[dropcap]I[/dropcap]t’s still cold in Gotham, so I think we need a hot-weather quiz. Please answer in the comments. 1. Where is the Goldeneye estate, and who famously owned it? 2. Which well known fictional detective encountered Death on the Nile? 3. There are two men at the heart of the short story “August Heat.” One is an artist. What is the other man’s profession? 4. In Katherine Neville’s The Eight, accountant Catherine Velis is sent by her employer to what desert nation? 5. The classic paranoid political thriller The Year of Living Dangerously was made into a 1982 film in...

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]re you going a little snowblind? Wake up your eyeballs (and warm your chilly selves) with a dip in the exuberant colors and extravagant heat of India, during the Season of the Monsoon, Paul Mann's first George Sansi mystery. Anglo-Indian cop George Sansi provides what amounts to an insider’s tour of Mumbai, from the coolly elegant intellectuals’ salons to the sweating slums, not to mention the glorious chaos that is Bollywood (lately made a little more chaotic and perhaps a tad less glorious by the actions of one nutball serial killer). An irresistible intro to this series, a vacation in...

[dropcap]B[/dropcap]aby it’s cold outside. So stay inside with a nice warm book (a cat, a blanket, and a hot toddy would be nice optional accessories). Our suggestion: Shamini Flint's Inspector Singh Investigates: A Most Peculiar Malaysian Murder. Cities don’t get a whole lot steamier than Kuala Lumpur, and mysteries don’t get much more engaging than this first in a series about a tubby, turban-wearing cop whose bosses on the Singapore PD would love to see him move to Malaysia on a permanent basis. Today only, meet him on the cheap. And don't miss the second title in the series, in...

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]t’s supposed to be THIRTEEN degrees in New York tomorrow, and I don’t know whether you’re on Fahrenheit or Celsius, but trust me, that is VERY DAMN COLD. Which, of course, is perfect curling-up-with-a-book weather, particularly if that book is set someplace warm. This week we're tweaking our usual Felony of the Week format to give you a different escape to some sunny locale every day. Today's choice: Belshazzar’s Daughter, the first in Barbara Nadel’s brilliant and award-winning Inspector Ikmen series set in Istanbul, a city so drenched in history you can’t take a step without tripping over the past....

In one of our Bouchercon interviews, we asked author Lauren Henderson, author of the "Sam Jones" mystery series, about the challenges of writing sex scenes for mystery novels, and her immediate answer was "it doesn't work." Find out why Henderson, who herself writes very sexy novels, thinks that sex and crime writing don't usually mix successfully. http://youtu.be/JE0Xe7qfKoA