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 […]
Read More…Ron will greet readers and sign books—including his new suspense DEEP END—at his hometown bookstore, WIND CITY BOOKS. He’ll be there 3-5pm on Saturday, September 26, 2026. Stop in and […]
Read More…If you’re in Placitas, Bernalillo, Algodones, parts of Rio Rancho, and the Pueblos of Santa Ana, Zia, and San Felipe … and if you’re up late this Friday night … […]
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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 […]
Read More…In a fireside chat with friend and fellow mystery author ANNE HILLERMAN, Ron will talk about his new mystery novel DEEP END, which was inspired by a true-life 1970 double […]
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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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The wait is over! DEEP END, sequel to Ron’s popular thriller DEAF ROW, will be released today! DEEP END is now available in print, ebook, and audiobook wherever you buy […]
Read More… ‘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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I originally wrote this essay as a newspaper column in 1995. It appears here today with a few minor but festive updates because, well, Scrooge is timeless. No businessman in […]
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This essay was originally written just two days after the Sandy Hook Elementary massacre in 2012. Yesterday’s tragic shooting at a Catholic school in Minneapolis makes me want to re-run […]
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Essayist Robert Fulghum once surmised that everything he ever needed to know he learned in kindergarten, but I was a slow learner. Yesterday, the 2025 Little League World Series got […]
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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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