THE STAR WARS MURDERS

By Lisa Black Way back in the dark ages before personal computers on every desk and watching TV on your smartphone, in 1983, Ronald Reagan talked about starting the Strategic Defense Initiative. A bunch of satellites would float around in space and shoot down any missiles incoming from Russia and...

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A NOT SO COZY REALITY

By Lisa Black Truth is often stranger than fiction, but sometimes fiction is truth—whether it means to be or not. Any cozy mystery worth its salt has a small town, a bickering couple, eccentric characters, and a great climate. A murder in 2013 checked all these boxes and more, but to the...

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I WILL FIND YOU: THE USE OF FORENSIC GENEALOGY

By Lisa Black Forensic genetic genealogy burst into the American lexicon in 2018 with the identification of the Golden State Killer, but the methodology had been around for decades. It was developed not to find the perverse and violent, but the loved. Around the turn of the millennium, companies...

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HOLIDAY TRAVEL TIPS

By Lisa Black Late November and December are the nation's busiest travel periods. Here are some life hacks to smooth your journey: Dress for comfort. You’ll be seated for hours, so that means soft shirts and stretchy pants—yoga pants and leggings or your nicest set of workout clothes. But you want...

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WE HAVE (ALMOST) ALWAYS LIVED IN THE CASTLE

By Lisa Black If you travel to Austria or Hungary, you’re likely to hear a lot about the vivacious “Sissi.” The beloved local celebrity embodies enough glamour and drama to fill a season of reality shows…even if she died 124 years ago. Imagine you’re a 15-year-old girl, Elizabeth, nicknamed Sissi,...

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MAD (WO)MAN? GETTING YOUR BOOK TRAILER ON TV

by Lisa Black I created a television commercial for my current release, Red Flags, and aired it on local channels twenty times in five days. The cost to me? A whopping—and deductible—$289. I should add that I know nothing about film composition, video technology, or advertising. We’ve all become...

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THE QUICKSAND EPISODE

by Lisa Black Young people today must have no idea why children of the 1970s had an irrational fear of quicksand—the colloidal of saturated loose sand by which one would die slowly and inexorably without hope of rescue. Even though it is impossible for a human to actually drown in quicksand, any...

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