True Crime Story: The Times Number One Bestseller

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In "The Time Travel Club," a group that meets to share fictional stories of their time travel adventures is presented with a working time machine but stymied by trigonometry when it comes to using it. A young couple turns to suspended animation to help them balance their relationship with launching their careers in "The Power Couple." The 19 stories in this collection demonstrate Anders's mastery of many genres and tones, including comic space opera, queer body horror and a few set in the present or very near future with only minor speculative elements. Although all of the stories have been published previously, some have been expanded or substantially reworked. Some are intended as epilogues to Anders's novels but are self-contained enough that they can still be appreciated by readers who come to these first, as long as they don't mind spoilers.

Girard begins at the end, on November 7, 2016, when Cohen fell out of bed in his Los Angeles home: "Nobody heard me," he utters. "I am going to die here, all alone, like a dog." Rewind to Montreal, Cohen's birthplace, where he's a teen in 1947, desperately looking for his missing pooch, whose frozen corpse he finds under the neighbor's porch. "This is a rotten way to say goodbye," Cohen mourns. Farewells become a repetitive theme throughout his many decades, during which his achievements are often marred by drugs, alcohol and dysfunctional relationships--romantic, familial, professional. The most richly accomplished of the brothers’ pairings to date—and given Connelly’s high standards, that’s saying a lot. Also, the way the story was told, each interviewee was informed of each other's responses, and those were integrated into the recording, creating a detached, dissonant web of pseudo-conversations which made up the entire story. I wish we had gotten one interview at a time, giving the reader a chance to make their own alliances and assumptions, and perhaps have those assumptions challenged when we heard from a different point of view later on.Inconsistencies arise constantly within the alibis and anecdotes surrounding Zoe's case, which Evelyn finds troubling enough. But then a real danger arises, threatening Evelyn's safety and coaxing Knox himself further into the tale. Readers won't finish the book liking the fictional Knox much, but that's part of the real-life Knox's game. I must stress this is not a bad read. Far more it is a case of the fact it wasn't the great read I was expecting. I can see that plenty of people love this so possibly it's just me. Personally I would advise people new to Joe Knox's work to start with the Aidan Waits stories. 3.5/5

On the other hand, if you are a diehard fan of true crime and like your nonfiction unadulterated, then you might wonder why Joseph Knox didn’t put all his time and considerable talent into writing a novel that suspends disbelief, rather one than causes it. I typically love the "interview-style" formatting, but I had some problems with the way this was done which impeded my enjoyment of the story overall. The impressively twisty plot drops one bombshell revelation after another. Twin Peaks fans won’t want to miss this one." — Publishers Weekly, STARRED Review Knox starts off by telling us how he met a woman named Evelyn Mitchell at one of his book signings. Also an author, Evie gently dismisses him as another attention-seeking writer whose books focus more on the salacious details of the killers than the victims. True crime is everywhere, and yet your book stands out because it is, in fact, fiction masquerading as true crime. There's a hint of parody in that. What were you trying to experiment with, or perhaps to prove about the genre?

Crime fiction as a distinct genre has been popular for over a century and if you are familiar with at least some of its history, then you will know that it is very rare to come across a genuinely original mystery. My last was Antony Horowitz’s Magpie Murders, published five years ago. Knox’s combination of fiction and fact is not only original, but innovative, offering a unique crime fiction experience that pushes the genre to its limits. Joseph Knox now offers an ingenious metafictional work about a cold case involving the disappearance of Zoe Nolan... This is one of the most engaging cold-case novels I have read." — Literary Review Just to be clear, for those wondering “was Zoe Nolan a real person?”, this is indeed a work of pure fiction, and despite the fact the author inserts himself into the plot, he is not the same person in the story as he is in real life, having some of his own dark secrets for the reader to discover… but I’m getting ahead of myself. I have just finished reading True Crime Story. Gripping! It is set at Manchester University in Northern England, and starts innocuously enough with a student disappearance just before the Christmas holidays. Not necessarily a major crime, and the Police are informed, but this is not a standard police procedural, and the missing girl, Zoe Nolan, is not quite the ordinary student she seemed to be at first. She also has an identical twin, also a student at the Uni, which of course complicates things. Thank you to Sourcebooks Landmark and NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review. Expected Publication Date: 12/7/21.