1.
The Brides
Sir John Seward and Dr. Knight conducted their first examination of Lady Lowell at Littlemore Hospital in Oxfordshire. They met with her in a private room, where she was lucid and composed, despite having been given a sedative the night before due to agitation. Lady Lowell described her nightmares, which always feature screaming, howling, and chanting of the 23rd psalm, and often involve a malevolent presence or a stormy night sky. She also reported hallucinations where she sees people or shapes that mean her harm. Lady Lowell's physical symptoms include chills, nausea, and aches in her head and neck.
During the examination, Lady Lowell revealed that she consumed ants, believing they would give her strength, as she felt weak and perceived weakness as a danger. Her words and actions suggested a delusional state, and she eventually fainted. Dr. Knight expressed uncertainty about the cause of Lady Lowell's symptoms, suggesting it could be a traumatic mental disturbance, a disease of the brain, or hysteria. Sir John Seward and Dr. Knight agreed that they needed more information before making a diagnosis and considered the possibility of using hypnosis to help Lady Lowell.
2.
Rosanne Limoncelli on the Joy of Following Characters Through Multiple Stories
We make emotional connections to characters in stories because they become part of our lives, and we don't want to let them go. Through their successes and failures, we get to know them and feel a sense of empathy. These characters become friends, trusted colleagues, and heroes that we root for and learn from.
The best characters are often flawed and relatable, making it easy to imagine ourselves in their shoes. We feel a sense of investment in their lives, wondering what will happen next and how they'll grow and evolve. This is especially true in series where characters have more room to grow and evolve over time.
Reading about characters with different lives than ours gives us a kind of lived experience, expanding our world and building empathy. This is one of the things that makes those fictional character connections so powerful, especially when the story parallels our life experience.
From a writing perspective, the process of creating characters is often the most enjoyable part of writing. Authors often connect with their characters first, before the story blossoms in their minds. The characters can become so real that they insist on speaking for themselves and making demands on how the story should progress.
Ultimately, the connection to fictional characters is what makes reading and writing so powerful. It allows us to experience new things, learn from others, and build a bigger and better inner life that enriches our real life.
3.
Cliff Dorfman on Crime Families, Loyalty, and Rooting for the Bad Guys in Fiction
Cliff Dorfman talks about why we’re drawn to crime families and their anti‑heroes, not because they’re good but because they embody loyalty in a world that feels rotten. He starts with a scene of two brothers fighting to the death and the audience’s urge to pick a side, then flips it: the real engine is the desire to see someone who will stand by you, no matter how messed up they are. That’s why we keep coming back to the Corleones, the Sopranos, the Lannisters, the Roys—because they’re the families that promise an unbreakable bond, even if the bond is built on blood and betrayal.
Dorfman weaves his own story of being adopted into a secret study, where the people who recorded his life were loyal to the experiment, not to him. That personal loss fuels his fascination with characters who would burn the whole system for a single person who truly belongs to them. When he wrote his novel Crime Family, he wasn’t writing about gangsters per se; he was exploring the painful gap between the family you’re handed and the family you’d die for, turning power into a costume for belonging.
He points out that morally ambiguous anti‑heroes aren’t a modern trend—they’re ancient. From Achilles sulking in his tent to David sending a loyal soldier to his death, the Bible is full of characters we’re asked to love and condemn at once. What makes us root for them isn’t the violence; it’s the cost they pay. Tony Soprano can’t sleep, Walter White loses the one thing he pretended to protect, Michael Corleone ends up alone despite winning every battle. We watch them fall, hoping gravity might spare them, and that hope never comes—that’s the contract of the genre.
There’s also a darker reason: we see a glimpse of ourselves in the monster. When someone harms a beloved pet or a child, we instantly become the angry parent with teeth. Crime stories don’t create the monster; they refuse to hide it, reminding us that the line between a family head and a criminal indictment is often just luck and circumstance.
In the end, Dorfman says each generation claims it’s tired of anti‑heroes, yet we keep lining up for the next saga about a fiercely loyal, constantly lying family. That’s not fantasy; it mirrors how many of us were raised—inside a circle deemed sacred, outside it deemed fair game. The genius of crime families is that they give us the loyalty and belonging without the real‑world price, letting us sit at the table and imagine what it feels like to belong to a family that would burn the world rather than lose us. That’s why the genre endures.
4.
How AI Deepfakes Are Changing the Rules of Crime Fiction
The lines between reality and deepfakes are blurring at an alarming rate. Deepfakes, created using AI, can be incredibly convincing and are now widely available. They're being used in targeted scams, such as fake video calls that trick employees into transferring millions of dollars, and in paid ads featuring deepfaked celebrities promoting investments.
In crime fiction, deepfakes offer a rich territory to explore. A recent novel, Three Reasons for Revenge, features deepfakes as a means of personal attack, where characters are left questioning what's real and what's fabricated. The existence of deepfakes has created a new defence, where people can claim they've been deepfaked, making it harder to discern truth from fiction.
The challenge is that when evidence becomes unreliable, accepted truth becomes about who's believed, how often a claim is repeated, and whose version of events reaches us first. This is a theme that's been explored in crime novels for years, but the technology of deepfakes has brought a new level of complexity to the question of how we know what happened and who we should believe.
In the novel, deepfakes fracture relationships, forcing people to decide whether the trust built over years outweighs what they can see and hear in a few brutal seconds. The author suggests that deepfakes strike at something personal and precious – our trust in our own judgement, in our eyes and ears, and in each other.
As governments and legal systems struggle to keep up with the repercussions of deepfakes, the lines between reality and fiction continue to blur. The challenge for all of us is to navigate this new reality, where the truth is no longer what can be proven, but what we choose to believe.
5.
100 Years of Russian Espionage in the U.S.
Russian espionage in the U.S. has been a long-standing issue, dating back to the 1930s when Jacob Golos, a Ukrainian-born Bolshevik, recruited agents in the U.S. to advance to influential positions. After Golos's death, Elizabeth Bentley took over his network and later defected to the U.S., helping to usher in the onset of the McCarthy era. Whittaker Chambers, a Soviet spy, served as a courier and organizer of the Ware Group, a collection of government employees with communist sympathies.
The 1940s saw the Soviet Russia pull off one of the greatest espionage feats in history - the theft of America's atomic secrets from the Manhattan Project. The networks established during the 1930s facilitated the success of this initiative, leading to the convictions of Fuchs, Gold, Greenglass, and Sobell, as well as Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. After WWII, Soviet espionage shifted from specific targets to broad categories of U.S. military and industrial activities.
Notable cases include John Walker, a U.S. Naval Officer who provided encoded Navy communications to the Soviets, and Jack Dunlap, a U.S. Army sergeant who provided highly classified cryptographic data. The next two decades produced a plethora of Soviet spies, including Harold Nicholson, Earl Pitts, and George Trofimoff. Robert Hanssen and Aldrich Ames are widely regarded as the most notorious and damaging spies in CIA history.
Russian espionage in the U.S. continued into the 21st century, with the "illegals program" and the Evgeny Buryakov spy ring being high-profile cases. The focus shifted to the theft of American technology, hacking government and commercial networks, and disinformation through social media and phony websites. The Russian SolarWinds cyberattack, unveiled in 2020, was one of the most sophisticated launched by Russia.
The U.S. has expelled Russian diplomatic personnel, closed consulates, and indicted individuals for crimes perpetrated by Russia or Russian-backed entities. The FBI views Russia as a "top counterintelligence priority," and the Russia counterintelligence threat "continues to loom large." The prospect of a Traitors-like Russian conspiracy in the U.S. is all too real, and it raises awareness of the possibility of malign Russian influence in our government.