The Books Briefing: A Study in Sleuthing

📚 The Darkest Secret, by Alex Marwood

📚 Women Crime Writers, edited by Sarah Weinman

📚 You Will Know Me, by Megan Abbott

📚 The Secret Place, by Tana French

📚 Woman With a Secret, by Sophie Hannah

📚 Hard Light, by Elizabeth Hand

📚 What Remains of Me, by Alison Gaylin

The two Raymond Chandler sentences that changed Walter Mosley’s life

“This well-aimed description … does more than conjure the ice-cool calmness of a practiced killer. It juxtaposes light and dark, serenity and violence, in a way that reaches beyond the physical into the anguished struggle of the human heart.”

📚 The Long Goodbye, by Raymond Chandler

📚 Parishioner, by Walter Mosley

The new true crime

“In many ways, the genre hasn’t changed much since the days of Poe or Capote … But in other, deeper ways, it has. New forces—improved technology, new media, and less trust in institutions—have helped shape true crime into a truly modern form.”

📚 The Mystery of Marie Roget, by Edgar Allan Poe

📚 In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote

🎧 Serial, hosted by Sarah Koenig

📺 The Jinx, directed by Andrew Jarecki

(S. Borisov / Shutterstock)

The unlikely father of Miami crime fiction

“[Charles] Willeford’s last four novels (1984-88) spanned Miami’s metamorphosis from vacationer and retiree haven to the nation’s capital of glamour, drugs, and weird crime.”

📚 Miami Blues, by Charles Willeford

What writers can learn from Goodnight Moon

“Whether it’s a child or adult reader, the impulse is to invent stories that explain how the things in the room connect. We can’t help trying to answer the question why—which, for me, is the fundamental question of fiction.”

📚 Goodnight Moon, by Margaret Wise Brown

📚Little Fires Everywhere, by Celeste Ng

The Reference Desk

(New York Public Library)

Write to the Books Briefing team at booksbriefing@theatlantic.com or reply directly to this email with any of your reading-related dilemmas. We might feature one of your questions in a future edition of the Books Briefing and offer a few books or related Atlantic pieces that might help you out.

About us: This week’s newsletter is written by Rosa Inocencio Smith. On the advice of a colleague, she’s finally reading Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights.

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Rosa Inocencio Smith is an assistant editor at The Atlantic.