There are funerals you attend because someone died, and funerals you attend because someone survived. I didn’t understand the distinction until last weekend, when I found myself driving toward the […]
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Somewhere between the last page and the next book you pick up, there’s a consequential question most readers never think much about: whether to leave a review. I understand the […]
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Today has sneaked up, or dawdled, depending on the moment you ask me. I circled May 5 on the calendar months ago, as if choosing it gave me some control. […]
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I’ve heard the word closure in courtrooms, on front porches, in hospital hallways where you can’t quite forget what’s happened. It’s usually spoken with relief. Sometimes with gratitude. Almost always […]
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We have a mythology about small towns in America, and it goes something like this: people know each other, watch out for each other, leave their doors unlocked at night. […]
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Writers like to pretend stories are found objects—arrowheads in the dust, waiting for the right set of eyes. We talk about stumbling onto them, as if narrative were a vein […]
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There are two kinds of priests in fiction. The first wears immaculate vestments, speaks in ecclesiastic riddles, and inevitably knows more about the murder than he lets on. The second […]
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There’s a small, mischievous part of me that believes every crime novel should come with a magnifying glass and a wink. As I put the finishing touches on DEEP END, […]
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For a true-crime writer, the world is seldom what it seems. Every place hums with a past life; every peaceful landscape casts a longer, darker shadow. When I moved to […]
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I have always been a little suspicious of tidy labels for messy things, and nothing is messier than human beings. Yet here we are, happily sorting ourselves into generational bins […]
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We read about crimes (and I write about them) not merely to know “whodunit,” but to peer into the hidden architecture of choice—the fragile lines between decency and destruction, the […]
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There’s something seductive about the edge of the map. We talk about remote places the way earlier generations spoke of monasteries or islands—as if distance itself confers virtue. Move far […]
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Reporting tells us what happened; fiction asks why it matters. Up to 2020, I wrote bestselling true-crime books like THE DARKEST NIGHT and SHADOWMAN. Then COVID-19 shut down my field […]
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In every town I’ve ever known—from wind-scoured prairie crossroads to mountain hamlets tucked against a hard horizon—there is a table of old men always holding court over coffee. You know […]
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‘DEEP END’ IS HERE! in print, ebook, and audio formats wherever you buy books! When a cannabis billionaire is murdered, retired Denver homicide detective Woodrow “Mountain” Bell is drawn […]
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For the past couple months, I’ve been chasing a ghost. Fifty years ago, a 53-year-old man checked into a cheap roadside motel along Route 66 in the kind of Southwestern […]
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“If you could be human for just one day,” I asked the robot inside ChatGPT, “what do you think you’d be thankful for?” To be honest, I have a love-hate […]
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It was after 2am and the graveyard-shift nurses drifted like ghosts in the hallway, tending to the dead and dying. It wasn’t that Michael* couldn’t sleep, even with meds he […]
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Fifty years. Half a century. And yet, if I close my eyes, I can still hear the music drifting down the hallways, feel the sun warming our faces on autumn […]
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Seventeen years ago, I spent this day with my teenage son in a remote Yukon camp above the Arctic Circle, where the Sun never sets on the longest day of […]
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“Matter can neither be created nor destroyed. It can only be rearranged.” —Law of Conservation of Mass For a long time, I collected dirt. OK, maybe not the coolest collection, […]
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According to the Mayo Clinic, narcissistic personality disorder — related to sociopathy under the umbrella term Antisocial Personality Disorders — is a mental condition in which people have an inflated […]
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“Reminiscent of Charles Frazier’s ‘Cold Mountain’ … Ron Franscell’s themes involve a fresh approach to our rural roots as a font for the elusive American spirit.” — USA Today Twenty-five […]
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Hollywood actor, comedian, and impressionist Jim Meskimen—the superb narrator on DEAF ROW’s audiobook—offers some insights on some beloved celebrities who might be reading my new mystery.
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