When Irish Eyes are Smiling

 

The shortlists were revealed for the Irish Book Awards, including the Book Centre Crime Fiction Book of the Year (In association with The Irish Independent), and now it's time for readers and fans to vote for their favorite among these finalist titles through November 13th. Winners will be announced at an awards ceremony in the Convention Centre Dublin on Tuesday, December 1st, and a TV program announcing the overall "An Post Irish Book of the Year" winner will be broadcast on RTÉ One on December 10th.

The awards were established by a coalition of Irish booksellers in 2007, and are dedicated to the celebration of the best Irish writers and writing across all genres of publishing. Thousands of readers vote to select the winners every year, and Irish libraries and bookshops showcase the best books during the fourth quarter.  

This year's eight contenders for Crime Fiction Book of the Year include:

• The Truth About Ruby Cooper – Liz Nugent (Sandycove)
• Everything She Didn’t Say – Jane Casey (Hemlock Press)
• One of Us Is Guilty – Steve Cavanagh (Headline)
• Such a Nice Girl – Andrea Mara (Bantam)
• In Glass Houses – Edel Coffey (Sphere)
• The Keeper – Tana French (Viking)
• Never to be Found – Jo Spain (Zaffre)
• If These Walls Could Talk – Michelle McDonagh (Hachette Books Ireland)

Mystery Melange

On October 31, the Cardiff Library in Cardiff Wales is hosting "Conversations in Crime," a day of panel discussions and workshops on writing and editing. Authors scheduled to take part include Chris Lloyd (the historical Occupation series); L.J. Shepherd (One of  Your Number); Mark Ellis (Frank Merlin WW2 London detective series); and GJ Williams (The Tudor Rose Murder Mysteries and The Gawain Mysteries). This free event has limited seating, so registration is recommended.


There will be a Noir at the Bar at the iconic Shade Bar in New York City, hosted by and Jen Conley and Scott Adlerberg, on November 1 from 6-9pm. Author taking part include SJ Rozan, Richie Narvaez, Josh Kendall, Victor De Anda, Monique Laban, Nadia  Rabbani, Lincoln Michel, and David Heska Wanbli Weiden.


The New York chapter of Mystery Writers of America have an event scheduled in New York City for November 2nd at the New York Society Library on “Plotting Crime Fiction." Panelists include Naomi Rand (the Emma Price mystery series); Lori Robbins (the On Pointe and Master Class mystery series); and Laura Joh Rowland (two historical samurai detective series with Sano Ichiro and photographer Sarah Bain in Victorian England). The moderator is Charles Salzberg, a former magazine journalist and nonfiction book writer and author of the novel, Devil in the Hole.


The Buckinghamshire libraries in the UK are sponsoring "Agatha Christie: A World of Mystery" in their various branches from October through June 2027. Inspired by the British Library's major exhibition, this special display includes a journey into Christie's life, inspirations and literary legacy, where visitors will discover the stories behind the stories, revealing the experiences, adventures and imagination that shaped some of the most famous mysteries ever written. As part of the exhibition, there will also be a variety of events celebrating reading, storytelling and crime fiction, from author talks and book discussions to family activities and immersive mystery experiences.


The Midwest Victorian Studies Association has issued a call for papers on the topic of "Detection: Exploring, Innovating, Locating, Uncovering” for a conference April 1-3, 2027, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. They offer up a list of many angles to consider, such as medical innovation and diagnostic breakthroughs; policing, crime-solving, forensic medicine, the court system; methodologies of detection: observation, induction, deduction; and much more. Applications and abstracts are due by December 7, 2026.


Lee Child is the UK’s first prison reading laureate and as such, he is backing the launch of a reading program to send prisons half a million books. The initiative, delivered by the Reading Agency charity as part of its Quick Reads program, will see copies of 11 short books distributed, with titles selected with input from prisoners as well as staff. A book will be distributed to every cell across the prison estate, as well as stock sent to prison libraries. Child added that the initiative was intended to address the “revolving door” of people leaving prison but struggling to cope outside and returning to custody. The Quick Reads collection spans crime and thrillers, memoir, wellbeing, and a creative writing guide. Fiction titles include High Heat by Child himself; Cell One, a Lagos-set thriller by Leye Adenle; and Darkness Rising, from Bradford-based crime writer AA Dhand’s Harry Virdee series.


Gerald So, editor of the 5-2 Crime Poetry Weekly, discontinued updating online zine in 2023, only to revive the site almost two years later. However, it seems he is considering shuttering the webzine once again due to Blogger's recent updates to its content policy effective December 16, 2026. Updates include prohibition of criminal acts and, as So noted, "As editor, I’ve always tried to keep the poetry on the figurative, non-explicit side, but Blogger’s content reviewers may disagree with my standards. In fourteen years, I’ve received one notice of a post being put behind a sensitive-content warning, but I was unable to determine which post. I don’t want to run into this problem with future posts. I’m not seeking a less restrictive platform. I’ve had my editorial say on all manner of crimes, and I don’t feel the need to continue for my own gratification. That’s why Blogger’s policy change may be the best time to end."


The Crime Fiction Lover website and blog asked their resident espionage experts to list the best spy series that have some of the same vibe as Mick Herron's Slow Horses, and they came up with seven choices. Now, the blog is giving you the chance to win the first book in each set, whose authors include David McCloskey, William Boyd, David Goodman, Mark Ezra, Tess Gerritsen, Alex Preston, and Michael Idov. For more information and to enter by the deadline of November 4, follow this link.


If you happen to have a New York Times games subscription, you can try your hand at solving a special detective-themed crossword, co-created by Rian Johnson, the Oscar-nominated director of Knives Out, and puzzle editor, Christina Iverson.


Kevin Tipple's Thursday Treats column has news of Black Cat Weekly #268; the new anthologies Songs to Woody and The Power of 13; Crimeucopia: Objection! Overruled! and much more.


Art Taylor's "The First Two Pages" featured an essay by by James D.F. Hannah about his story “Me & Magdalena” in the new anthology Daydream Believer: Crime Stories Inspired by the Songs of The Monkees, edited by Lawrence Allan and Michelle Kubitz.


This week's crime poem up at the 5-2 Crime Poetry Weekly is "Skin in the Game" by David Anson Lee.


In the Q&A roundup, Crime Fiction Lover interviewed Chris Dolley about his Reeves & Worcester Steam Punk mysteries and the DCI Shand series, including the latest installment, The Last Hostage; Colin Campbell discussed what working 30 years as a scene-of-crime officer with West Yorkshire Police gave him as a writer; and the New York Times chatted with David McCloskey ("America’s Answer to John le Carré"), a C.I.A. analyst turned spy novelist, has just released his fifth book, London Station.

Author R&R with Kevin R. Andrade

Kevin R. Andrade writes crime fiction about loyalty, redemption and the trouble people find when they confront the darkness that surrounds them. Raised in the college town of Bowling Green, Ohio, he has lived in Mexico City, Boston, New York and Los Angeles. More than twenty-five years as a bartender has given him plenty of opportunities to observe people at their best and their worst and how it affects the world around them. He now lives in Manhattan Beach, California.

His latest novel, In for a Dime, is the second installment in the Jake Hansen thriller series, following the first novel, Ten to the 405. The series explores the dangerous intersection of friendship, loyalty and survival against the sprawling backdrop of Los Angeles.

In For a Dime follows former journalist turned reluctant PI Jake Hansen, who thought he'd seen the worst Los Angeles had to offer. Alongside Pete Mills, a bruised NYPD veteran, and Lamar Wagner, an ex-con with his own moral code, Jake makes a living chasing small-time cases and keeping his dive bar afloat. But when an insurance firm hires them to track down a missing accountant and $2 million in stolen funds, the trio is pulled into a case far darker than they imagined. When Sophie-their bartender, confidante, and unofficial fourth partner-finds herself targeted by a predator from her past, the investigation spirals into a web of political corruption, blackmail, and a sex trafficking ring protected by the city's elite. With bodies dropping and the law closing in, Jake and his crew have one chance to expose the truth-before the people they love become collateral damage.
 

Kevin stops by In Reference to Murder to take some Author R&R to talk about researching and writing the book:

 

The City, the Bar Stool and the Price of Loyalty

The character, Jake Hansen, started with a bad beat in a college football game.

That was back in 2011. I couldn’t have told you then where the idea would lead, but it eventually became about a journalist in decline, a man searching for redemption while carrying around plenty of reasons he might not deserve it. Before I had a novel series, I wrote Jake and the characters from the books in a series of screenplays and always with Jake at the center of the storm. He’s someone whose next decision might make his life better- or considerably worse.

By the time I wrote Ten to the 405 and now, In for a Dime, I knew that the people surrounding Jake would matter as much as whatever trouble Jake would find himself in. I wanted to explore what happens when friendship becomes loyalty and obligation. I wanted to see how, ultimately, when someone you care for needs help but helping them means you crossing a line you never thought you’d cross and how one would react.

Loyalty is paramount in these books. It’s also complicated. We admire people who stand by their friends but there comes a point when standing by someone means answering for their choices. That’s fertile territory for crime fiction. How far will you go? What will you excuse? And can you live with what happens next?

I’ve spent more than twenty-five years behind a bar and I’ve heard a remarkable range of explanations for human behavior. People tell you what happened, what they wish had happened and what they need you to believe happened. Sometimes all three versions arrive during the same conversation. I try to use that thought process and cadence in my work.

In my stories, place matters just as much as the human characters. Some of the South Bronx stories in Ten to the 405 grew out of real experiences that I fictionalized. With In for a Dime, I continued building a world rooted in places and people that feel lived in.

Los Angeles gives me an enormous amount to work with. The city changes as you move through it. A beach bar in Hermosa, a café or steakhouse in Koreatown, a club in Hollywood and downtown LA after dark; each of these areas have their own rhythms. The distance between them can shape an entire day. Traffic gives someone time to reconsider a decision, sit with a suspicion or work oneself into doing something truly foolish.

I want those places to affect the story. I want the place to be a character and have a role in how the story plays out; where the place feels comfortable or uncomfortable and tells us something and as we watch and listen, we can see that the different stretches of Los Angeles can provide entirely different possibilities depending who is reading.

These books are a love letter to the city, written with an awareness of its rough edges. I love its neighborhoods, its contradictions and the people making lives here beyond the familiar images of Hollywood and palm trees. That’s the Los Angeles I want readers to spend time in.

Ultimately, the crime of the story brings everyone together but it’s the relationships that make me keep writing. I want to know what Jake and Pete and Lamar and Sophie will do when their loyalties become expensive.

And after all those years behind a bar, I know there’s usually another story coming through the door.

 

You can learn more about Kevin R. Andrade via his website and follow him on Facebook, Instagram, Substack, and Goodreads. In For a Dime is now available via Wild Rose Press and all major booksellers.

Author R&R with Kevin Moore

A New York–born novelist, now living in L.A., Kevin Moore is a lucid dreamer, yoga teacher, and Reiki Practitioner. Moore draws on a lifelong fascination with spirituality, dreams, and the mysteries of consciousness in writing his stories. His debut, The Book of Souls, was an Amazon Editors' Pick, a #1 Amazon bestseller, and the recipient of a Global Book Award Gold Medal for Ghost Fiction. The sequel, The Book of  Demons—described as Harry Potter meets The Exorcist—was chosen as a  BookLife Editors’ Pick. In 2026, Moore continues the saga with Pandora’s Box and The Lost Boys, an even darker and more intense ride.

Moore is exploring new ground with his latest book, Waking Sleeping Beauty, a neo-noir thriller about redemption and awakening. Los Angeles is sweltering through Holy Week when a teenage hustler named Kiddy is murdered on Hollywood Boulevard in broad daylight. The investigation pulls Detective Joanna Steele into a conspiracy that reaches from Hollywood's shadows to the highest levels of power.

Mia More is on the verge of superstardom when Kiddy crosses her path. What begins as concern becomes something far more dangerous: love, responsibility, and a fierce protective instinct that pulls her back into a world she once escaped. To save him, she may have to risk everything… including her life.

Lana DeMille drifts through Los Angeles with a fractured memory and nowhere left to land. Somewhere in the gaps of what she's forgotten lies the truth about what happened to Kiddy—if she can piece together what she saw before the killer remembers her.

As the investigation tightens and the body count rises, the line between victim and predator blurs. In this dark, fierce reimagining of Sleeping Beauty, three women awaken to a truth someone will kill to keep buried—in a city where the most dangerous stories are the ones no one lives to tell.

Kevin Moore stops by In Reference to Murder to discuss researching and writing the book:

 

The City of Seekers

Los Angeles has long been known as the City of Dreams. Most people think the dream begins in Hollywood, where aspiring actors, writers, musicians, and filmmakers arrive hoping to reinvent themselves in California's endless sunshine. But Hollywood tells only part of the story. For more than a century, Los Angeles has also been one of America's great centers of spiritual seeking. It gave birth to the Azusa Street Revival, helped launch modern Pentecostalism, became home to Sister Aimee Semple McPherson and Angelus Temple, and welcomed generations in search of healing, purpose, and a deeper understanding of themselves. In many ways, this has been an unconventional story.

Yet the city's spiritual landscape has never belonged to a single tradition. Alongside packed churches and revival meetings, tent revivals, faith healers, psychics, palm readers, trance mediums, astrologers, and metaphysical bookstores flourished. Later, yoga studios, meditation centers, Eastern philosophies, and New Age movements found fertile ground in Southern California. Whether people were searching for God, enlightenment, or simply someone who claimed to know what tomorrow might hold, Los Angeles became a destination for seekers.

At first glance, Hollywood and spirituality seem to inhabit different worlds. One promises worldly success, while the other promises inner transformation. Yet I have come to believe they spring from the same desire. People come to Los Angeles because they believe life can be different from what they are living now.

Some arrive dreaming of fame. Some hunt for fortune. Some come hoping to become someone new. Others come searching for answers to questions that have haunted humanity for centuries.

Why am I here? Is there a purpose to my life? What happens after I die? Some pursue enlightenment. Some pray for healing. Some long for God.

All are searching for transformation. That may also explain why Los Angeles became the natural home of noir. The spiritual searcher and the noir protagonist begin in much the same place. Both sense that something in their lives is incomplete or false, and both are searching for truth. Both are trying to awaken from an illusion or a lie, whether that illusion concerns the world or themselves. The two paths usually diverge in what they discover, but from time to time they converge on the same truth.

Spiritual stories often end in redemption. Noir more often ends in disillusionment. The illusion is stripped away, but what remains isn't always comforting. Sometimes the truth sets us free. Sometimes it exposes corruption, greed, loneliness, betrayal, or violence that has been lurking beneath the dream all along.

Perhaps that is why Los Angeles has produced both traditions in such abundance. It is a city built on possibility. It invites people to imagine a different life, then quietly poses a far more difficult question… Who are you when the dream collides with reality?

Hollywood sells the dream of becoming someone else. Spirituality asks whether you have the courage to become who you truly are. Noir asks what happens when you fail. That question has echoed through Los Angeles for generations. It echoes through the Azusa Street Revival, the sermons of Sister Aimee, the tents of traveling evangelists and spiritualists, the storefront psychics that still dot the city's boulevards, the meditation halls and yoga studios, the novels of Raymond Chandler, and the countless dreamers who arrived believing they could shed their skin and leave their old lives behind.

Some found exactly what they were looking for. Others discovered that the person they needed to confront had been traveling with them all along. “Wherever you go, there you are.”

Los Angeles is often described as a city without history. That criticism has always struck me as absurd. The city has an abundance of history; it simply hides it better than most places. New York wears its history on the surface, while Los Angeles buries it beneath freeways, shopping centers, movie studios, dreams, and infamous murders.

The deeper I explored the city, the more fascinated I became by the forgotten stories hidden in plain sight: vanished neighborhoods, unsolved murders, lost movie palaces, religious revivals, political scandals, and lives that quietly slipped from public memory. The same streets that gave birth to classic noir also witnessed some of America's most influential spiritual movements. The city that manufactured illusion also became a place where millions sought ultimate truth.

As I began writing Waking Sleeping Beauty, I realized I wasn't simply writing a murder mystery set in Hollywood. I was writing a novel about seekers.

Detective Joanna Steele is searching for truth in a city built on illusion, one she grew up in, where her family made B-horror films. Mia More believes she's chasing the Hollywood dream until she discovers something far more meaningful. Lana DeMille wanders through Los Angeles with almost nothing, yet she may see more clearly than anyone else. Each woman is pursuing a different kind of transformation, but all three are trying to wake from a life that no longer reflects who they are.

The murder that brings them together is the plot. The awakening is the story.

Perhaps that's why writing the novel felt less like inventing characters and more like discovering people who had always belonged to Los Angeles. In a city where people have long come to reinvent themselves through fame, faith, fortune, or forgiveness, the line between noir and spirituality isn't as wide as it first appears.

Every noir detective and every spiritual seeker asks a version of the same question. What is true? One searches the dark alleys. The other walks through the dark night of the soul. Both pursue what lies beyond illusion. Maybe that's why Los Angeles remains unlike any other city in America. It is where people come hoping to change their lives. Some discover the dream. Others discover that the dream was never the destination. Either way, Los Angeles remains the city of dreamers and of those in search of God or a deeper spiritual life.

To me, Los Angeles has never been just the City of Dreams. It has always been the city where people come to discover whether the dream they are chasing is the one they truly need.

 

You can learn more about the author via his website and follow him on Facebook, Instagram, and Goodreads. Waking Sleeping Beauty is now available via all major booksellers.