julia

“I tried to bring alive what it’s like to be a tabloid reporter at a time when newspapers are dying,” said Julia Dahl, the 36-year-old author of the latter novel, Invisible City, which was published May 6 by Macmillan’s Minotaur Books.

“I have two books on me. One is Invisible City by Julia Dahl, and the other is Missing Out. Michael C. Hall actually lent it to me, and I might never give it back!”

As she pieces together the story behind the murder of a Hasidic woman, a young crime reporter is forced to confront her own demons, in Julia Dahl’s masterly, pitch-perfect first novel.

Bringing together the hyenas of tabloid journalism with the secretive, inwardly focused, self-protecting religious Jews, Dahl manages to demonize and humanize both, while delivering a riveting story. I sincerely hope there will be a sequel because after reading the last page, I wanted to know: What happens next?

Take a female newspaper reporter in Manhattan named Rebekah Roberts covering a murder in the Hasidic community — where a recent murder has everyone talking — and you’ve got a very good and probing debut novel by CBSNews.com reporter Julia Dahl.

Julia Dahl is the author of the new novel Invisible City, which is about a young reporter who covers a murder in Brooklyn’s Hasidic Jewish community. Dahl has worked for CBS News.com and the New York Post, and she lives in Brooklyn.

T is for thrillers: Summer is prime time for crime fiction lovers, with plenty of works by old favorites (Ace Atkins, Alafair Burke, Michael Koryta, Jenny Milchman, Karin Slaughter, John Verdon among them) and promising debuts from Julia Dahl ( Invisible City) and Neely Tucker ( The Ways of the Dead).

Julia Dahl’s first novel, “Invisible City,” is about a tabloid reporter in New York City covering the murder of a Hasidic woman. The novel, which came out in May, is fiction, but Dahl, a reporter for CBSNews.com, had some similar experiences of her own to tap. She spoke with Poynter about the book, writing for