When the Australian Mystery Writers' Society invited me to their crime-writing festival aboard the Ghan, the famous train between Darwin and Adelaide, I was hoping for some inspiration for my second book. Fiction, this time: I needed a break from real people killing each other. Obviously, that didn't pan out. The program is a who's who of crime writing royalty: the debut writer (me!) the forensic science writer the blockbuster writer the legal thriller...

Young Lemony Snicket investigates when the nightly train that goes to the city is instead redirected to a mysterious alternate location.

Song lyrics about the bygone era of the mighty iron horse are paired with detailed paintings that pay tribute to life around a little railroad station.

Investigating a series of attacks on the Southern Pacific Railroad's Cascades express lines, Detective Bell learns of the existence of an elusive saboteur who recruits and murders his own accomplices while engineering schemes of maximum havoc.

A train is on its maiden voyage across the country, and first-class passenger Will Everett is about to embark on an adventure. Will ends up with a key to a train car containing priceless treasures; he becomes the target of sinister figures from his past. So Will joins a traveling circus, enlisting the aid of Mr. Dorian, the ringmaster and Maren, a girl his age who is an escape artist. With villains fast on their heels, can Will and Maren reach Will's...

Off the northeast coast of Russia, the captain and crew of a small crabbing vessel are brutally murdered by members of Bratva, the Russian mafia. Their bodies are stuffed into crab pots and thrown overboard. The killers scuttle the vessel off the coast of Alaska and slip ashore. In Washington, DC, Supreme Court Justice Charlotte Morehouse prepares for a trip to Alaska, unaware that a killer is waiting to take his revenge by livestreaming her death...

The American West in the early 1960s appears to be a pastoral paradise: golden wheat fields, mist-filled canyons, frolicking animals. Aspiring novelist Aaron Holland Broussard has observed it from the open door of a boxcar, riding the rails for both inspiration and odd jobs. Jumping off in Denver, he finds work on a farm and meets Joanne McDuffy, an articulate and fierce college student and gifted painter. Their soul connection is immediate, but their...