Neal Thompson's Blog: Blood & Whiskey

Hey friends and readers,

I tried ten times to get this one out the door, but… the election, holidays, New Years, whatever. Now I’m sending this on my birthday. One of those landmark b-days — ends with a 0 and starts a new decade (shut up, doesn’t matter which decade…) Feels like a good time to put Blood & Whiskey on ice to tackle some urgent writing projects. Not forever, but this’ll be my last newsletter for a bit.

I’m grateful to you generous paid subscribers. Your support helped keep this newsl...

Hey friends and readers,

Allow me to interrupt your election countdown doom-scrolling to say hello and share a few distractions, including a pile of books I’ve been reading since taking a little self-imposed hiatus from this newsletter.

Put down the phone and pick up one of these:

Horse, by Willy Vlautin

A small tale of a sad man trying to live a bigger, better life. Vlautin is a spare and soulful writer who shines an empathetic light on lives we mostly prefer to overlook. He makes this story of a b...

Hello friends and readers,

I’m happy to share this Q&A with Kimberly McCreight, whose new novel, Like Mother, Like Daughter (her eighth) I’d reviewed a few months back.

As I wrote back in April, this is the best kind of mystery: layered and tangled but easy to devour, a smart and twisty mix of crime drama, legal thriller, and domestic thriller, with messily believable characters and lots of heart. It’s also a book about learning to raise a teenager, about learning to let go.

The story begins: NYU...

Hey there friends and readers,

During a recent Covid funk, I thought about what connected this month’s books and what I look for in all good stories. A twisty mystery is fun. Believable and empathetic characters are essential. But most vitally important to me is a strong sense of place, which is this month’s throughline, with stories set in rural Maine, the Puget Sound coast, small-town Missouri, and the fictional city of Chahokia. (As I was drafting this and got smacked by Covid I also read Krue...

(reposted here from Blood & Whiskey #37, June 2024)

Cocktails of the Month

One bourbon, one tequila…

Classic Old Fashioned

2 oz. bourbon 

1/4 oz. simple syrup (you can also just use sugar)

2 dashes Angostura bitters

Pour ingredients into an ice-filled rocks glass and stir. Garnish with thin-shaved lemon or orange peel.

[For a twist: replace the bourbon with mezcal, the simple syrup with agave syrup or nectar, and the Angostura with something like Mole Bitters.]

La Cigua (Spicy Margarita)

I’d rather drink ...

Hey friends and readers,

Better late than never.1 Mainly due to one lonnnnngggg book. It took a while to work my way through this 900-pager. I tried to savor it…

Southern Man, by Greg Iles

Iles has a lot to say about a lot of things: the history of the South (especially slavery), book-banning Karens, White Panic, voters who elected Trump “with fierce gladness in their hearts.” Also Armageddon and the great unraveling of America. Plus his and our “imminent mortality.” Penn Cage is dying of the same ...

Hey friends and readers,

I recently plowed through most (but not all — more on that in a sec) of the trilogy by late Scottish writer William McIlvanney, featuring hard-bitten Glasgow cop Jack Laidlaw. The first, Laidlaw, was published in 1977, followed by The Papers of Tony Veitch in 1983, with Strange Loyalties closing out the series in 1991. McIlvanney, who also wrote poetry and literary fiction, died in 2015 at 79.

The Laidlaw novels got tagged as “Tartan Noir” (allegedly coined by James Ellro...

Hello friends and readers,

I’m happy to share this Q&A with Deepti Kapoor, whose second novel, Age of Vice, I reviewed last month. Kapoor’s first novel, A Bad Character, was published in 2015, a prelude of sorts to the sprawling Age of Vice, which came out last year and earned heaps of praise for it’s take on wealth, crime, and violence in modern India. It’s the first book in a planned trilogy and TV rights have been sold to FX Studio — this would make a great a TV series.

Kapoor was born in the ...

Hello friends and readers,

I started this newsletter on Saturday, which was 420 Day, but I got so baked I couldn’t finish. I’m kidding. I don’t smoke or pop edibles and rarely have since high school. But 420 Day has special meaning in our house. As in: I fucking hate it. I’m happy for those who celebrate, I guess, but for me it’s a PTSD day. Getting whiffs of weed around Seattle gave me flashbacks to the skunk-smelly days of raising skateboarding teen boys, days that are thankfully now in the rea...

Hello friends and readers — a belated Happy St. Patty’s Day.

I’m just back from a ski trip with buddy Blaise, capped by a 4-hour train ride (PDX>SEA) devouring Tana French’s latest. I read my face off this past month, with half an eye on Irish themes. The best of the bunch was French’s The Hunter.

There’s something compelling about the slower pace and deliberate “don’t rush me” table setting of her books. She doesn’t give you a mutilated body on page 4, or 40, or maybe ever. Like Louise Penny, she...