Back in 2015, I attended the Bouchercon mystery conference in Raleigh, and sat listening to a panel discussion in which a bunch of mystery writers recommended some of their favorite books. When her turn came, the New York Times Bestselling author Laura Lippman mentioned a children’s book entitled The Egypt Game, by Zilpha Keatley Snyder. I remember her saying it was an unusual book for kids, because its key subplot deals with the murder of a child.

Published in 1967, the title was named a Newbery Honor book. That’s one of the top two awards a children’s book can receive. Clearly, it was highly regarded by many in its heyday, though I had never heard of it…

These days when I need a recipe in a hurry, I turn to the web. But if I have time, I turn to the legion of cookbooks that we have collected over the years. Besides the cookbooks we each brought to our marriage, we have a number of books rescued from the estates of loved ones who are no longer with us.

I recently wrote about two books of mine that I have long treasured. They are books on French cooking by an interesting author named Edouard de Pomiane (1875-1964), a medical doctor and food scientist who also presided over a popular radio show in France during the 1930s. He espoused a philosophy of simple cooking, which is unusual when you consider the complexity of most French cooking techniques.

Pomiane wrote a lot of books, but these two are the ones most easily found translated into English…

Two of the novels in my Mesmerist series of books are live and available for purchase in the Apple audiobooks store! These are the seventh and eight books of mine to go live for readers who prefer to consume books that way. They are also the fourth and fifth novels of mine to become an audiobook.

You can learn more about the first two book in the series, The Mesmerist and Ear of God right here.

In a nutshell, this is a thriller series that focuses primarily on psychic phenomena. An FBI agent and a New York City cop team up to investigate strange cases that have no conventional solutions. It’s basically my take on the occult detective genre. Part detective fiction, part urban fantasy…

My novel Sorceress Kringle is live and available for purchase in the Apple audiobooks store! This is the sixth book of mine to go live for readers who prefer to consume books that way. It’s the third novel of mine to become an audiobook.

You can check out the book right here, and buy it outright for $6.99. It’s an epic fantasy novel for grown-ups—NOT KIDS—that imagines that Santa Claus is actually a woman, and has very good reasons for hiding her identity…

Back in the 1990s I stumbled across a book that changed the way I think about character—literary and real-life characters. The book was a little something called We’ve Had a 100 Years of Psychotherapy—And the World’s Getting Worse. It’s a series of conversations between a journalist, Michael Ventura, and the great Jungian psychologist, James Hillman.

One portion of their conversation blew my mind. It has to do with how we become the people we are. In the western view, the present is always based on our childhoods.

Hillman says that this is our peculiar American myth. What if you read you life backward instead?

When an acorn falls from a tree, it’s coded to become a mighty oak. Great treeness is its destiny. The tiny puppy I picked out of a litter in South Carolina a year ago was destined to become a ferocious Doberman. Regal dogdom was embedded in his soul.

Why don’t humans think the same way about themselves?

A while back I wrote about how I came to buy and read the hardcover version of The Silence of the Lambs, by Thomas Harris, when it was first published 35 years ago. (Yes, it really was that long ago.) I was only 23 years old at the time, and not really earning enough money to buy hardcover novels on a regular basis.

But as I explain in this post for SleuthSayers, the mystery writers blog, sometimes just the right review can send you rushing to a bookstore.

In my case, it was an article in The New York Times that convinced me that this was the right book for me…

I’m a frustrated artist. I was into both painting and writing when I was a kid. When the time came to pick a college, I rolled the dice and went with a writing major. Guess it turned out okay, but I’m still strongly attracted to art of all kinds, especially illustrations. It’s a great form—often representational, but still demanding technical mastery.

A few months back, I did a post for SleuthSayers about how mystery writers can actually own a piece of art that once graced their stories in major mystery magazines. This is somewhat inside baseball, I admit, but it shakes down like this…

I’ve written before about the book recommendation site, Shepherd.com, which enlists the help of authors, not algorithms, to share great books with fellow readers. My wife, Denise Kiernan, shared a new list with Shepherd, which is up as today. It’s tied to her trio of books on the subject of Thanksgiving and gratitude. The list is entitled:

The best books on gratitude that make every day feel like Thanksgiving

All but one of the books she’s recommending are for adults. That makes four lists she’s contributed to Shepherd. The others are, in no particular order…

When a kid gets hooked on a topic like number patterns or math in nature, you just want to feed that excitement because you don’t know where it is going to lead. Teachers, parents, and librarians often ask me to recommend books about Fibonacci beyond my own.

To that end, I’ve compiled what I hope is a pretty good Fibonacci bibliography. It contains books for kids, adults, and even serious mathematicians. I’m parking this list on the blog with the expectation that I’ll revise it as new books come along. The link is easily shareable if you want to shoot it to a friend or colleague.

Some years ago, I told the story of how, as an adult, I reconnected with a writer I’d loved as a kid. The writer was Clifford B. Hicks, who penned a fun series about a kid inventor named Alvin Fernald. The series ran for 10 books, and inspired a Wonderful World of Disney TV movie.

I didn’t realize when I moved to North Carolina that Mr. Hicks lived about 40 minutes away. I wrote him a note and we exchanged a few emails, never meeting before he passed away.

I revisited the story a few months ago in a blog post I did for SleuthSayers. I think it’s little tighter than my previous take on the story. If you are looking for a wholesome mystery series to get a kid—probably a boy—hooked, you might want to…