Because so many of Margaret Millar's novels consider married couples - often at the point in which the relationship is strained, if not fractured - one wonders about her relationship with Ken Millar (better known as Ross MacDonald, who also wrote mysteries). Did they squabble like Esther and Ron do
There is, about an hour's drive from Toronto, a small town called Paris, on the Grand River. I've visited it a couple of times and I have travelled through it, by train, countless times. Rarely, on one of those rail journeys, did I miss that broad curve of the tracks, the
Readers familiar with Margaret Millar's suspense novels, will immediately recognize her style and language in Wives and Lovers. (Just yesterday I discussed Vanish in an Instant, another volume in the Syndicate reprint series.) "It was a shoebox of a room, with the ceiling pressed down on it like a lid, and
In the wake of my IFOA reading list and the literary prizelists of the season, my November reading felt relatively whimsical. Without duedates attached to the majority of my reading, it was a pleasure to slip into volumes which had sat untouched in recent weeks. Each of these three volumes covers,
What's interesting about each of these novels is that none fits a traditional model in the suspense genre. Shari Lapena's The Couple Next Door is the closest to a conventional thriller. But even her novel spends more time on characterization and atmosphere than many loyal genre readers would tolerate. Nonetheless, she
