What is David Handler reading?

The current featured contributor at Writers Read: David Handler, author of The Blood Red Indian Summer.

His entry begins:

I'm currently up to my hips in the climax of my next Berger-Mitry mystery, The Snow White Christmas Cookie. I've found that when I'm focused real deeply on the complexities of one of my own plots I can't keep track of someone else's. If I try to do that my head feels as if it's going to explode. Too much information. So I don't usually read novels during this stage of the creative process. Yet I still need to read myself to sleep at night. Can't fall asleep unless I have a book in my hands. The solution that I came up with is short stories.

I am a huge fan of John O'Hara, Irwin Shaw and James Thurber. All three of them were masters whose collected works I'm continually re-reading. Another of my favorites is Jack Finney, who wrote one of my all-time favorite novels, Time and Again, as well as The Body Snatchers, which was made into the 1956 sci-fi classic film Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Finney was also a tremendously gifted short story writer. A volume of his stories called About Time happens to be...[read on]

About The Blood Red Indian Summer, from the publisher:

This newest mystery featuring Mitch Berger and Connecticut State Trooper Des Mitry presents Des with her first genuine racially charged case in the historic New England village of Dorset, the gem of Connecticut’s Gold Coast.

Tyrone “Da Beast” Grantham, the famously volatile NFL superstar linebacker, has just been suspended for “conduct detrimental to the integrity of and public confidence in the league.” When Tyrone and his entourage decide to spend his season in exile in bucolic Dorset---much to the dismay of his early-to-bed, ultra-white neighbors---Des is put on the spot. And when Tyrone’s eighteen-year-old sister-in-law, Kinitra, washes up on Mitch’s beach one morning, bloodied and barely alive, Des is on the case. Especially when it turns out that Kinitra is eight weeks pregnant. Good thing there’s nothing else serious going on in our heroes’ lives right now. Like, say, Mitch’s parents arriving from Florida at long last to meet the new woman of color in their nice Jewish boy’s life.

The Blood Red Indian Summer makes a fine and entertaining addition to David Handler’s award-winning, critically-acclaimed series.

Learn more about the book and author at David Handler's website and blog.

Writers Read: David Handler.

--Marshal Zeringue