Fresh Pick for Monday, June 16th, 2014 is THE MURDER FARM by Andrea Maria Schenkel #SuspenseMonday Quercus June 2014 On Sale: June 3, 2014 208 pages ISBN: 1623651670 EAN: 9781623651671 Hardcover Add to Wish List Suspense, Literature and Fiction Literary, Mystery Buy A Copy Amazon.com BN.com Powell’s Books Indiebound The Murder Farm by Andrea Maria Schenkel   The Times Literary Supplement said of The Murder Farm, “With only a limited number of ways in which violent death can be investigated, crime writers have to use considerable ingenuity to bring anything fresh to the genre. Andrea Maria Schenkel has done it in her first novel.” The first author to achieve a consecutive win of the German Crime Prize, Schenkel has won first place for both The Murder Farm and Ice Cold. The Murder Farm begins with a shock: a whole family has been murdered with a pickaxe. They were old Danner the farmer, an overbearing patriarch; his put-upon devoutly religious wife; and their daughter Barbara Spangler, whose husband Vincenz left her after fathering her daughter little Marianne. She also had a son, two-year-old Josef, the result of her affair with local farmer Georg Hauer after his wife’s death from cancer. Hauer…

All right, so I was only seven in 1966 — not a child of the sixties, but a child in the sixties. And I wasn’t one of those kids who knew about popular music. I spent most of my early years in the small Texas town of San Marcos, hardly on the cutting edge of pop culture. Music came to me in a spotty, haphazard and completely disjointed way, and it wasn’t until a few years ago, when I started writing the novel MONDAY, MONDAY, a novel that begins in 1966, that I found I had suddenly tapped into one of the richest veins in American music. I was, of course, a few decades behind everyone else. I had arrived at the sixties in my fifties. It’s not that music was unimportant to me as a kid: I liked singing. I sang along to Burl Ives records. I could sing as loud as the next kid. I remember standing shoulder to shoulder with other children on small bleachers in a small room at Crockett Elementary, belting out a song in French that none of us knew the meaning of. I thought the words were “Allawetta, John T. Allawetta.” My dad was a…

My friend Sharon and I sat watching the televised news conference of a political candidate I liked. The man had been accused of having an affair. Standing in front of reporters, he denied the campaign-ending allegations. I wanted to believe him. My friend knew better. Sharon Smith is a retired FBI agent and a forensic psycholinguist. She studies language, the words people use, in the context of criminal investigations. Detecting deception, analyzing kidnappers’ notes, and assessing threats are just a few of the areas in which she applies her specialized knowledge. What tipped her off that the politician was lying? Body language does sometimes provide clues to what a person is thinking, but more recent studies have shown words are more reliable indicators of what’s going on inside. For example, the use of qualifiers like “sort of,” “kind of,” and “possibly” indicate a suspect is backing away from the truth. A man suspected of killing his girlfriend may admit that he was “sort of” angry with her when neighbors heard the fight. These “minimal descriptors” also include words like “I believe” and “probably”. Not answering directly is also a clear red flag. For example, when an investigator says, “Did you…