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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In June, Amazon announced the winners of its annual Breakthrough Novel Awards. Journalist and formerly self-published novelist Jo Chumas won the mystery and suspense category with her historical thriller, The Hidden. It's the story of a young widow named Aimee in Egypt in 1940. WWII is on the verge of spilling into the land of the Nile. She receives a journal written by her mother, whom she never knew, from her life in 1919 during similarly turbulent times in Cairo. Conspiracy, secrets, and danger are all afoot in this prize-winning novel.

This episode of Mysterypod is a bit different, as the true crime book in question, Murder in Mississippi, isn't available in the USA yet. However, I'm a huge fan of Australian author John Safran's (not to be confused with American novelist Jonathan Safran Foer)radio and television work, and the murder in question took place in Mississippi, just a couple hundred miles down the road from my current home in Memphis.

Richard Barrett was a notorious white supremacist from Rankin county, Mississippi who was murdered in 2010. The previous year, John Safran had interviewed and pranked him for his television mini-series John Safran's Race Relations on ABC1 (Australian Broadcasting Corporation television). Hearing of Barrett's death, allegedly at the hands of a young African-American man named Vincent McGee, Safran came to Mississippi to research what he thought would be a rather straight-forward story of a black man killing a virulent racist. What he found was a lot of contradictions in each of the men's lives.

We talk about Safran's growing up as a secular Jew in Australia, his satirical documentaries, and paint the broadest of strokes about his insightful and often funny book dealing with the lives and a death which were way more complex than outsiders could even imagine.

You can listen to his current radio program here:
Sunday Night Safran

And here is his recent radio mini-series interviewing true crime writers:
John Safran's True Crime

The book Trailer for Murder in Mississippi:


John Safran's Murder in Mississippi from PenguinAustralia on Vimeo.


An excellent sketch from John Safran Vs. God where he acts an atheist missionary in Salt Lake City, Utah:

John Dufresne is a Guggenheim fellow, playwright, screenwriter, and novelist. His first two novels, Louisiana Power and Light and Love Warps the Mind a Little were named New York Times notable books of the year. He's now trying his hand at crime fiction with No Regrets, Coyote, the story of middle-aged therapist Wylie Melville who gets caught up in in a tough situation when he's called into consult on a murder case on Christmas Eve down in south Florida.