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Neil Nyren

Neil Nyren

Neil Nyren is the former evp, associate publisher, and editor in chief of G.P. Putnam’s Sons, and the winner of the 2017 Ellery Queen Award from the Mystery Writers of America. Among the writers of crime and suspense he has edited are Tom Clancy, Clive Cussler, John Sandford, C. J. Box, Robert Crais, Carl Hiaasen, Daniel Silva, Jack Higgins, Frederick Forsyth, Ken Follett, Jonathan Kellerman, Ed McBain and Ace Atkins. He now writes about crime fiction and publishing for CrimeReads, BookTrib, The Big Thrill, and The Third Degree, among others, and is a contributing writer to the Anthony/Agatha/Macavity-winning How to Write a Mystery.

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Neil Nyren

Thrillers

“All That’s Bright and Gone” on the Hunt for a Killer

A bit more than confused, though. When we first meet Aoife Scott, age six, in All That’s Bright and Gone (Crooked Lane Books), she’s waiting to see a child therapist, because her mother’s just had a public breakdown, and now they’re keeping Mama someplace and won’t let her come home. Aoife doesn’t know…
Neil Nyren
November 27, 2019
Thrillers

Welcome to “The House of Brides,” a Modern Gothic

“There” is Barnsley House, a rambling estate turned into a hotel in the West Country of England, and the subject of an enormously bestselling book called The House of Brides. It chronicles the generations of women who married into the infamous Summer family. From crime novelist Gertrude, who threw herself…
Neil Nyren
September 25, 2019
Thrillers

The Boy in the Floor, the Whisper at the Window

One of the quotes for Alex North’s The Whisper Man (Celadon) calls it a “seamless blend of Harlan Coben, Stephen King, and Thomas Harris.” I’d say that’s just about right. Novelist Tom Kennedy and his seven-year-old son Jake are both still grieving the death of the boy’s mother, Rebecca. Everything…
Neil Nyren
July 29, 2019
Thrillers

Blood on the Page: Chanelle Benz’s “The Gone Dead”

In Chanelle Benz’s The Gone Dead (Ecco), the dead aren’t really gone. Billie James has returned to the dilapidated house in Greendale, Mississippi, where her father, a renowned black poet, lived. She hasn’t seen it in thirty years. “She had forgotten about the house, figured it’d been knocked down forever…
Neil Nyren
June 24, 2019
Thrillers

War, Criminality, and “The Right Sort of Man”

“Did your hunch prove correct?” asked Gwen. “It did,” replied Iris, as she began typing her notes of the interview. “What was it about?” “Her stockings.” “Were her seams not straight?” “The seams were straight,” said Iris. “The girl is crooked.” It is June 1946 in London. The war is…
Neil Nyren
May 31, 2019
Fiction

Why is the Servant Covered in Their Blood?

 From the prisoners’ hold, they take me through the gallery, down the stairs and past the table crawling with barristers and clerks. Around me a river of faces in flood, their mutters rising, blending with the lawyers’ whispers. A noise that hums with all the spite of bees in a…
Neil Nyren
April 29, 2019
Thrillers

A Mystery and a Mind Unravel in “The Silent Patient”

Alex Michaelides grew up reading Agatha Christie “obsessively,” but she never wrote anything like this. The Silent Patient (Celadon Books) grips you immediately, but where it goes is completely unpredictable – and it takes you to dark corners of the human psyche you never knew existed. “I love him so totally,…
Neil Nyren
February 6, 2019
Thrillers

Ancient Truths, Modern Evil, in Hearts of the Missing

The spirit of Tony Hillerman hovers over every page of Carol Potenza’s debut novel Hearts of the Missing (Minotaur), so it’s no surprise that, when still unpublished, it won the 2017 Hillerman Prize for the best first mystery set in the Southwest. Hillerman’s spirit is far from the only ghost that…
Neil Nyren
December 4, 2018
Thrillers

Opium and Identity: 19th Century Woman Battles Crime

Port Townsend, Washington, 1887. An ex-Pinkerton agent named Alma Rosales is hunting for opium stolen from her employer, criminal boss Delphine Beaumond, one of the most dangerous women in the Northwest. Also on the hunt is a dockworker named Jack Camp, a rough brawler with his own plans for the…
Neil Nyren
November 7, 2018
Thrillers

Vanished Lives-Secrets in “Find Me Gone”

Find Me Gone  (Harper) is unusual in many respects -- in its story, its author, and the creation of the book itself. Belgian author Sarah Meuleman says it is the sum of everything she has been and done in her life: a singer-songwriter, a journalist, a television host, a writer…
Neil Nyren
October 25, 2018
Thrillers

Stuart Turton’s Intricate Plot Bends Minds and Genres

This may very well be the twistiest, most intricate crime novel you’ll read this year. A tall order, I know, given the competition, but trust me on this. The author, Stuart Turton, calls it “an Agatha Christie mystery in a Groundhog Day loop, with a bit of Quantum Leap.” Others have…
Neil Nyren
September 18, 2018