings him face-to-face with such illustrious characters as gangster Dutch Schultz, who’s looking to muscle out numbers racket boss Queenie St. Clair, and famed inventor Nikola Tesla who is using his electrical acumen to surveil plutocrats. Henson’s pal Bessie Coleman, America’s first black aviatrix lends a hand as well. With a death ray zeroing in on him, he races against the clock to save lives, and keep a mysterious and powerful meteor fragment he brought back from the Arctic years ago out of the hands of monied evil-doers.
Purchase Matthew Henson and the Ice Temple of Harlem at an independent bookstore near you.
Purchase Matthew Henson and the Ice Temple of Harlem online at www.bookshop.org.
