Mystery/Crime/Thrillers

In this epic dark fantasy panel, three rising stars of the genre: Andrea Stewart, Madeleine Nakamura, and Evan Leikam plunge readers into worlds where power corrupts, gods wage war, and survival demands impossible choices. From grimdark assassins to divine battlefields to queer magic under siege, these stories ask: what does it cost to defy a king, or a god? Moderated by Flight of the Fallen fantasy author Hana Lee, the conversation will explore morally complex heroes, ruthless magic, and the shadowed spaces where crowns are claimed and shattered. In Anji Kills a King, Evan Leikam delivers a brutal, high-velocity debut in which a servant assassinates a king and becomes the target of legendary, magic-wielding mercenaries. As the hunt intensifies, alliances shift and a kingdom’s future hangs in the balance. Angel Eye by Madeleine Nakamura returns to a world of inquisitors, forbidden magic, and psychological peril. A string of murders ignites suspicion and witch hunts, forcing a traumatized scholar of magic to confront both external threats and his own unraveling mind. In The War Beyond, bestselling author Andrea Stewart escalates a divine conflict as sisters stand on opposing sides of a war between gods. Faith, loyalty, and destiny collide in a sweeping tale of rebellion and sacrifice.

Crime fiction becomes a lens on buried history, fractured families, and the uneasy relationship between past and present in this electrifying conversation featuring Naomi Hirahara, Susie Hara, Faye Snowden, and Élan Les Vies. Though their settings range from early 20th-century California to post-1906 San Francisco, from the contemporary South to a fogbound Northern California cove in the 1980s, these authors share a fascination with what lingers: generational trauma, cultural displacement, family secrets, and the long shadow of violence. Their novels probe how history imprints itself on communities and on the individuals who attempt reinvention in places shaped by exclusion, secrecy, and survival. In Crown City, Hirahara uncovers anti-Japanese violence and artistic intrigue in early California, illuminating overlooked chapters of regional history within a classic investigative mystery. Hara’s Earthquake Shack introduces Sadie García Miller, a half-Mexican, half-Jewish investigator pulled into a mystery involving a vanished 1906 earthquake cottage and her own family’s criminal past. Set in San Francisco’s Mission District, Hara’s noir blends intergenerational conflict, buried histories, high-stakes danger and the moral gray areas of family loyalty. In A Killing Breath, Faye Snowden continues her gripping Southern gothic series featuring homicide detective Raven Burns, the daughter of a notorious serial killer. As Raven hunts a new predator, she must confront the terrifying possibility that her father’s darkness lives on within her. Her work has been called “intense,” “and a pulse-pounding contribution to a genre lacking in Black women authors”. In The Lemon Twist, Les Vies follows a search for truth sparked by a cryptic clue tied to a long-ago disappearance. Through fractured memory, cassette recordings, and coastal isolation, the novel explores identity, shame, and the dangerous undertow of unresolved pasts. Across their work, these writers examine how communities respond to displacement, how families transmit both resilience and harm, and how investigators navigate systems that marginalize or erase. Together, they will discuss historical noir, Southern gothic suspense, California crime fiction, and the craft of writing mysteries that are as socially resonant as they are gripping. The conversation will be moderated by Randal Brandt, Head of Cataloging and Curator of the California Detective Fiction Collection at the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley and creator of Golden Gate Mysteries, an annotated bibliography of crime fiction set in the San Francisco Bay Area.

In this high-stakes thriller panel, three acclaimed authors explore stories where violence shatters ordinary lives and the search for answers grows increasingly perilous. Each novel begins with a crime but what unfolds is a deeper reckoning with truth, justice, and the forces that shape suspicion.

In Missing Sam, bestselling author Thrity Umrigar crafts a tense, twist-filled tale of a woman who vanishes during a morning run and the spouse left to navigate mounting scrutiny. As the investigation tightens, the novel probes racial bias, queer identity, and the quiet dangers simmering beneath suburban life in today’s political climate. Dead Note by Victor Manibo opens with a murder marked by a chilling signature: the same song sung at two separate killings years apart. What begins as an open-and-shut case spirals into an investigation through Manila’s criminal underworld, where corruption, memory, and obsession intertwine. In The Reckoning, crime writer Kelli Stanley delivers an atmospheric thriller in which long-buried secrets resurface and past actions demand accountability. As hidden histories come to light, the line between guilt and innocence grows increasingly blurred.

Moderated by Nicholas Louis Baham III, California State University professor and author of The People’s Detective, this electrifying panel will explore how contemporary thrillers confront social tensions, moral ambiguity, and the enduring power of the whodunit. From suburban streets to international underworlds, these novels remind us that solving the crime is only the beginning.

Secrets fester in isolated communities. Corporations conceal monstrous truths. Grief curdles into vengeance. In this high-stakes thriller panel, Sarah Gailey, Jendia Gammon, Luke Goebel, and Paddy Hirsch explore conspiracy as both engine and mirror, reflecting our deepest anxieties about belonging, power, and truth. In Make Me Better, Gailey crafts an eerily seductive psychological thriller set on a remote island promising healing, transformation, and the end of suffering. As an exclusive festival draws seekers desperate for connection, the novel interrogates cult psychology, toxic self-improvement culture, and the terrifying allure of surrendering autonomy in exchange for belonging. Gammon’s Atacama, longlisted for the British Science Fiction Association Award, blends speculative horror and corporate conspiracy thriller. A researcher investigating a colleague’s suspicious death uncovers shadowy agents and an inhuman threat hiding in plain sight. The novel fuses scientific inquiry with creeping dread, asking what happens when institutions meant to foster knowledge instead weaponize it. Goebel, known for his boundary-pushing fiction and screenwriting, brings a raw, literary intensity to the thriller form in Kill Dick. In this dark and satirical collection of short stories, obsession, violence, and fractured identities blur the line between perpetrator and victim while exposing the stories we tell ourselves to survive complicity and guilt. In PRIMED, Hirsch delivers a transatlantic revenge thriller that begins with a decades-old bombing and a single photograph. As a grieving father hunts the man he believes responsible, the chase stretches from Northern Ireland to Los Angeles, unraveling into espionage, political shadows, and the devastating costs of living for vengeance. Across their work, these authors probe the architecture of conspiracy: closed communities that promise salvation, corporations that distort truth, governments that obscure accountability, and individuals whose private grief fuels public violence. Moderated by podcast host of Twisted Passages and Dark Obsessions author Marie Sutro, join us for a conversation discussing writing paranoia in an era of misinformation, sustaining suspense while deepening character psychology, and why the thriller remains one of the most urgent genres for confronting systems of power, and ourselves.

Join us for an engaging exploration of mystery and magic in young adult fiction, where the fantastical reveals deeply human truths. Emily Renk Hawthorne, Ama Ofosua Lieb, Lio Min, and S. Hati each craft imaginative worlds shaped by secrets, identity, and transformation. In Of Mountains and Seas, hidden histories and stolen magic ripple beneath the ocean’s surface. Goldenborn follows Akoma as she searches for the truth behind her father’s mysterious coma, weaving Ghanaian myth with moral reckoning. The L.O.V.E. Club blends music, queer youth culture, and magical realism while asking what really happened to a missing classmate. And in Morbid Curiosities, a teen uncovers unsettling clues, investigates the academy that isn’t what it seems, and ultimately must decide how far she’s willing to go for the truth. Moderated by playwright and novelist Michelle Ruiz Keil, author of Summer in the City of Roses, this panel explores how YA authors use mystery and magic to uncover powerful truths about belonging, loss, and courage.

Put your detective caps on for this intriguing panel, featuring middle grade books with a mysterious twist! Shafaq Khan’s Zeyna Lost and Found follows a British-Pakistani aspiring detective in London, whose overactive imagination regularly gets her in trouble because she believes there is mystery and intrigue everywhere… until there is a mystery at the shops. Set in another shop run by a survivor of the Titanic, where Colette secretly works, Nikki Shannon Smith’s Deep Secrets: A Titanic Novel weaves between the Great Depression and a journey aboard the Titanic as Colette uncovers the mystery surrounding her father’s death as a Black factory worker. Tracy Badua adds a hint of magic to the mystery in Thea and the Mischief Makers, a story about a pair of grumpy duwendes—Filipino goblins—who threaten to wreak havoc on Thea’s neighborhood and her chance at a fresh start as the cool girl at Junior Stunt Warrior summer camp! Helping us to moderate this panel and close the case is the knowledgeable Sharon Levin, who has been reviewing children’s and YA literature for over 30 years.