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- Cordell Logan Series
What’s in a name? Plenty, if you’re a storyteller and you aspire to set your book’s protagonist apart in the world of crime fiction. Myriad considerations factor into how a writer goes about assigning their hero a name. Sometimes it’s a simple function of the way the name sounds, how it rolls off the tongue. Michael Connolly, with whom I had the pleasure of sharing several...
Recent studies have found that most people Google themselves. Indeed, a survey in May 2021 of nearly 9,400 adults* found that nearly one in ten people look up their name online every day using one or more search engines. “Ego surfing,” it’s called. Vanity and curiosity aside, internet searches are a good way to research the history of a prospective dinner date, or the background of...
I’ve read no shortage of spectacular books over the years, more than a few of which came wrapped in some pretty unspectacular covers. Conversely, I’ve read—or tried to read–some truly awful books that came camouflaged behind the most fantastic and ultimately misleading covers imaginable. Books are a lot like people. As the old adage goes, looks can be deceiving. Never judge what’s inside either based on outward...
On that day in June 1994, when Los Angeles police officers brought in O.J. Simpson for questioning in the murders of his ex-wife, Nicole, and her friend, Ron Goldman, I was 800 miles in Durango, Colorado, working on a cheeseburger, nursing a cold beer, and watching the media frenzy play out on a wall-mounted TV in the bar where I was having lunch. The sky over downtown LA...
I’ve strung together many words over the long span of my career as a journalist and, more recently, novelist. It would not be hyperbole to say that several million sentences have appeared in print under my name, though how many specifically would be anyone’s guess. In truth, there have been few sentences I ever constructed that I reread weeks, months or years later and didn’t...
Much as I used to enjoy watching major league baseball, I quit following the sport long ago. My interest waned with the introduction of modern free agency. It became a chore keeping track from one week to the next which player was on what team. Plus, I found myself chaffing at the notion of grown men getting paid tens of millions of dollars every season to play a...