Scott Adlerberg

Feb 24, 2024 | mysterytribune.com | Scott Adlerberg

Scott Adlerberg takes a closer look at Half Crime, a new collection of stories by Rusty Barnes. Half Crime is an apt title for this short story collection by Rusty Barnes. It’s a book that inhabits a space somewhere between genre fiction and what people call literary fiction, the nine stories in here dealing with crime not as a plot device or a puzzle to be solved, but as an integral part of hardscrabble lives in which daily existence is difficult.

Jan 4, 2024 | crimereads.com | Scott Adlerberg

Cornell Woolrich published Black Alibi in 1942. His tenth book overall, it was the third in his series of “Black” novels. The Bride Wore Black (1940), later adapted into a film by Francois Truffaut, led the sequence off, succeeded by The Black Curtain (1941), The Black Angel (1943), The Black Path of Fear (1944), and Rendezvous in Black (1948).

Sep 8, 2023 | mysterytribune.com | Scott Adlerberg

Author Scott Adlerberg takes a closer look at The Stolen Coast, the new novel by Dwyer Murphy. I love novels that, however subtly, employ defamiliarization. These are the books that take something the reader recognizes as familiar and through their technique and presentation make that something quite strange. The goal isn’t strangeness for its own sake, of course, but to present a world or subject in an unexpected way for the reader’s benefit.

Jul 11, 2023 | crimereads.com | Scott Adlerberg

There’s a region touching on three areas of fiction that I like to explore when writing. It’s the region where mystery story meets horror story meets psychological thriller. You can play with a lot of ambiguity in this zone. Does an odd and creepy situation connected to a crime have a rational explanation, or will the final revelation involve the supernatural? If the narrative is told in the first person, how reliable is the narrator?

Jul 10, 2023 | litreactor.com | Scott Adlerberg

My new novel, The Screaming Child, published by Ghoulish Books, is a novel that mixes mystery with horror. It’s a story told from the point of view of a woman named Eleanor, a mother trying to go on with her life after her 12-year-old son has vanished. Perhaps he was murdered, perhaps kidnapped. The police are investigating. To keep herself busy, Eleanor leaves the city for a distant rural area to finish a book she is writing about an explorer.