Legal mysteries and thrillers have been popular through the years, with Perry Mason being the best known. As evidence of their readership numbers, new titles continue to be published year after year, including two of the most recent, Karen E. Olson's fourth installment in the series with police reporter Annie Seymour, and John Darnton's Black and White and Dead All Over.
In a New York Times interview, Olson, who spent 16 years as a nighttime editor for The New Haven Register, says that unlike her protagonist, she never found a body in her trunk or had to swim for her life across New Haven Harbor. “That’s why Annie is so ‘wow,’” said Olson. “I gave her the journalism career I always imagined.”
Time Magazine featured Darnton's book and concluded it's really a novel about the Times, thinly disguised as a murder mystery. A talented former correspondent and editor in his own right, Darnton has an insider's view that breathes life and cynicism into his plot and provides fodder for snarky descriptions, such as the ancient pressroom at City Hall looking like "a crowded Mayan ruin littered with the detritus of tourists," and the relentless questions rained on a journalist writing a page-one story on deadline being an experience "like getting nibbled to death by ducks."
While we're on the subject — any favorites of yours featuring legal beagle protagonists or themes?
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