Mr. E. Reviews Thin Ice

Purchase/Rental Option(s)

This film is one of those that is tricky to review, with so many twists and turns that it isn't clear which scenes are important and which aren't. (Hint: they're almost all important.) It is a clever movie, almost too clever, but most importantly a very enjoyable one to watch.

Read the full text of our review at Mr. E. Reviews Thin Ice.

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Mr. E. Reviews is your source for mystery, suspense, thriller, and crime drama reviews of television and film.

Today's Bestselling Free Kindle MystereBooks (121005)

Here is today's list of the Bestselling Free Kindle Crime Fiction: the top nine mysteries, novels of suspense, and thrillers.

We're using a script to embed an RSS feed from Amazon.com, which is updated hourly, but if you cannot see the box below — or have scripts blocked — you can click on the image to the right or use this link to see the relevant page on Amazon.com.

Spanish Language Poster for Looper

A Spanish-language poster for the time-travel crime thriller Looper has been released by the studio (right; click for larger image). Titled Asesino del Futuro, the tagline is "Perseguido por tu pasado … Atrapado por tu futuro." (Haunted by your past … Trapped by your future.)

This particular poster, based on the release date of October 12th, seems to be for the Mexican and/or Columbian market(s). Here's the Spanish language synopsis: "Joe es un asesino, pero no uno ordinario. En un futuro lejano, su trabajo es matar gente que después es enviada de regreso al pasado, donde se encarga de quemar los cuerpos para que no queden rastros. Pero todo cambiará de repente cuando llegue su propio cuerpo, y empiece una lucha contra reloj para salvar su propia vida en el futuro."

Starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the contemporary Joe, and Bruce Willis as the future Joe, Looper is written and directed by Rian Johnson.

Please Welcome Back Novelist David Grace

by David Grace

We are delighted to welcome back novelist David Grace as our guest. (He was most recently here in March, discussing his book Doll's Eyes.)

David's new novel is The Concrete Kiss (Wildside Press, August 2012 trade paperback and ebook formats), which he is making available to our readers to download for just 99 cents! Details below.

We asked David to tell us how he comes up with the storylines for his books … and he responded with today's guest post.

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I always have story ideas and book titles floating around my head. Unfortunately, the story ideas and the book titles arise from different sources and almost never match up. I keep a written list of the titles just in case someday a new book and an old title will be a good fit. I heard a phrase the other day that has stuck in my head, "Suicide By Murder" and I figure that has to be a good title for a book. Well, maybe someday.

Photo provided courtesy of
David Grace

I often have a little internal war between stories that I find intellectually interesting and ones that provide opportunities for emotional scenes. I love writing emotional scenes so I usually want to design a plot that will give me a chance to include them. On the other hand, I think most crime-novel readers prefer what I will call "puzzle stories." It is always a conflict for me between writing a puzzle story that others may like reading and writing an emotional story that I think I will enjoy writing. The best solution, of course, is to figure out one that has both. That is a very difficult thing to do.

I have a great crime-novel puzzle story in the back of my mind but I have been resisting writing it because I don't yet see the emotional aspects of the story that will make my pulse beat faster when I'm writing it and, I hope, make the reader's stomach go hollow when they read it.

Where does that emotional component come from? The first answer I have is: From the character, usually the Hero. I have to figure out who the Hero is and what makes the reader really, really root for the Hero and care about his/her success.

The second answer is: From the chance for triumph or failure that the story offers the Hero. Will there be a scene where, battered and bloody, the Hero struggles on and defeats the Villain? We can no longer rely on the Hero merely pulling Little Nell from the railroad tracks seconds before the train arrives, but that doesn't mean that the reader and the writer don't enjoy suspenseful and emotional scenes. If my book doesn't have some scenes like that, something that makes my own heart beat faster or cause me to get a catch in my throat then I won't enjoy writing it.

Let me give you an example. In my latest novel, The Concrete Kiss, a thirteen-year-old girl, Amy, is grabbed by a serial killer. She manages to escape by jumping out of his van at about forty miles per hour. She is severely injured and winds up as a coma-bound Jane Doe. Here are two sections from The Concrete Kiss, the first when Amy has been put into long-term care in the hospital and the second, much later in the book and five years later in time. For me, together, these are emotional scenes.

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 Back at St. Vincent's Hospital Amy was still listed as "Jane Doe 16." Her body held no surgical pins or implants that could be traced. Her fingerprints and DNA were not in any database. No missing person's report had been filed for anyone who matched her description. There was no public database for dental records and if there had been one, there was no reason why Amy's teeth would have been in it.
 Her scrapes and cuts slowly began to heal, though her face was still bruised and raw and would remain unrecognizable for weeks to come. Her bones knit as well, but her coma showed no signs of fading. She no longer needed an intubation tube and could breathe on her own but that was the extent that her body was able to function. After a month she was transferred to the Old Wing for long-term care where she was fed intravenously, bathed and cleaned, turned and exercised to keep her muscles in some semblance of workable condition. Beyond that there was nothing that could be done. She would either wake up or she wouldn't.
 Over the succeeding weeks and months Amy's nurses became attached to her and treated her with smiles and an occasional gentle caress. And they gave her a name.
 They called her "Sleeping Beauty."

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 Harvey loved birds, or more accurately, he loved watching birds. Early on a Saturday morning every two or three months, even in the winter if the snow wasn't too deep, he'd kiss a sleepy Shirley goodbye and head for the woods. He never went very far from home. Luckily for him Upstate New York was full of birds. He'd spend most of the day tramping through one state park or another then check in to the closest Motel 6, catch some cop shows on cable TV, then the next morning hurry back into the trees to watch the birds some more but taking care to be home by six for one of Shirley's patented Sunday dinners. Usually it was a beef or pork roast or a whole chicken with mashed potatoes and gravy. Shirley was a whiz in the kitchen. Sure, she didn't cook anything fancy, no little radishes carved into the shape of a rose and none of those high-class deserts like tiramisu but she made a cornbread that would knock your socks off. If they had had a daughter, Harvey thought, then stopped himself. God answers all questions, he reminded himself, and sometimes the answer is no.
 Harvey gave his head a little shake as if to drive those thoughts away and instead chose to concentrate on the good things in his life. He had a great wife, a good job, friends, good health, nobody was suing him or was even mad at him and tomorrow morning he was leaving for two glorious days in the forest. True, he thought, as he passed the hallway mirror, I'm no movie star. He paused and gave himself a critical stare. At five feet nine, well, actually five eight and a quarter, a size thirty-seven waist and a hairline that had receded halfway to the back of his head he wasn't going to be sweeping any women off their feet, but then he didn't need to. Shirley seemed to still like him just fine even though he wasn't quite the man she had married twenty years before. He gave his image one last look and concluded that no one was ever going to call him Prince Charming.
 But he was wrong.

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To me, those are emotional scenes. But maybe that's just me.

I have three stories in my head right now and I'm giving my brain some time to sort them out. Starting a novel is like beginning to climb a mountain. You think you know where you're going. You think you know what challenges you will encounter and how to meet them. You think you can do a good, clean, and efficient job of getting to the top. You think that in spite of the work and sweat and time involved that you will enjoy the journey and that, when you reach the summit, you will appreciate the view. You hope that when you get to the top you can say, "Wow! What a fantastic view. This was totally worth it." But sometimes you can't. Sometimes you realize about a quarter of the way up that it's all going to be a bust and then you have to turn around and climb back down.

A few years ago I had an idea for a book set in a fictitious city in southern L.A. County. The Hero would be a uniformed cop. I drew maps of the town. I figured out how many cops were in the police department and where each of the precinct houses were located. I laid out street maps and named the streets. I named the gangs and figured out their territories. I set out the entire plot and even did a beat outline of the book's chapters. Then I started writing. I think I quit somewhere around chapter three or four. Why? Because I couldn't do it? No, I could have finished the book. Because it was a boring or pedestrian story? No, it was a story that lots of people who read crime novels would have liked well enough.

Suppose you think you're a good painter and then, for some reason, you begin a paint-by-the-numbers picture. How excited, how fulfilled are you going to feel doing that? Not very. I quit because I felt as if I was creating a paint-by-the-numbers book. I quit because nothing about the story excited me. It was work. I may as well have been digging a ditch. Yes, I could do it. Yes, it would have been a perfectly workman-like ditch. But if you don't need the money, why dig a ditch? So I stopped digging.

The three ideas I have now are all different. One is a puzzler, a crime novel where the Hero finds clues that something unusual and menacing has happened but he isn't sure what. He is drawn into the puzzle, sucked into an investigation that becomes more complicated and more dangerous the deeper he goes. To make this one work for me I will have to make the Hero someone special and he will need more than just an intellectual motive. There will have to be an emotional reason why he becomes obsessed with this puzzle. If I can do that, I can write a novel that will, I hope be worth my effort.

The second story idea involves a Hero forced into a situation with a varied group of people, some of whom are quite interesting. He needs to be challenged to deal with these people in way that will let him achieve the purpose that put him there in the first place. Again, I will have to figure out the emotional component that drives the hero and the other principal characters.

The third story idea is more risky. It involves a unique character who accidently stumbles into a dangerous situation. He is faced with the choice of avoiding the problem or making a dangerous commitment to take it on and solve it. I have to figure out what his personality is and, emotionally, why he would be willing to stand and fight rather than turn away.

I envy writers who enjoy writing puzzle stories. If I could enjoy writing a complicated whodunit instead of needing an emotional fix to keep me going, my life as a writer would be a whole lot easier.

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David Grace is the pen name for David M. Alexander. He graduated from Stanford University in 1967 with a major in history and a minor in economics and received a Doctor of Laws degree from the University of California Law School in 1970. He was licensed to practice law by the Supreme Court of the State of California in 1971 and before the Supreme Court of the United States in 1977.

To learn more about David and his books, visit his website at DavidGraceAuthor.com.

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The Concrete Kiss
David Grace
Publisher: Wildside Press

Homicide Detective Ned Danes discovers that an ambitious Deputy D.A. has concealed evidence of an accused murderer's innocence in order to secure a headline-grabbing conviction. Danes is warned that a smart guy would keep his mouth shut. More interested in being a good guy than a smart one, Danes torpedoes the corrupt Deputy D.A.'s case, and for his honesty, Danes is exiled to the tiny basement office of the Cold Case Squad.

Working in his forgotten outpost Danes becomes obsessed with finding the real killer who the Deputy D.A.'s scheme has allowed to run free. But just as he seems to be closing in Danes receives a plea for help from an old friend. FBI agent Phillip Abbott has been put on leave for his last sixty days before his forced retirement. He has that long to catch a drug-cartel hit man whose specialty is murdering entire families. Completely alone, Abbott needs a courageous cop like Ned Danes to back him up.

While Danes knows that Abbott has a seventeen-year-old adopted daughter named Jessica, it is only after Danes agrees to help catch the killer that he discovers that the hit man murdered Jessica's entire family. When he adopted Jessica Abbott promised her that he would get the monster who killed her family no matter what it took and Danes soon learns that Abbott is willing to do anything, including break the law and possibly go to prison, to keep that promise.

And after Danes and Abbott do all that, Ned still has a killer of his own to catch.

      

Here is how you can get an ebook copy of David Grace's police-procedural novel, The Concrete Kiss, courtesy of the author, for just 99 cents:

• Go to: http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/175650.
• Click "Add To Cart".
• Enter the Coupon Code GJ59Z in the coupon code box. (Note: This coupon code is only valid until October 20th, 2012.)
• Click "Checkout".
• Scroll down to the "Download" choices and then download the ebook in the file format appropriate to your ereader/device.

Dark Market by Frank Coles is Today's Fourth Featured Free MystereBook

MystereBooks is pleased to feature Dark Market by Frank Coles as today's fourth free mystery ebook.

This title was listed as free as of the date and time of this post. Prices are subject to change without notice. The price displayed on the vendor website at the time of purchase will be the price paid for the book. Please confirm the price of the book before completing your transaction.

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Dark Market
Frank Coles
Publisher: Riding High Ltd.

John Savage is a special force of one. A corporate investigator who had to leave when an investigation went wrong. He's become a 21st century warrior serving overseas but not for any one government only the highest bidder.

When he finds a dead body with links to his old life he returns and finds that what forced him out was only the beginning of a conspiracy to commit murder on a grand scale. The Dark Market. In which anyone can take part and anyone can be a victim. Now Savage must battle to finish what he started.

  

Important Note: This book was listed for free on the date and time of this post. Prices can and do change without prior notice. Please confirm the price of the book before completing your purchase.

For more free mystery ebooks, visit our Free MystereBooks page.

A Puzzling Death by H. O. Ward is Today's Third Featured Free MystereBook

MystereBooks is pleased to feature A Puzzling Death by H. O. Ward as today's third free mystery ebook.

This title was listed as free as of the date and time of this post. Prices are subject to change without notice. The price displayed on the vendor website at the time of purchase will be the price paid for the book. Please confirm the price of the book before completing your transaction.

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A Puzzling Death
H. O. Ward
Publisher: Winpublish

When the newspaper eulogizes Deborah O'Nair, well-known cryptic crossword puzzle composer of New Orleans, by running the unfinished puzzle with her obituary, one of her more devoted fans—a semi-retired physician named Galimatias—quickly sees that one of the clues suggests foul play.

This unpromising sleuth — potbellied, messy, and given to florid speech that obscures his fundamental shrewdness — enlists the reluctant aid of his houseguest, Aramus Limpkin, a young history professor anxious to prove worthy of his first sabbatical. Together they attempt to bring the police around to the doctor's rather tenuous way of thinking.

The police investigation, headed by the swaggering Detective Sergeant Mink Fleming and his conscientious but naive rookie assistant, Hazel Catkin, is hardly less inept than the doctor's own fumbling attempts to uncover the truth.

But in the end, the truth is revealed. And along the way, Aramus learns the secrets of working cryptic crossword puzzles. Four cryptic crossword puzzles revealing some answers pertinent to the mystery are included for the reader to solve.

  

Important Note: This book was listed for free on the date and time of this post. Prices can and do change without prior notice. Please confirm the price of the book before completing your purchase.

For more free mystery ebooks, visit our Free MystereBooks page.

A Dead Red Cadillac by R. P. Dahlke is Today's Second Featured Free MystereBook

MystereBooks is pleased to feature A Dead Red Cadillac by R. P. Dahlke as today's second free mystery ebook.

This title was listed as free as of the date and time of this post. Prices are subject to change without notice. The price displayed on the vendor website at the time of purchase will be the price paid for the book. Please confirm the price of the book before completing your transaction.

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A Dead Red Cadillac
R. P. Dahlke
Publisher: Dead Bear Publishing

"I've been married so many times, they should revoke my license," says New York model and reluctant pilot Lalla Bains.

Running her dad's Crop-Dusting business in Modesto, California she's hoping to dodge the inevitable fortieth birthday party. But when her trophy red '58 Cadillac is found tail-fins up in a nearby lake, the police ask why a widowed piano teacher, who couldn't possibly see beyond the hood ornament, was found strapped in the driver's seat.

Reeling from an interrogation with local homicide, Lalla is determined to extricate herself as a suspect in this strange murder case. Unfortunately, drug running pilots, a cross-dressing convict, a crazy Chihuahua, and the dead woman's hunky nephew throw enough road blocks to keep Lalla neck deep in an investigation that links her family to a twenty-year old murder only she can solve.

  

Important Note: This book was listed for free on the date and time of this post. Prices can and do change without prior notice. Please confirm the price of the book before completing your purchase.

For more free mystery ebooks, visit our Free MystereBooks page.

Just Add Water by Jinx Schwartz is Today's Featured Free MystereBook

MystereBooks is pleased to feature Just Add Water by Jinx Schwartz as today's free mystery ebook.

This title was listed as free as of the date and time of this post. Prices are subject to change without notice. The price displayed on the vendor website at the time of purchase will be the price paid for the book. Please confirm the price of the book before completing your transaction.

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Just Add Water
Jinx Schwartz
A Hetta Coffey Mystery
Publisher: Jinx Schwartz

Hetta Coffey is a woman with a yacht, and she's not afraid to use it. She's a globe-trotting civil engineer with swath of failed multi-national affairs in her jet stream.

Plying the San Francisco waterfront, trolling for triceps, her attention is snagged by a parade of passing yachts — especially their predominantly male skippers — and experiences a champagne-induced epiphany: If she had a boat, she could get a man.

In spite of a spectacular ignorance of all things nautical, Hetta buys her dream boat, but shadowy stalker, an inconvenient body, and Hetta's own self-destructive foibles, give a whole new meaning to the phrase "sink or swim!"

  

Important Note: This book was listed for free on the date and time of this post. Prices can and do change without prior notice. Please confirm the price of the book before completing your purchase.

For more free mystery ebooks, visit our Free MystereBooks page.

Death of a Kitchen Diva by Lee Hollis is Today's Nook Daily Find

MystereBooks is pleased to feature Death of a Kitchen Diva by Lee Hollis as today's Barnes & Noble Nook Daily Find.

The deal price of $2.99 is valid only for today, Friday, October 05, 2012.

Note: The price has been matched by Amazon.com for today only.

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Death of a Kitchen Diva
Lee Hollis
A Hayley Powell, Food and Cocktails Mystery
Kensington

This is the first mystery in this series, introducing the Maine food writer.

Welcome to Bar Harbor, Maine, one of New England's most idyllic coastal towns. But as new food writer Hayley Powell is about to find out, the occasional murder can take a bite out of seaside bliss …

Single mom Hayley Powell is barely keeping her leaking roof over her head when her boss at the Island Times gives her a new assignment — taking over the paper's food column. Hayley's not sure she has the chops — she's an office manager, not a writer, even if her friends clamor for her mouth-watering potluck dishes. But the extra income is tempting, and Hayley's chatty first column is suddenly on everyone's menu — with one exception.

When rival food writer Karen Appelbaum is found face-down dead in a bowl of Hayley's creamy clam chowder, all signs point to Hayley. To clear her name, she'll have to enlist some help, including her BFFs, a perpetually pregnant lobster woman, and a glamorous real estate agent. As she whips up a list of suspects, Hayley discovers a juicy secret about the victim — and finds herself in a dangerous mix with a cold-blooded killer.

 

Important Note: This book was listed at the price mentioned above on the date and time of this post. Prices can and do change without prior notice. Please confirm the price of the book before completing your purchase.

Mystery Bestsellers for the Week Ending October 05, 2012

A list of the top 15 mystery hardcover bestsellers for the week ending October 5th, 2012 has been posted by the Hidden Staircase Mystery Books.

We're guessing that had we categorized The Casual Vacancy as crime fiction it would have displaced the stand-alone thriller Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn at the top of the list. (We consider it "literary fiction" so you won't find it here!) Three new titles enter the list (position in parentheses), including one in the top four, a very rare feat, indeed.

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(4): Mad River
John Sandford

A Virgil Flowers Mystery (6th in series)

Bonnie and Clyde, they thought. And what's-his-name, the sidekick. Three teenagers with dead-end lives, and chips on their shoulders, and guns.

The first person they killed was a highway patrolman. The second was a woman during a robbery. Then, hell, why not keep on going?

As their crime spree cuts a swath through rural Minnesota, some of it captured on the killers' cell phones and sent to a local television station, Bureau of Criminal Apprehension investigator Virgil Flowers joins the growing army of cops trying to run them down. But even he doesn't realize what's about to happen next.

            

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(8): Live by Night
Dennis Lehane

Boston, 1926. The '20s are roaring. Liquor is flowing, bullets are flying, and one man sets out to make his mark on the world.

Prohibition has given rise to an endless network of underground distilleries, speakeasies, gangsters, and corrupt cops. Joe Coughlin, the youngest son of a prominent Boston police captain, has long since turned his back on his strict and proper upbringing. Now having graduated from a childhood of petty theft to a career in the pay of the city's most fearsome mobsters, Joe enjoys the spoils, thrills, and notoriety of being an outlaw.

But life on the dark side carries a heavy price. In a time when ruthless men of ambition, armed with cash, illegal booze, and guns, battle for control, no one — neither family nor friend, enemy nor lover — can be trusted. Beyond money and power, even the threat of prison, one fate seems most likely for men like Joe: an early death. But until that day, he and his friends are determined to live life to the hilt.

Joe embarks on a dizzying journey up the ladder of organized crime that takes him from the flash of Jazz Age Boston to the sensual shimmer of Tampa's Latin Quarter to the sizzling streets of Cuba.

            

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(9): Phantom
Jo Nesbø

A Harry Hole Mystery (9th in series)

When Harry left Oslo again for Hong Kong — fleeing the traumas of life as a cop — he thought he was there for good. But then the unthinkable happened. The son of the woman he loved, lost, and still loves is arrested for murder: Oleg, the boy Harry helped raise but couldn't help deserting when he fled. Harry has come back to prove that Oleg is not a killer.

Barred from rejoining the police force, he sets out on a solitary, increasingly dangerous investigation that takes him deep into the world of the most virulent drug to ever hit the streets of Oslo (and the careers of some of the city's highest officials), and into the maze of his own past, where he will find the wrenching truth that finally matters to Oleg, and to himself.

            

Winners of the 2012 Macavity Awards Announced

Bouchercon 2012 is underway in Cleveland this week — Crime Fiction Rocks! — and that means award presentations!

About 10 minutes ago we posted the winners of the Barry Awards; now we have the winners of the Macavity Awards, selected by the members of Mystery Readers International.

• Best Mystery Novel: Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead by Sara Gran (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

• Best First Mystery Novel: All Cry Chaos by Leonard Rosen (Permanent Press) — Mysterious Reviews also selected this book as one of the best mysteries of 2011

• Best Mystery-Related Non-Fiction: The Sookie Stackhouse Companion by Charlaine Harris (Ace)

• Best Mystery Short Story: Disarming by Dana Cameron (Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, June 2011)

• Sue Feder Historical Mystery Award: Dandy Gilver and the Proper Treatment of Bloodstains by Catriona McPherson (Minotaur Books)

Special thanks to The Rap Sheet for notifying us of the results.