Finally! I’ve finished work on Daemon Blood, the third book in the Daemon World series. The novel will go on sale March 8, 2022. Meanwhile, check out Daemon Blood‘s sensational cover, designed by Damonza.com. I think the image captures fully the tension and eerie atmosphere of this story about a looming daemon war. I hope […]
Both the unnamed tortoise and I need your help. That’s why I’m holding a name-the-tortoise contest to find the cleverest, most apt name for Lu’s pet. You can find out more about the newest addition to Lu’s world when Daemon Blood comes out March 8, 2022. So, here are the contest details. If I’ve […]
Dark and violent, but a love story nonetheless. “What Love Is” appears in Volume 2 of the anthology What We Talk About When We Talk About It, published last October by Darkhouse Books. The inspiration for my love story grew from my early childhood in Soldiers Summit, Utah. The town was mostly ruins, the wooden […]
Imagine being wrongly accused, arrested and jailed for a crime you didn’t commit. Everyone—your colleagues, your friends, maybe even your life partner—assumes you must be guilty. After all, the police wouldn’t arrest you without solid evidence. Recently I read two thrillers based on this nightmarish scenario. The protagonists of both Rachel Caine’s Stillhouse Lake and […]
I wrote this review of Karen Marie Moning’s Shadowfever a few years back and rediscovered it a couple of months ago when I downloaded material from an inactive blog of mine before it went offline. The Shadow series holds a special significance to me. While reading the books I fell in love with urban fantasy. […]
Look for Daemon Blood, the third volume of the Daemon World series, on March 8, 2022. The first novel in the series, Talion, recounts how the serial killer Rad Sanders stalks and kidnaps fifteen-year-olds Lu Jakes and Lisa Duncan. Lu must turn to the daemon Talion for help. But he has a price. Ten years […]
The image remains among the most vivid of my early childhood. My three-year-old brother Steve stood in front of our house in Soldiers Summit, wearing one of my dresses as punishment for—something. I don’t recall much about the dress, just a general impression of frills. I’m pretty sure the dress had a sash that tied […]
I’m excited to announce that the next Kelly Durrell crime thriller, Hometown Boys, will come out on January 21, 2019. The novel will be available in paperback and ebook editions. I’m also planning an audio book edition sometime in the future. In the meantime, you can preorder the ebook from Amazon and several other online […]
I was recently saddened to learn that author Brian Sfinas had died after a short illness. Although I never met Brian face to face, I considered him a friend. He helped me redesign my old blog, Ancient Children—in fact, he did the heavy lifting on that job—and we worked together during the time that he […]
Vu Tran’s novel Dragonfish combines a noir mystery with a family saga and adds a dash of ambiguity of the kind usually associated with literary fiction. Written in elegant prose, it begins as a familiar kind of detective story, the search for a missing person, but Tran seems more concerned with the mystery than its […]
Ever since I discovered the pleasure of listening to audio books, I’ve thought about making audio versions of my novels. But the high cost of production and my unfamiliarity with the process kept me from moving ahead. Then, in mid-May of 2017, my thriller Darkroom won First Prize for Fiction in the IndieReader Discovery Awards. […]
Like millions of other Americans, my husband and I made a pilgrimage into the path of totality on August 21, day of the Great American Eclipse. Or rather, I made a pilgrimage. Joe came along to keep me out of trouble. We live in Charleston, Illinois, a town where the moon would obscure 95% of […]
