Wednesday, October 16, 2024

Four works of crime fiction that features children

Julia Dahl is the author of Conviction, Run You Down, and Invisible City, which was a finalist for the Edgar Award for Best First Novel, one of the Boston Globe’s Best Books of 2014, and has been translated into eight languages. A former reporter for CBS News and the New York Post, she now teaches journalism at NYU.

Dahl's newest novel is I Dreamed of Falling.

At CrimeReads the author tagged four works of crime fiction with children as prominent characters, including:
Emma Donoghue, Room

While not marketed as crime fiction, Room is the story of an ongoing crime, and its aftermath. The book is narrated by 5-year-old Jack, whose entire life has played out in a single room (a shed) where he is held with his mother, who was kidnapped two years before he was born. What is so astonishing about this book is the way, in the word’s of New York Times reviewer Aimee Bender, “Jack’s eyes remake the familiar.” By privileging the little boy’s voice, we see the world anew, and it is both beautiful and utterly terrifying.
Read about the other entries on the list.

Room is among Greg Mitchell's ten top escapes in literature.

--Marshal Zeringue