Christopher Swann is a novelist and high school English teacher. A graduate of Woodberry Forest School in Virginia, he earned his Ph.D. in creative writing from Georgia State University. He has been a Townsend Prize finalist, longlisted for the Southern Book Prize, and twice been a finalist for a Georgia Author of the Year award. He lives with his wife and two sons in Atlanta, where he is the English department chair at Holy Innocents’ Episcopal School.Swann's new novel is A Fire in the Night.
At CrimeReads he tagged six great novels with "narrators and protagonists who deliberately keep secrets from us, or whose pasts are mysteries that loom over the story and are only revealed a piece at a time." One title on the list:
Security by Gina Wohlsdorf (2016)Read about another entry on the list.
This is a savage, sardonic bloodbath of a story, suffused with mordant wit and a Grand Guignol style. The Manderley Resort,an exclusive, high-tech hotel on the California coast, is about to open, but someone is determined to keep that from happening. Every single staff member of the Manderley is being watched, and over the next several hours, they will be killed off, one by one. Gory and breathless, with nods to Hitchcock by way of Tarantino, Security is also a love story featuring a mysterious and oddly disembodied narrator, and the identity of that narrator becomes almost as compelling as the taut suspense Wohlsdorf employs around a single question: who will survive?
Security is among James S. Murray's five books that are pulpy in all the right ways.
The Page 69 Test: Security.
My Book, The Movie: Security.
--Marshal Zeringue
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