Execute Plan B!

I will let you in on a little secret about my latest Kirkus Reviews column, which was posted earlier this morning.

I’d originally planned to devote that piece’s full length to critiquing a single new novel. However, I wound up not really enjoying the book I had chosen. This happens every now and then when you’re penning a regular books column; you have absolutely no guarantee, when launching into a novel, that it will be satisfying enough or even sufficiently interesting to write about—yet you’re still scheduled to write something. In this case, I decided that the work in question was worth commenting on ... but I couldn’t address it alone. I needed to package it along with my thoughts on a couple of other recent releases I’d found more rewarding.

So click right here to read about three fresh additions to the crime/mystery/thriller genre: Murder Never Knocks, by Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins; The Other Widow, by Susan Crawford; and The Sign of Fear, by Robert Ryan. I bet you’ll be able to guess which one of that trio I had initially thought to appraise on its own.