So many books, so little time. On Saturday, I will be both an author and a reader (two things I seldom do at the same time). I’m privileged to be among the authors who’ll speak at the 5th Annual San Antonio Book Festival—one of the USA’s fastest rising book events—about our bestseller MORGUE: A LIFE IN…Read More…
Essayist Robert Fulghum once surmised that everything he ever needed to know he learned in kindergarten, but I was a slow learner. Maybe Little League was just the beginning of my higher education, but everything else I ever needed to know I learned in the sandlot on endless summer days that simmered into night games…Read More…
This morning, the Mystery Writers of America announced that MORGUE: A LIFE IN DEATH, by Dr. Vincent Di Maio and Ron Franscell, is among the nominees for its prestigious Edgar Awards as one of the five best true crimes of 2016. “It’s always a humbling moment when a life’s story is considered worthy of re-telling,” co-author…Read More…
“Don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you.” —SATCHEL PAIGE I lived a hundred lives last year. The curious wanderer, the angry plumber, the heartbroken son who refused to cry, the willing friend, the writer who lost his words, the proud stonemason, the reclusive loner, the expectant fisherman, the father who missed too much,…Read More…
Ready or not, a new year is about to begin, even though it doesn’t seem like that long ago when the “old” year started. An amateur philosopher friend of mine has two theories about why time passes so much quicker as we get old. Theory No. 1: Every year is an incrementally smaller fraction of the…Read More…
This essay originally appeared in 1998. It appears here today with a few minor but festive updates. No businessman in the history of literature has been as misunderstood as Ebenezer Scrooge. His very name is now a synonym for pinch-fisted churlishness and humbuggery. Why? Certainly because that was Charles Dickens’ aim when, in his classic…Read More…
“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” —William Faulkner So the would-be mass murderer at Ohio State University this week was apparently inspired by the hateful words of American-born cleric Anwar al Awlaki, al Qaeda’s most powerful recruiter before he was obliterated in a US drone strike in Yemen in 2011. A few years ago, I…Read More…
A long time ago, my parents were visiting for an early December weekend, a rare occasion since I’d moved north. But I had already committed to hanging the Christmas lights before the weather turned bitterly cold – which is when I normally put up my Christmas lights. My father asked if he could help and…Read More…
2017 EDGAR nominee! Now in US paperback from Picador and Portuguese edition from Darkside Press/Brazil Forensic science is booming. TV dramas, books and movies have made morgues cool. Complex technology and intricate research can take curdled blood, bone shards, and flakes of skin and turn them into justice. And Vincent Di Maio, MD, son of…Read More…
Among Top 25 Best Crime Fictions of 1999 POISONED PEN Former Chicago Tribune crime reporter Jefferson Morgan is living his life-long dream of running a weekly newspaper, The Winchester Bullet, in the Wyoming town where he grew up. But when an infamous child-murderer comes home to die and begs Morgan to help clear his name,…Read More…