0:07
There is an animated show, a real show, called Mike Tyson Mysteries
Everyone. Everyone listen up. EVERYONE LISTEN UP.
Apparently…apparently… apparently… there’s an animated Hanna-Barbara style TV show where Mike Tyson solves crimes? Like, it’s in the style of Scooby-Doo. It aired on TV. It aired on TV for SIXTY NINE episodes from 2014-2020. Did you know this? I didn’t know this! I DIDN’T KNOW THIS.
What is it about? Well, as I said, I had NO idea, so I went to IMDb.
0:36
Blood River Witch
She drove deep through the trees until her truck’s tires spun loose in the mud and it was there she got out. Her flashlight made night’s theater of the june bugs and the buttonbush, errant shadows leaping from cottonwood like creatures undiscovered.
She spotted Jackson’s patrol car, muddied to hell within a stone’s throw of the Miller tobacco barn. The place was mostly how she remembered it. Gap-toothed planking, sunken and slanted like a last-call drunk. Left standing despite the time, prayers, and collective common sense that should’ve seen it razed from existence years ago. Maybe she ought’ve done it herself. Back then. Purging her name and the place with a single matchstick.
She didn’t know what to make of the tobacco barn’s persistence except that nature might hold the deed to what man builds, but even nature has the good sense of what to leave untouched, and could such a place even be said to be man-made if the devil himself was whispered to live here?
She raised her flashlight and waved it around through the dark. “Jackson?”
“Over here.” His flashlight edged around the barn, shivering in the dark.
She’d been getting ready for bed when she got the call and still wore her pajama pants, which she hitched up to her knees as she schlepped through the belching mud. Jackson stood with his flashlight wandering the fire-licked chinking, most of the exterior worn down to pale slats. Decades of sun and rainfall and occasional evil.
Her flashlight found Jackson’s bloodless face, as transparent as a dime bag. She might’ve expected as much. When he’d radioed her earlier, his voice was flatter than she’d ever heard it, none of his usual schoolyard bravado. She thought maybe he’d been drinking on the job again, but even if he had, drinking didn’t account for lips gone white. Sweat dripping down his neck and collecting in his collarbones.
“You were the first one I thought to call,” Jackson breathed like he’d run all this way. “Forgot you were off today.”
She waved off the apology like a mosquito. “Where is it?”
He shone his flashlight inside the barn, but she didn’t follow it.
“Who called it in?” she asked.
“Call came in half hour ago,” he said.
“Yeah, and I’m asking who.”
“Dispatch didn’t get a name.”
“A number then?”
“Just take a look. Goddamnit.”
The barn door was ajar against the breeze. Jackson’s cheeks puffed as he swallowed something down. He nodded once it’d passed.
The door swung on a single hinge, rusted beyond sound. A step forward and she heard a current sizzling through the air. She looked about for an electrical box or generator or simple telephone pole—impossible, this near the riverbank—until her flashlight finally traced the drone into the barn’s shallow belly where massed a plague of flies assembled into the shape of a body held upside down, outstretched and still. Feet to the rooftop and propped against the wall. Like it was standing on its head for her to see.
For a short second the dead nearly looked alive with the flies moving over the corpse.Then came the smell. Pushed like a fist down her throat, fingers tickling her stomach. She covered her mouth and nose with a handkerchief she’d brought only for this purpose.
For a short second the dead nearly looked alive with the flies moving over the corpse. She reached to shoo the flies off, and as they scattered her fingers nearly brushed the inside of the corpse’s belly, flayed open like curtains. A bone-bound book with nothing written inside but a rib cage and spine. Hung upside down like a rack of meat, pale wrists nailed to a two-by-four level with her ankles. And there before the inverted cross and its gutless crucifant lay a fly-ridden pile of shining insides scooped from the now- empty hollow of skin. Lungs draped over the top of the mess like two blankets keeping the rest of their organs warm.
She came out of the barn coughing, snot dripping from her nose and burning. Flies in her hair, she was convinced they’d be there forever, shampoo and combs be damned. She pointed back at where she’d come.
Jackson said, “Yeah.”
She wanted to feel the cool mud cover her but refused to drop to her knees. “Who called it in?”
“We didn’t get a name. I don’t know.”
“Put out a call then.”
“To who?”
“Everybody. Anybody. We’ll get to setting a perimeter.”
She scanned the dark and saw nothing but its many flashing eyes.
“Should I get State?” he asked.
“What’s Sheriff Parsons said?”
“I haven’t heard back.” Jackson’s cheeks puffed again with something vile. “He’s kissing babies in Frankfort last I knew.”
She shone her flashlight through the door. It was all still there how she remembered, how she’d dreamt of it since, waking only to the cold-sweat comfort of the here and now, but here it all was again. “God’s sakes.”
“I know it.” Jackson crouched down, his head hung between his knees. Breathing like he was birthing a child.
She’d never asked and didn’t know for certain, but he must’ve been not a day over thirty years old.
5:14
Karen Mack and Jennifer Kaufman on Co-Writing a Shakespearean Las Vegas Crime Saga
Talk about writing what you know! That’s exactly what Karen Mack and Jennifer Kaufman did when they sourced third-generation Nevadan Karen Mack’s upbringing in a casino-owning family in Las Vegas during the time when gambling was a strictly family business.
The Kings of Las Vegas is a tale of greed, temptation, misogyny and murder with biblical and Shakespearean underpinnings.
*
Nancie Clare: The Kings of Las Vegas is brimming with themes that are both biblical and Shakespearean.
Karen Mack: Absolutely. Family sagas!
NC: How did the story develop, and at what point did you decide— in your infinite wisdom—that The Kings of Las Vegas needed to be a crime fiction novel?
KM: Well, I grew up in Las Vegas and we were talking about growing up there in the 90s when it was still kind of a frontier town with a lot of crime. So much of the book is based on authentic people, authentic things that happened. I grew up with a guy across the street named Ice Pick Willie, and I thought that was a normal name! And Dave “The Man” Berman. I thought “The Man” was a normal middle name.
What do they say about Las Vegas? It’s a sunny place for shady people, but we didn’t think of it as crime fiction. We just told the story as I remember it.
NC: It wasn’t an “Oh, let’s write crime fiction” moment, it was a biographical “Let’s just tell the story?”
Jennifer Kaufman: It was like, what is it like to grow up in Vegas and be part of a casino family!
KM: [In Las Vegas] Casino families are kind of like the firemen and the policemen. Casinos are passed down from the grandfather to the father and usually to the son. We wanted to tell the story of a woman coming into that world—to a male dominated world that had a lot of violence.
JK: The crime part of it was that for families that own casinos, the wolves are always at the door. So, we did two things: We made the protagonist a woman; and we had her have a very violent background. And her character becomes more violent and tougher as things got rougher. We took the story from Karen’s experiences and just turned it into this family Shakespearean drama.
KM: It’s also a fish-out-of-water story because Josie King, our protagonist, was exiled when she was sixteen; her father wanted to get her out of the city. Coming back, it’s a world that she has been away from for a long time, but she remembers much of what went on.
But now she has a child of her own and she didn’t [think she] wanted to be a part of that world. And the way she rises to the occasion is being as tough and as sneaky and as aggressive as everyone else. But in the end, she wanted to protect her father and her grandfather’s….
JK: Legacy.
KM: I can remember when I was little and my grandfather would take me out in the desert and he’d go, “One day there’s going to be houses, there are going to be churches, there’s going to be all this.” These men were visionaries and Josie didn’t want to let their legacy be stolen. So that propelled her.
NC: We should mention the double entendre of the title, The Kings of Vegas—Josie’s last name is King. And there are many crime fiction elements: Financial shenanigans and guns and buckets of blood and booze and drugs and cigarettes.
But the first thing that struck me was the patrimony. In chapter two, there’s an observation about Josie who is driving to Las Vegas for her father’s funeral. You wrote,” She enjoyed being underestimated. It gave her an advantage.”
Josie is the prodigal daughter. This is where we get biblical from the distaff side. She was exiled as a teenager and she’s home to bury the King. She’s a woman going back to Vegas where women are fungible. It’s another wonderful word that you used, but there are sharp teeth in there. She’s definitely a Regan and I don’t mean Ronald.
KM: Josie is a math whiz; she could count cards at the age of 12. Growing up, all the family-owned casinos were run by men and the women, like a lot of the women in Vegas, were fungible. I remember sitting at a table with my father when he was running a casino and someone came up to him in front of me—like I wasn’t there, I was probably 12—and he said, “Can you get me some girls?” That’s women in Las Vegas and that guy was a famous guy.
NC: It’s both wonderful and rather frightening that you can channel this!
Josie’s father’s will essentially mandated her choice to move back to Vegas. It’s move back or lose out on her inheritance. Is that fate or is it free will?
KM: Well, it’s a shitload of money. That casino threw off $200 million a year, her share would be $10 million a year. Also, Josie never thought she would stay in LA. As difficult as he was, Josie adored her father. And she was shocked at the loss.
There’s a scene in the book, a recollection of she talks to him about being in this magazine with mobsters and he said, “I’m no angel.” You heard a lot of mob guys saying that.
9:52
What Has Gabino Iglesias Been Reading in 2026?
“Hey, it’s July and you’re talking about January and February books?” Yeah, guilty as charged. March, April, and May, too. Oh, and I missed a bunch of columns–and books, which is the truly sad part–in the second half of 2025. Let’s just say that 2025 turned into a dark thing, yeah? Good news is, I’m out of that hole and doing a lot of the things that make me happy, and two of those things are reading crime fiction and talking to you about it. Let’s do that.
All the Little Houses by May Cobb
(Sourcebooks Landmark)
For a long time, May Cobb was the only author who could make me care about the lives of the rich and their little peccadilloes. A bit of that came from the healthy doses of chaos, sex, bad intentions, secret agendas, awful people, and murder that Cobb injects into every book, but it mostly has to do with the way Cobb spins a yarn and her ability to humanize even the most despicable people in order to explore humanity while everyone gets hammered. In any case, I said a shorter, probably far more eloquent version of that before and it became a blurb on one of her previous novels. This is all to say I expected to like All the Little Houses, but had no clue it would become one of my favorite Cobb novels.
All the Little Houses takes place in the 1980s in a small town in Texas. Small-town hell is real, and when you add families with a lot of money and huge egos, things only get worse. But not everyone has money. Charleigh Andersen, for example, has a great life now, but she came from nothing and, more importantly, remembers what that was like and doesn’t want to return to that. Unfortunately, Charleigh–and her spoiled daughter–suddenly face a najor threat to their status; a new family has moved to town, and they’re perfect. Or are they? This is a May Cobb novel, so of course they aren’t. Everyone has a secret agenda and a few dirty secrets here, and Cobb uses sex, weed, and booze like someone throwing gasoline on a campfire.
Wanna hear something funny? All the Little Houses also reads like a YA. It sort of is a YA. A very twisted, mature one, but a YA novel nonetheless. Most of the characters here are younger than usual for a Cobb novel and the violence, while still there, is more canoe hit to the head than shotgun to the chest.
Dark, tense, twisty, bloody, and entertaining to read, All the Little Houses is yet another banger from Cobb. Can’t wait to read the sequel.
Everybody Wants to Rule the World by Ace Atkins
(William Morrow)
Technically a December book, but I wrote things down wrong and picked up my galley in January, and that makes it a January book. Hah.
Can Ace Atkins write crime? Yes. Can he do violence? That’s another yes. Can he also be funny? Very much so. In fact, in Everybody Wants to Rule the World, his latest, he does all of it in almost every chapter, often in the same page or paragraph.
The year is 1985 and Peter Bennett, a fourteen-year-old, is convinced his mother, who has seen several men since Peter’s dad died, is now involved with a Russian agent who goes by Gary. The guy is weird, owns a gym, and seems a little too interested in the work his mother does at a government lab. So far, Gary seems to have everyone fooled, Peter’s mom included, but Peter is a fan of spy novels, so he comes up with a plan. Peter tracks down Dennis Hotchner, an author who hasn’t published anything in a while and is working at a local bookstore. Peter wants to hire Hotchner to look into Gary. The whole thing sounds silly, but Hotchner, with help from his good friend Jackie Demure–amazing drag performer now, but also former NFL player with the roughness to match–soon finds himself deep in a world of shady information, Russian defections, spies, double spies, and murder.
This is a hell of a fast-paced, multilayered romp. I could fill a few paragraphs telling you things you probably already know about Atkins; his dialogue is tight, his humor dark, his real, even when weird. But I won’t do that. Instead, I’ll tell you that Atkins had a blast writing this one and that makes it a fun read. The amount of detail and the number of characters here would probably scare or frustrate a less seasoned author, but Atkins is always in control, talking about people, places, sports, drag queens, politics, and love with the same energy and wit.
I’m a fan of Atkins’s work, but this novel surprised me. Everything I’ve come to expect from Atkins as an author was here in spades, but there’s something else going on here, and I think it’s love. No, hear me out. This story has decent amounts of love and loss, but that’s not what I’m talking about. What I’m talking about here is the author’s love for his characters, for dingy bars, for football, for the research that went into the novel, for the things from his past he is able to share with readers here. Movies and personalities and songs are sprinkled all over this novel with obvious love and care, and that adds a little something special to the reading experience.
14:33
The Best True Crime Releases of the Month: July 2026
5 new works of true crime history and reportage out this month, as selected by the CrimeReads editors.
*
Rebecca Wright Stevens, Sisters of the Midnight Sun: A Murder in Arctic Alaska
(Counterpoint)
“Written with curiosity, empathy, and humility, this is true crime, second-act reinvention, and extreme-landscape immersion in one crystalline package.” —Oprah Daily
Meyer Lansky II, S. J. Peddie, The Lansky Legacy : The Life and Letters of Meyer Lansky
(Citadel)
“Meyer Lansky pioneered an international gambling empire that continues to this day. His grandson captures his legacy from a perspective only he can share, and no stone is left unturned.” —Louis Ferrante, internationally bestselling author of the Borgata Trilogy
Maria DiLorenzo, Confessions of the Green River Killer: A True Story of Manipulation, Madness, and a Search for Justice
(Crooked Lane)
“The most complete portrait of Gary Ridgway we’ve ever seen, as well as a deeply personal story of a writer whose life was changed in ways she had not expected. An important addition to the annals of true crime.” –Booklist
Pamela Colloff, Catch the Devil: A True Story of Murder, Deception, and Injustice on the Gulf Coast
(Knopf)
“Both a chilling profile of an evildoer and a glimpse into a fractured justice system, this enlightens and entertains in equal measure.”–Publishers Weekly
James Renner, A Cruise to Nowhere: My Search for Amy Lynn Bradley
(Citadel)
“This is easily the most thorough telling of Amy’s disappearance and most likely, the definitive one.” –Lance Reenstierna, host of the Crawlspace true crime podcast
