Keith Thomson blogs about national security matters for the Huffington Post. In addition to his journalistic duties, he's also a screenwriter and has written several novels. He's appeared on book talk to discuss Once a Spy and Twice a Spy about a retired CIA agent with Alzheimer's, but today we about his new one, Seven Grams of Lead, where a journalist learns too much and goes on the run to discover the truth and save his own life.

 
Greg Iles is a superstar thriller writer who has sold millions of books around the world. In 2011, he was grievously injured in a car crash. He's worked hard to recover and has just released his fourth novel to star Penn Cage, a former writer and Prosecutor who is the mayor of Natchez, Mississippi. The new book, Natchez Burning, the first of a trilogy, looks at how the crimes of a domestic, racist terror group in the 1960s have affected contemporary Mississippi and Louisiana.

Ace Atkins is an Edgar-nominated writer known for his incredible historical true-crime novels, his current Quinn Colson series about an Army Ranger who returns home to become a sheriff in north Mississippi, and he has also written the last three books in the Robert B. Parker's Spenser series. The newest of which is entitled Cheap Shot and is available from Putnam.

 Ace will be at The Booksellers at Laurelwood in Memphis, TN on Thursday, May 15th at 6:00 p.m. to sign books.

Jedidiah Ayers is one of the driving forces behind Noir at the Bar and has been making a name for himself among the Grit Lit set for his books Fierce Bitches, A F*ckload of Shorts, and Peckerwood. It's a fairly serious interview with a guy known for his sharp wit. And if you couldn't tell by the titles for his books, this interview is very NSFW. Also, this isn't the typical highly edited interview, it is rawer than road rash.

 
Wylie Cash's first novel, A Land More Kind Than Home, the story of a death of a small boy in a Holiness Pentecostal church in the hills of western North Carolina, won the Crime Writer's Association John Creasey New Blood Dagger Award as well as the SIBA Fiction Book of the Year Award. His new novel is This Dark Road to Mercy, and it is published by William Morrow.

Sheila Turnage's first novel for middle graders and up, Three Times Lucky, received a 2013 Newbery Honor and was a finalist for the Edgar Award for Best Juvenile Book. Kathy Dawson Books, an imprint of Penguin, has just released the second episode following the preteen Desperado Detective Agency, and it's entitled The Ghosts of Tupelo Landing.

Since I'm getting ever pressed for time, I'm going to be releasing my interviews from Book Talk that will be of interest to Mysterypod subscribers as bonus episodes, instead of rebadging them with different intros and closes. Rest assured,  I will only include books in the mystery/crime/thriller/true crime genres.

James Scott's debut novel, The Kept, has garnered praise from reviewers, having been named a Best Book of the Month by Amazon and received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly and Kirkus. Set in upstate New York at the end of the 19th century, a woman and her 12 year-old son set out into the deep, winter snow for revenge, while harboring secrets from each other.

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James Magnuson heads up the Michener Center for Writing at the University of Texas at Austin. He draws upon that experience for his new novel, Famous Writers I Have Known. Small-time grifter Frankie Abandonato gets in over his head in in New York and heads out to Austin, Texas, where he gets sucked into the world of literature and MFA programs. Could this be the longest and biggest con in Frankie's career?

Journalist Denise Parkinson learned about an infamous 1930s murder case from her native Arkansas County. In Daughter of the White River: Depression-Era Treachery and Vengeance in the Arkansas Delta, she tells the story of a community of people living on the White River and the strange tale of Helen Spence, who avenged her father's murder by shooting the accused dead in a county courtroom and the bizarre spiral her life took as the country was plunged into the depths of economic depression and hunger.

The nominees for the 2014 Edgar Awards were recently announced. I was lucky enough to interview four writers on the short lists last year.

Jenny Milchman was nominated for the Mary Higgins Clark Prize for her novel Cover of Snow.

Marcus Sakey was nominated for Best Paperback Original for his thriller Brilliance.

Charles Graeber got a nom for Best Fact Crime for The Good Nurse.

And finally, Matthew Guinn was nominated for Best First Novel for The Resurrectionist. I had the chance to talk to Matthew last summer for my other program Book Talk. The Resurrectionist is the story of a slave in the 1850s ordered to steal other slaves' corpses for dissection for a South Carolina medical school, and the parallel storyline of a 1990s doctor who learns of the past misdeeds which jeopardize his school's reputation.


 

Memphian Mark Greaney has just published the fourth installment on his Gray Man series. In Dead Eye, former CIA assassin Court Gentry finds himself in Eastern Europe being hunted by his fellow Americans. When he receives assistance from an unexpected source, Gentry must decide if it is worth the risk to take someone at their word.

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