Assignment 1: In week 1, I said I was going to follow Mystery Readers International but I quickly decided I didn't like that site very much and switched to Stop, You're Killing Me! I didn't think Mystery Readers International was too helpful because you have to pay to download Mystery Readers Journal.
While Stop, You're Killing Me! has a limited offering of author read-alikes, the category read-alike list is more extensive. I also thought the genre index as well as the location index, job index and historical index would be very helpful for readers advisory. Maybe there are lots of people out there who want to read about mysteries involving pilots, pet sitters or even librarians!
I also signed up for the newsletter which is released twice a month. The first issue has new authors and characters that have been added and the mid-month issue lists current and future book and audio releases. This site is a useful tool and it's free.
Assignment 2 & 3: I decided to explore cozy mysteries, techno thrillers and psychological thrillers.
Culinary Capers
There are many fans of culinary mysteries and that made it fairly easy to locate fan sites. After Googling "fan websites culinary mystery" I came across a blog - cozy-mystery.com/blog. The author of the blog was excited about Susanna Calkins' A Murder at Rosamund's Gate. Other entries discussed the Charmed Pie Shoppe Mystery series by Ellery Adams and The State of the Onion (White House Chef mystery #1) by Julie Hyzy.
Popular authors in this genre include Joanne Fluke, Diane Mott Davidson, Laura Childs and Jenn McKinlay. Culinary mysteries are often upbeat, witty, engaging, funny and heartwarming. They are considered part of the cozy mystery subgenre and as such are not very violent.
Techno Thrillers
A lot of the blogs and fan sites I found for techno thrillers seem to be for aspiring techno thriller authors. However, some of them actually discuss the genre. One such site was The Pulp Super Fan. The blogger discusses Fragment by Warren Fahy and brings up the concept of New Pulp - "stories by modern fans and authors that recreate the style of adventures
that appeared in the pulp magazines during the pulp era."
Dan Brown, Douglas Preston, Michael Crichton and Stephen Coonts are among the top authors in the genre. Techno thrillers are plot-driven, fast-paced, suspenseful and descriptive.
Psychological Thrillers
Again, there are many sites devoted to psychological thrillers. People are passionate about the types of novels they like to read and write. Fans still seem to be buzzing about Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl, which reminds me that I really need to read it...
I liked the description Novelist provided for this genre, explaining that it "answers the question: 'what really goes on in people's minds?'" Books in this category are fast-paced, menacing, suspenseful, violent and intricately plotted. Dean Koontz, Thomas Harris, Tara French and Gillian Flynn write in this genre.
Mashups
I read an interesting article in Publishers Weekly from last September that discussed the trend of genre mashups in young adult literature. The Diviners by Libba Bray, a book I annotated in Week 2, was mentioned in the article. Bray combines historical fiction with elements of the supernatural and the occult and tosses in a little bit of romance to boot.
Another example of a genre mashup is the Merry Gentry series by Laurell K. Hamilton. This series features a crime-solving fairy princess, crossing over into both mystery and fantasy. I read about this series on a blog called Read Learn Write. The author of the blog nicely described why mashups are popular and why they broaden readership for various genres. "Readers that might not read straight horror, or fantasy are more likely to test their taste buds on a lighter, less strongly flavored version." From the little I've read about mashups and from the books I've read recently, it seems like genre mashups are becoming more common.
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