Boston Book Festival 2017

It’s a good thing this session takes place in the expansive Old South Sanctuary, because these three brilliant suspense novelists take readers to some pretty dark and claustrophobic places. Local favorite turned Hollywood A-lister Dennis Lehane returns to Boston with his latest novel, Since We Fell, about a journalist whose history of trauma leaves her vulnerable and afraid to leave the house. This unconventional psychological thriller (already optioned for film, of course!) is Lehane’s first written from a woman’s point of view. Peter Swanson’s Her Every Fear is also written from a woman’s perspective, this time from a panic attack–prone visitor to Boston; her fatalistic outlook seems validated when a woman is murdered down the hall the very night she arrives on Beacon Hill. And, from all the way across the Atlantic, Malin Persson Giolito offers a very different sort of lockdown in Quicksand—this one an account of a school shooting from the perspective of its female perpetrator, in a tense novel that also comments on issues of race and class in contemporary Sweden. Their conversation is sure to keep you on the edge of your seats--and it'll be moderated by essayist and author of the novel Tethered, Amy MacKinnon.