As is known by anyone who has either read Stieg Larsson's 2005 novel or seen one of the two film adaptations (and that seems to be just about everyone), the big break in the case comes when Mikael Blomkvist sees a photograph taken of spectators at a parade 36 years earlier. One of those spectators, a 16-year-old girl named Harriet Vanger, disappeared that day, and Blomkvist has been hired by her great uncle to find out what happened to her. Blomkvist notices that Harriet, unlike all the other people in the crowd on the sidewalk -- who are watching the parade and smiling -- is instead looking in another direction with an expression of great distress. After burying himself in the photo archives of the local newspaper for days, Blomkvist unearths a shot from a different angle, showing a woman taking yet another photo, over Harriet's shoulder. By tracking down that woman and her snapshot, he's able to see exactly who Harriet feared.

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Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Victorian-era superman, with his Freudian appetite for cocaine, did not otherwise abstain according to his epoch’s mores, but lust was as foreign to Holmes as frivolity. His acute powers of deduction left him cold and indifferent to the powers of seduction. “He” famously “never spoke of the softer passions, save with a gibe and a sneer,” wrote his dutifully Boswellian Watson. “They were admirable things for the observer — excellent for drawing the veil from men's motives and actions. But for the trained reasoner to admit such intrusions into his own delicate and finely adjusted temperament was to introduce a distracting factor which might throw a doubt upon all his mental results.” This a-romantic remove set him apart, both from the corruptible creatures he studied as if through a microscope, and from the community of literary characters at large. Aside from perhaps Tom Jones, Holmes was our first and — along with Poirot’s contemporaries in the pages of Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forester — our most significant asexual character in fiction.

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But is Mickey really as crazy as she keeps insisting, or as impervious to the emotions of those around her? Although she's the rare disturbed narrator who seems completely reliable (part of her claim to fame is her brutal honesty), the novel hinges on the reader's slowly dawning suspicion that she might be a lot saner than even she realizes.

Technically, "My Second Death" is a psychological thriller. It begins with Mickey receiving a cryptic message at the university where she works as a grad student in medieval literature. The message includes a quote from Nietzsche and the address of a derelict house. When Mickey investigates she finds a mutilated corpse. At first, she suspects Aidan, an artist acquaintance of her older brother who asks her to help him unearth the circumstances of his mother's death ten years earlier and who lives across the street from the house where she discovered the body. To learn more about him, Mickey decides to fill the vacancy left by his last roommate. The idea that she should be afraid of Aidan doesn't seem to occur to her; Mickey is accustomed to thinking of herself as the dangerous one.

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The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) is on a mission to find Earhart's plane, the Lockheed Electra, ABC reported, and its researchers will be diving for clues around Nikumaroro, an uninhabited island in the western Pacific Ocean.

The team believes that Earhart crashed, and survived for days, on the island – after taking off from Papua New Guinea on July 2, 1937, with her navigator Fred Noonan.

TIGHAR leader Richard Gillespie told Hawaii News Now: "We think the Earhart plane is there. We've got the right people. We have the right technology. We have the right support."

Earhart, who became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic in 1932, had been looking to become the first woman to fly around the world. When the pair vanished in the South Pacific, they had circumnavigated their way around three-quarters of the Equator, the BBC reported.

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A great crime novel, however, is an unstable thing, entertainment and literature suspended in some undetermined solution. Take Gillian Flynn's "Gone Girl," the third novel by one of a trio of contemporary women writers (the others are Kate Atkinson and Tana French) who are kicking the genre into a higher gear. Flynn's particular specialty is "unlikable" narrators: Not freakish killers, but ordinarily selfish, resentful or sarcastic types, the kind of characters that readers often seem to dislike because they offer an uncomfortable reflection of their own mundane shortcomings. (More traditional crime-novel heroes have flaws, of course, but only noble ones, like caring too much about the case, losing their tempers in the face of injustice or failing at department politics.)

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The reports are in about the books President Obama is looking at on his annual trip to Martha’s Vineyard. According to reports from the Los Angeles Times and the AP, Obama purchased five books on his trip to the Vineyard bookseller Bunch of Grapes: Marianna Baer’s Frost, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Daniel Woodrell’s Bayou Trilogy, Emma Donoghue’s Room, and Ward Just’s Rodin’s Debutante.

The second wave came when, according to Alexis Simendinger, White House aides listed for reporters the three books Obama brought with him to the Vineyard: two more novels — Abraham Verghese’s Cutting for Stone and David Grossman’s To the End of the Land — and one nonfiction work — Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration.

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Since the tag was "Game of Thrones" and "HBO," the collective Internet began salivating as it tried to unravel the mystery. Surprisingly, some people got it.

Turns out all these references were clues about the casting of Brienne, Maid of Tarth, a character that appears in the second "A Song of Fire and Ice" book. British actress Gwendoline Christie snagged the coveted role of a woman described as "piggish" and "awkward" in the books, who is mocked with the nickname "Brienne the Beauty" because she is well … not.

Christie however, is quite a looker, though I see where Martin saw the female knight in her: The actress is 6'3.

Martin revealed the meaning of his riddle later that night:

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In her May obituary, the Los Angeles Times described Clark as "a copper tycoon's daughter with a taste for exquisite French dolls, baronial homes and solitude;" the New York Times labelled her "the last link to New York’s Gilded Age" -- a relic from "the city’s glory days of Astors, Guggenheims and Vanderbilts." Clark had been raised in a different world, and (or so the papers implied) she seemed to have stayed there, isolating herself from the twenty-first century and its inhabitants.

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Give up? By hiding in plain sight, dressed as police officers. It sounds as unlikely as a man more powerful than a locomotive, I know, but it's true: Just check out what "Detective Comics'" head writer Scott Snyder discovered while leafing through some of the newer superhero comic books.

He is right, these "hipster cops" are everywhere: Scott's found examples in both DC and Marvel series like "Batman" "Spider-Man," "Iron Man" and "Wonder Woman." The duo looks relatively the same in every copy: a redheaded dude with a soul patch and glasses and a dark-haired gentleman with a perpetual 5 o'clock shadow. Scott notes that these comics all come from different publishing houses, and are illustrated by different people. So just who are these comic-hopping extras?

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Before "Memento" was released to the public on March 16, 2001, the most popular thriller mysteries of the past several years had been films like "The Sixth Sense" and "The Usual Suspects." Both great movies, sure, but both included clear expository endings to make sure the audiences understood what the hell they had just paid good money to see. But when Andy Klein wrote his definitive "Everything You Wanted to Know About 'Memento'" essay for Salon and created a numerical and alphabetical system to use to watch the scenes of the film in chronological order, it was only because DVDs had recently given us the ability to do so. As Andy says:

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The 638 items include pieces of jewelry, bronze figurines and cylindrical seals from the world's most ancient civilizations that were looted from the Iraqi National Museum in Baghdad after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion. After their recovery, the U.S. military delivered them last year to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's office, where they were misplaced and forgotten about.

The artifacts, packed in sealed boxes, were misplaced because of poor coordination between the Iraqi government ministries in charge of recovering and handling archaeological treasures, said Tourism and Antiquities Minister Qahtan al-Jabouri.

He blamed "inappropriate handover procedures" but did not go into detail.

Iraqi and world culture officials have for years struggled to retrieve looted treasures but with little success.

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In other words, Frank looks like one of crime fiction's stock crusader types (although, thank god, he hasn't got a murdered family to avenge, the cheapest, tiredest device in the TV screenwriter's toolbox). He's the guy Raymond Chandler was talking about when he wrote, "Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid."

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Since Lou narrates the Thompson novel, and film is by its nature a more detached and objective medium than fiction, there are limits to how well Winterbottom and screenwriter John Curran can capture the book's eerie, haunting power, or Lou's willful lack of self-knowledge. But the novel's most notorious scene, in which Lou calmly pulls on a pair of black gloves and sets about beating his hooker girlfriend to death, all the while apologizing to her and telling her he loves her, is rendered in explosive and terrifying detail. It serves as a rupture in the film's narrative of reality, one almost as dramatic as the moment when the film appears to break in the projector during Bergman's "Persona."

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Yet despite the vast popularity of the genre, decent thrillers are hard to come by. Even a writer who's delivered the goods in the past (I'm looking at you, Carlos Ruiz Zafon!) can disappoint. Some of the worst specimens have hokey plots whose "twists" you can spot a mile away; others feature characters so flimsy and dialogue so clichéd they make your average Stephen Seagal movie look like Ingmar Bergman. Most are just plain dull -- and can there be anything more dispiriting than a thriller that fails to thrill? Yes, there can: the knowledge that said thrill-less thriller is the only book in your beach tote or carry-on bag.

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