Sign up for our newsletters to receive our Best of 2024 ezine!

Denise Hamilton Biography, Books, and Similar Authors

Author Biography  | Interview  | Books by this Author  | Read-Alikes

Denise Hamilton
© Blake Little

Denise Hamilton

Denise Hamilton Biography

Denise Hamilton is an American crime novelist, journalist and editor of the Edgar-award winning anthologies Los Angeles Noir and Los Angeles Noir 2: The Classics. Hamiltons five Eve Diamond crime novels have been short-listed for many awards, including the Edgar Award in mystery, Willa Cather award in literary fiction and the UK's Creasey Dagger Award.

Her debut The Jasmine Trade was also a finalist for the prestigious Creasey Dagger Award given by the UK Crime Writers Assn. Hamilton's books have been BookSense 76 picks and Mystery Guild alternate selections, and have been published in France, Japan and England.

As a journalist, Hamilton's work has appeared in Wired, Cosmopolitan, Der Spiegel and New Times. She has won first place awards from the Los Angeles Press Club for feature and business writing.

She lives in a Los Angeles suburb with her husband and two young children.

Denise Hamilton's website

This bio was last updated on 02/05/2015. In a perfect world, we would like to keep all of BookBrowse's biographies up to date, but with many thousands of lives to keep track of it's simply impossible to do. So, if the date of this bio is not recent, you may wish to do an internet search for a more current source, such as the author's website or social media presence. If you are the author or publisher and would like us to update this biography, send the complete text and we will replace the old with the new.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Interview

Denise Hamilton discusses the first two books in her mystery/crime series, both set in Los Angeles - The Jasmine Trade and Sugar Skull.

As a cub reporter for the Los Angeles Times, I often worked weekends. And on summer days when the mercury climbed into the triple digits, one thing was sure: There would be a lot of murders.

People shot and stabbed and strangled each other in sleazy bars and hillside mansions, strip malls, abandoned houses and parking lots. Often, there were so many dead bodies clogging the news wires that the Times could barely mention them all.

Unless they were rich or famous or had died in a particularly gruesome fashion – such as the toddlers killed in a spray of drive-by bullets meant for someone else - the deceased didn’t merit their own stories. There were just too many murders and not enough room, and so most of them got folded as smoothly as egg whites into cake into what we called the "murder round-up" that ran every Monday morning.

Usually, that meant calling the police and coroner and getting only the most basic details – age, occupation, residence, cause of death. Still, when you had 40 murders in one weekend, that was one long litany of death.

I often wondered what exactly catapulted victims across the threshold of celebrity or gruesomeness into meriting their own story and how harried city ...

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Books by this Author

Books by Denise Hamilton at BookBrowse
Damage Control jacket Prisoner of Memory jacket Sugar Skull jacket The Jasmine Trade jacket
Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Read-Alikes

All the books below are recommended as read-alikes for Denise Hamilton but some maybe more relevant to you than others depending on which books by the author you have read and enjoyed. So look for the suggested read-alikes by title linked on the right.
How we choose read-alikes

  • Michael Connelly

    Michael Connelly

    Michael Connelly decided to become a writer after discovering the books of Raymond Chandler while attending the University of Florida. Once he decided on this direction he chose a major in journalism and a minor in creative ... (more)

    If you enjoyed:
    The Jasmine Trade

    Try:
    The Narrows
    by Michael Connelly

  • Jonathan Kellerman

    Jonathan Kellerman

    Jonathan Kellerman is one of the world's most popular authors. He has brought his expertise as a clinical psychologist to numerous bestselling tales of suspense (which have been translated into two dozen languages), including... (more)

    If you enjoyed:
    Sugar Skull

    Try:
    The Murder Book
    by Jonathan Kellerman

We recommend 5 similar authors

View all 5 Read-Alikes

Non-members can see 2 results. Become a member
Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Top Picks

  • Book Jacket: Small Rain
    Small Rain
    by Garth Greenwell
    At the beginning of Garth Greenwell's novel Small Rain, the protagonist, an unnamed poet in his ...
  • Book Jacket: Daughters of Shandong
    Daughters of Shandong
    by Eve J. Chung
    Daughters of Shandong is the debut novel of Eve J. Chung, a human rights lawyer living in New York. ...
  • Book Jacket: The Women
    The Women
    by Kristin Hannah
    Kristin Hannah's latest historical epic, The Women, is a story of how a war shaped a generation ...
  • Book Jacket: The Wide Wide Sea
    The Wide Wide Sea
    by Hampton Sides
    By 1775, 48-year-old Captain James Cook had completed two highly successful voyages of discovery and...

BookBrowse Book Club

Book Jacket
In Our Midst
by Nancy Jensen
In Our Midst follows a German immigrant family’s fight for freedom after their internment post–Pearl Harbor.
Who Said...

The secret of freedom lies in educating people, whereas the secret of tyranny is in keeping them ignorant

Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!

Wordplay

Big Holiday Wordplay 2024

Enter Now

Your guide toexceptional          books

BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.