Welcome to The Twist, episode 327. Mark and Rick take on the news from a crazy week, finger wag the Supreme Court, dish on the Met Gala, and reveal some unknown facts about Tennessee Williams.

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Welcome to Fearsome Fiction, the podcast that brings you mysteries, thrillers, rare gems, and a weekly True Crime Tuesday.

Today we conclude our journey through one of the greatest locked-room mysteries ever written, with chapters 14 through 29. Published in 1907, Gaston Leroux’s The Mystery of the Yellow Room set the standard for a genre that would captivate readers for generations. A young woman is found brutally attacked inside a room locked from the inside. No one could have entered. No one could have escaped. And yet someone did both. Following the investigation is the brilliant young journalist and amateur detective Joseph Rouletabille — one of fiction’s most ingenious and overlooked heroes — as he unravels a mystery that seems to defy every law of logic and nature. Now for your listening pleasure, the remaining chapters of Gaston Leroux’s ‘The Mystery of the Yellow Room.’

Marshall James: Chapters Twenty-Five Through Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Five finds Marshall waking up in Leland’s apartment the morning after a drug-fueled night he remembers all too clearly. Filled with regret, he dresses, slips out, and returns to Trent Stoffer’s Upper East Side apartment — where he finds the place ransacked and Trent dead, bound and tortured in his bedroom. Knowing the police will eventually trace him to the scene, Marshall grabs a hidden computer disk from his suitcase and disappears into the New York morning — just as Carlton the doorman picks up the phone.

Chapter Twenty-Six steps out of the thriller’s timeline for a quieter moment, as Marshall and Boo walk the streets of Lambertville, taking in Bridge Street, the Brightside Diner, and the unhurried pace of small-town life. For the first time in a long time, Marshall feels something loosen. He begins to think Lambertville might be exactly the change he needs.

Chapter Twenty-Seven brings us back to the immediate crisis. With nowhere to go and the clock ticking, Marshall makes his way to the Big Cup coffee shop in Chelsea, where he encounters Colin — a young, sharp-eyed escort with a gift for reading people. Out of options and running on fumes, Marshall accepts Colin’s offer of a couch and a few hours of sleep, knowing he’s going to have to tell someone the truth very soon.

On the Map with LGBT Senior: Visiting the Morris Arboretum in Philadelphia
By Mark McNease

We’d planned the trip for weeks and hoped the weather and circumstances would cooperate. They often don’t — plans with friends, a little back and forth, someone checks the weather, someone else checks the drive. But yesterday we made it happen, and it was the perfect day for it. Frank and I, Doris and Beth, all tucked into the RAV and off to the Morris Arboretum in Chestnut Hill. The town is in Northwest Philadelphia and less than a drive away. What we found there was one of those places that comforts you with its beauty and its quiet. Read more about it, and enjoy the photos! – Mark

A Victorian Estate Turned Public Treasure

The Morris Arboretum began as the private estate of siblings John T. Morris and Lydia T. Morris, who purchased and began landscaping the property in 1887. Both were world travelers with a genuine passion for plants, and they spent decades transforming their summer home into something extraordinary. When Lydia died in 1932, she left the estate to the University of Pennsylvania with instructions that it become a public arboretum. Today it serves as Pennsylvania’s official state arboretum — a fact that somehow feels both surprising and entirely fitting once you’re walking the grounds.

The arboretum contains more than 11,000 labeled plants of over 2,500 taxa, representing the temperate floras of North America, Asia, and Europe. But the numbers don’t prepare you for the feeling of the place — the winding paths, the canopy overhead, the sudden surprise of a Japanese garden or a classical fountain around a bend you didn’t expect.

On May 3rd, 2026, in Lambertville, New Jersey, two authors came together for an afternoon of storytelling, craft, and memoir. Mark McNease shared excerpts from Blank Page to Bookshelf: From First Sentence to First Sale — his guide to fiction writing, character creation, and self-publishing — and Kim Cook shared from her powerful memoir, I Am My Father’s Child: A True Story of History, Mystery, Betrayal, and Forgiveness. Keep watching for a video excerpt from that event.

True Crime Tuesdays – A Fearsome Fiction Podcast Feature: The Black Dahlia

Welcome to True Crime Tuesdays. I’ll be sharing a true crime story every Tuesday on Mark McNease’s Fearsome Fiction Podcast. Narration is provided by my own Wondervox. Fasten your headphones for one of the most famous unsolved murders in the annals of American crime – or is it American madness?

They found her on the morning of January 15th, 1947.

A woman walking with her daughter through a vacant lot in the Leimert Park neighborhood of Los Angeles. She thought at first that what she was seeing was a discarded department store mannequin. A broken one, in two pieces.

It wasn’t a mannequin.

The body had been completely severed at the waist. Drained of blood. Cleaned. Posed with a precision that suggested not rage — but ritual. Her face had been slashed at the corners of the mouth, cutting what investigators would describe as a grotesque grin from ear to ear.

She was twenty-two years old. Her name was Elizabeth Short.

The press would call her the Black Dahlia — a name she never knew in life, but one that would outlast everything else about her.

Welcome to Fearsome Fiction, the podcast that brings you mysteries, thrillers, rare gems, and a weekly True Crime Tuesday.

Today we continue our journey through one of the greatest locked-room mysteries ever written. Published in 1907, Gaston Leroux’s The Mystery of the Yellow Room set the standard for a genre that would captivate readers for generations. A young woman is found brutally attacked inside a room locked from the inside. No one could have entered. No one could have escaped. And yet someone did both. Following the investigation is the brilliant young journalist and amateur detective Joseph Rouletabille — one of fiction’s most ingenious and overlooked heroes — as he unravels a mystery that seems to defy every law of logic and nature. Now for your listening pleasure, another three chapters of Gaston Leroux’s ‘The Mystery of the Yellow Room.’