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4 days ago | 
chireviewofbooks.com | Lori Rader-Day
This will certainly reveal more about me than Megan Abbott, who, as the author of the new tense and atmospheric novel El Dorado Drive, is the true object of this piece. But here we go: Megan Abbott is the source of an intense gothic ambivalence for me. I want to be her very best friend, have her teach me everything she knows as a writer—and, also, she scares me. If you met her in person, you’d think I was telling you a slant tale. She’s small, elegant, delightful, funny. Personable.
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Mar 18, 2025 | 
chireviewofbooks.com | Lori Rader-Day
We hear Florida is a wild place, a fun park-shaped peninsula where, bad news, alligators can apparently climb walls. The literature of Florida is similarly outlandish: Karen Russell, Carl Hiassen, Tim Dorsey—all writers who seem to be having far more fun than most.
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Jan 28, 2025 | 
chireviewofbooks.com | Lori Rader-Day
In Neko Case’s riveting new memoir, The Harder I Fight the More I Love You, the musician often refers to herself as an animal: a “beast” as a child, as someone still with “werewolf inside”—most often, a “wounded critter.” It’s not difficult, reading this primal howl of a book, to see why Case might have identified with the tenderness of animals.
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Dec 3, 2024 | 
chireviewofbooks.com | Lori Rader-Day
It might be a trope, but crime novelist Alex Segura is pretty mild-mannered. Behind his Clark Kentish super kindness is a hard-working writer trying to bring zap! and pow! to crime fiction while also giving voice to underrepresented characters in the world he grew up in: comic books. Segura worked in the comics trade for years and, side-hustle style, wrote and published a series of private investigator novels before deciding to cross the streams.
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Nov 10, 2023 | 
chireviewofbooks.com | Lori Rader-Day
There’s no way to ease into this. I met James Kennedy in person while he was dressed as a tornado. If your brain can stretch to imagine what that looked like and how it might be done, Kennedy’s new book, Bride of the Tornado, is for you. With that particular Midwest experience of high winds and destruction turned into the horror novel’s monster, Bride of the Tornado is a high-velocity twister of a ride.
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Oct 3, 2023 | 
crimereads.com | Lori Rader-Day
My historical novel published in 2021, Death at Greenway, used research on the real people who had lived on the estate of Agatha Christie’s holiday home in the English Riviera during World War II. Faced with the universe of facts I could lay my hands on, I had to be selective about which details were worth including. Complex family arrangements, in particular, didn’t carry enough story weight.
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Sep 26, 2023 | 
redcarpetcrash.com | Lori Rader-Day
One rainy night fifteen years ago, a knock at the door changed Liss Kehoe’s life forever. On that night, Ashley Hay stood on Liss’s front porch and handed over her brand-new baby Callan. She was never seen or heard from again.
Since then, Liss has raised Callan as her own, and loves him as fiercely as any mother would. But in the back of her mind, she’s always wondered whether Ashley is still out there somewhere—and feared what might happen if she comes back.
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Sep 22, 2023 | 
chireviewofbooks.com | Lori Rader-Day
As a crime fiction writer and fan, I always get excited when a new Laura Lippman book is announced. When I heard that Prom Mom was on the way, I leapt to snag an opportunity to read it and ask Lippman a few questions. Turns out, I did that last time a new Laura Lippman book was out. The Chicago Review of Books didn’t stop me—or won’t? Wouldn’t dare?—so here we are. In Prom Mom, Lippman takes us back to high school, 1997.
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Sep 6, 2023 | 
redcarpetcrash.com | Lori Rader-Day
Fifteen years ago, Ashley Hay handed over her son Callan to Liss, who’s husband happened to be the father, and then vanished out of their lives. Liss became a mother to him, and they both raised him. Now today, her car and body are found in the water by their house, and an investigation is opened as to what might have happened to her 15 years ago. Everyone now becomes a suspect, and there are lots of questions, and shocking secrets we learn along the way. Just what did happen all those years ago?
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Sep 1, 2023 | 
booklistonline.com | Lori Rader-Day
Oct. 2023. 384p. Morrow, $18.99 (9780063293335); e-book (9780063293342).
REVIEW.
First published September 1, 2023 ().
Barely out of her teens, Liss leans into her dreams of a picture-perfect family, forgives her husband Link’s cheating, and raises his son, Callan, as her own. Liss is the only mother Callan knows after his biological mother, Ashley, disappears, and she revels in motherhood and the privileges of her marriage to the all-powerful sheriff’s golden child.
