If you are a crime, thriller, or mystery fan and you haven’t checked out criminalelement.com, stop everything and go right now. We’ll wait...
You’re back? Amazing, right? Criminal Element is a crime-fiction-community website owned and operated by Macmillan. “You can’t claim to be an authoritative voice on a genre if you refuse to acknowledge a significant portion of it,” says Joe Brosnan, marketing manager at St. Martin’s Press/Minotaur Books and the site manager for Criminal Element. “[But] we’re firmly publisher agnostic and discuss all books, whether they’re from a Big Five house or self-published.” Created in 2011, Criminal Element features reviews, excerpts, original author essays, cover reveals, shopping lists, film and television reviews, conference and awards coverage, and everything in between. Brosnan adds, “Criminal Element aims to offer crime fiction lovers a home where they can read about their favorite series, discover new authors, and interact with like-minded armchair detectives. There are so many authors out there waiting to be discovered. All you have to do is look for the clues.”
The website is bringing mayhem to BookExpo at a panel titled “Criminal Element Presents Two Truths & a Lie Featuring Macmillan Authors.” Moderator Brosnan will be joined by Peter Blauner (Sunrise Highway, Minotaur, Sept.), Hank Phillippi Ryan (Trust Me, Forge, Aug.), and debut author Zoje Stage (Baby Teeth, St. Martin’s, July). The authors have shared truths and lies about their books and their lives on the website already and will share even more—about their writing habits, reading preferences, and even some personal quirks—on the panel. They will discuss with Brosnan the question of “truth” and the increased use of unreliable narrators in thriller fiction. The authors will also interrogate each other to sniff out truths and lies. The idea is to keep it light and fun, explains Brosnan. Meanwhile, the audience will be divided up into three teams, with each assigned to an author. The author who correctly identifies the most truths and lies wins free books for his or her team.
Brosnan believes crime fiction not only offers readers a perfect escape from the real world but can be an instructive look into our society. “We’re in the age of the unreliable narrator, and that’s no accident,” he says. “All you have to do is scroll through your Facebook feed or turn on the news, and you’re greeted by unreliable information disseminated through unreliable sources.”
Then again, he could be lying.
