What is Lisa Black reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Lisa Black, author of Unpunished.

Her entry begins:

True Enough: Learning To Live in a Post-Fact Society by Farhad Manjoo

While researching the state of print journalism in America today, after deciding to set the murders in Unpunished at a big-city paper, I became sidetracked by the topic of how the news as an industry has changed over the past half a century or so. Hence I read, among many other books, True Enough. In it the author explores reasons for the explosion of selective perception and splintering in our society.

Many will come as no surprise—for instance the simple tendency of human beings to believe what they want to believe, what they like to believe, what they feel comfortable believing. What has changed is that...[read on]

About Unpunished, from the publisher:

Maggie Gardiner, a forensic expert who studies the dead, and Jack Renner, a homicide cop who stalks the living, form an uneasy partnership to solve a series of murders in this powerful new thriller by the bestselling author of That Darkness.

It begins with the kind of bizarre death that makes headlines—literally. A copy editor at the Cleveland Herald is found hanging above the grinding wheels of the newspaper assembly line, a wide strap wrapped around his throat. Forensic investigator Maggie Gardiner has her suspicions about this apparent suicide inside the tsunami of tensions that is the news industry today—and when the evidence suggests murder, Maggie has no choice but to place her trust in the one person she doesn’t trust at all...

Jack Renner is a killer with a conscience, a vigilante with his own code of honor. In the past, Jack has used his skills and connections as a homicide detective to take the law into his own hands, all in the name of justice. He has only one problem: Maggie knows his secret. She insists he enforce the law, not subvert it. But when more newspaper employees are slain, Jack may be the only person who can help Maggie unmask the killer-- even if Jack is still checking names off his own private murder list.

Learn more about the book and author at Lisa Black's website.

The Page 69 Test: That Darkness.

Writers Read: Lisa Black.

--Marshal Zeringue