Lina Chern has been published in Mystery Weekly, The Marlboro Review, The Bellingham Review, Rhino, The Collagist, Black Fox Literary Magazine, and The Coil. She lives in the Chicago area with her family.
Play the Fool is Chern's debut novel.
At CrimeReads she tagged seven of her "favorite books where characters make terrible yet totally believable decisions," including:
Out of Sight, Elmore LeonardRead about the other entries on the list.
As a rule, Elmore Leonard’s heroes – even the criminal ones – don’t make bad decisions. They’re heroes in the classic sense: confident, quick with a gun or a quip, damn-near invincible.
This is why Out of Sight is such a delight. The worst possible thing deadly-cool federal marshal Karen Sisco and fugitive bank robber Jack Foley can do is fall for each other, considering she’s trying to haul his ass back to prison. Leonard is the undisputed master of setting up shop in his characters’ heads, compelling our full-buy-in into their most harebrained choices. It’s tremendously appealing for strong characters to show vulnerability, and the conversation in which Sisco and Foley, alone in a cocktail bar at the top of a Detroit skyscraper, admit they’re powerless to stop what’s going on between them – is heart-stopping.
--Marshal Zeringue
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