As a reader I have always enjoyed mystery series. That started with the Grand Dame of mystery Agatha Christie with her delightful characters Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot. Then it was John D. McDonald and the Travis McGee series. A few years later I stumbled upon the 87th Precinct Series by Ed McBain, the alter-ego of Evan Hunter, and that's what stirred my interest in police procedural mysteries. There are so many other series that I've enjoyed. Sue Grafton's alphabet series with Kinsey Millhone. Dennis Lehane's series with Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro, a much too short series for me. Louise Penney' s series with Armand Gamache and a whole cast of intriguing characters. Timothy Hallinan's Poke Rafferty series set in Bangkok that recently ended, much to the dismay of this reader and many others. For a reader, when a series ends, it's like we've lost a whole family. That's especially true if there've been a lot of books, or even just...

A friend on Facebook tagged me a few weeks ago to name seven books I loved. In no particular order, here are my seven choices and why I loved them. 1. Mystic River , by Dennis Lehane. To me, Mystic River is the perfect crime novel. It starts when three boys are playing in the street, and a big car pulls up. A man who claims to be a cop chooses the one boy who doesn’t live on the street and tells him to get into the car. He does. The story picks up about thirty years later, and how that one incident comes back to haunt them all. By the way, I crossed the Mystic River Bridge, now known as the Tobin Bridge, every day going to college. 2. Ordinary Grac e, by William Kent Kruger. A coming of age novel where a middle-age man looks back on his thirteen-year old life and the death of a friend and the family members who shaped his manhood. Beautifully written and evocative of time and place. 3. The Kite Runner , by Khaled Hosseini. Again, the main character looks back on his childhood ...

When you hear the old adage, “ show, don’t tell ,” how would you break down the “showing” versus the “telling”? Many would break “showing” down into elements that create the sense that a reader is living out a scene moment by moment—namely dialogue, evocative setting, action, and suspense. “Telling,” one might conclude, is the point of exposition, those sections where the narrator communicates directly to the reader by summarizing events and character traits. If you accept these generalized definitions you will miss out on opportunities to “show” through exposition. Dennis Lehane does just that in his literary mystery, Mystic River . This passage is excerpted from a spontaneous block party that erupts after the return of 11-year-old Jimmy Marcus’s kidnapped friend, Dave Boyle. Jimmy doesn’t yet know what happened to Dave, but sees that he is surrounded by police and well wishers that include their fifth grade teacher, Miss Powell. When Miss Powell kisses Dave twice on the cheek Jimmy ...