I’ve got a post running today over at SleuthSayers on the topic of indigenous mysteries for kids. November is the start of Native American Heritage Month in the United States, and I’ve wanted to talk about some of the books I picked up when we visited Cherokee, North Carolina, back in summer. The three I’m recommending today…

I resolved to post on a regular basis, and I have done well since July or so. But the last two weeks have thrown me for a loop. Denise had three book events in town alone, then we were on the road for a few days for a combo book tour/research trip, then…sadly, the death of one of my old college friends necessitated a trip north for a funeral. Those are never fun, but in this case it was important to me to do so…

My wife, Denise Kiernan, hits the road tomorrow for what will be the first of a couple of trips to promote her trio of books about the creation of the Thanksgiving holiday. As I’ve said before, these three books—one read for three different ages, kids, little kids, and adults—are NOT the story of Pilgrims and Native Americans. It’s a way better story than that. It touches on the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln, and the crusading woman editor who lobbied for a national day of gratitude…

Some years ago I told the story on this blog about the time I wrote a series of columns for the New York Times, and received as payment not money but—wait for it—pie.

No, I’m not kidding.

I’m not talking about pie in some metaphorical sense, if that were even possible. Nor am I referring to the mathematical pi.

I’m talking baked goods. A delicious pastry crust packed with fruit or savory gourds, or what-have-you.

A literal fucking pie…

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…