Earlier this summer I was talking to someone in the publishing industry about what would be the next big thing in YA paranormal romance now that vampires, fairies, werewolves, and zombies have been overused. She suggested mermaids and angels. Sure enough, the only ARC I brought home from the ALA conference has an angel in it and I’ve seen some mermaid fiction with horrible titles (Forgive my Fins, seriously?!) in the bookstore. Stories about seemingly ordinary girls who are internally conflicted because two gorgeous boys happen to be in love …

After a long day at work, the Bureau Chiefs like to relax in bed with books and comic books. Since there are 16 of us, our bed is 64 feet wide and our nightstand is the size of a small elephant. Here’s what is stacked up next to it.
Ken
After a long spell of reading only comics, the wife and I took a trip to nearby bookstore Legacy Books. I’m embarrassed to say I did not know this enormous independent bookstore existed, despite the fact it was about 15 minutes away …

Jack Clark’s Nobody’s Angel, the latest release from the Hard Case Crime imprint, is the definition of a cult novel.
Clark, a Chicago cab driver, wrote and self-published the novel. Until its publication by Hard Case Crime last month, the only way a reader could get one of the 500 copies available was to take a ride in Clark’s cab.
But beyond the novelty of its publication, Nobody’s Angel is an endlessly fascinating look inside the world of a cab driver. While technically a crime novel, with two crimes driving the …

I came late to the game for the first novel of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. In fact, I had a copy of the mass market paperback edition of the novel for almost six months before I decided to read it. But then, I quickly devoured it and its sequel, The Girl Who Played with Fire, over the course of a week, wanting to do little more than read during that time. When the final novel, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s …

After a long day at work, the Bureau Chiefs like to relax in bed with books and comic books. Since there are 16 of us, our bed is 64 feet wide and our nightstand is the size of a small elephant. Here’s what is stacked up next to it.

After a long day at work, the Bureau Chiefs like to relax in bed with books and comic books. Since there are 16 of us, our bed is 64 feet wide and our nightstand is the size of a small elephant. Here’s what is stacked up next to it.
Anna
It is summer, so light and fluffy reading is even more of a priority to me than it usually is. I’ll read a romance novel or three when I want something I can breeze through in a day. Unfortunately my recent fun …

Hunt Beyond the Frozen Fire is the fourth book in the Gabriel Hunt series of adventure novels created by Charles Ardai, founder of the Hard Case Crime imprint. The conceit of the series is that modern adventurer Gabriel Hunt authors each novel (though, curiously, none are narrated in the first person) with the help of a different writer. So far, the series has been a mixed bag, but even at their weakest, the novels remain entertaining and diverting. However, Christa Faust’s contribution to the series, Hunt Beyond …

Billed as Donald Westlake’s “final novel,” Memory is actually an early novel, written in the 1960s but never published, by the great mystery and noir writer. Following the writer’s death in December 2008, Hard Case Crime publisher Charles Ardai announced the aquisition of this unpublished work, which had been rejected by Westlake’s agent early in the writer’s career. Memory, in fact, is barely a crime novel: it begins with a crime, and it does have a noirish feel; plus, there is something of a mystery involved. Police occasionally …

It is probably a little unfair to Melissa Marr that I think of her work often whenever someone mentions Twilight. This is partially because her first book, Wicked Lovely, was published during the post-Twilight teen paranormal romance deluge. I didn’t jump on the Twilight bandwagon early, and I think I read Twilight, Eclipse, and Wicked Lovely in short succession.
But out of the many teen paranormal romances that I’ve sampled, I think her Wicked Lovely series is one of the best. There are also some interesting parallels in the behavior of the male …

After a long day at work, the Bureau Chiefs like to relax in bed with books and comic books. Since there are 16 of us, our bed is 64 feet wide and our nightstand is the size of a small elephant. Here’s what is stacked up next to it.