Tag Archives: crimereads

CrimeReads: How I Stopped Worrying About The Rules And Learned To Write A Mystery Novel

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Thanks to CrimeReads for featuring an essay on my journey to writing Skin Deep.

One of my greatest thrills as a college student was when I was let into the intermediate-level creative writing workshop. You couldn’t just sign up and walk in—you had to submit a short story good enough for the professor to deem you worthy. That first day, I sat around the rectangular table with my future colleagues and was handed a set of rules for the class. It’s been almost thirty years since I laid eyes on this single xeroxed sheet, but I can still remember one of them: You will not write stories about serial murderers, or even regular murderers.

CrimeReads

12 Novels You Should Read in July – CrimeReads

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Big thanks to the kind folks at CrimeReads for highlighting Skin Deep in their July roundup!

Here’s more evidence that the private detective is enjoying a very welcomed resurgence in the crime fiction world. Sung J. Woo’s new novel features an inimitable PI, Siobhan O’Brien, a Korean adoptee who has somewhat haphazardly inherited her old boss’s agency and finds herself at a crossroads, unsure if she should continue down the line. The proverbial last job comes through, dragging Siobhan upstate to a seemingly idyllic liberal arts college with a girl gone missing from her dorm. The college is a hotbed of subcultures, and Siobhan has to learn each of their quirks and rivalries to keep the case moving forward. Skin Deep manages to be an entertaining, wickedly clever mystery and also a thoughtful meditation on adoption, culture, and identity. –DM

CrimeReads