Mystery Melange

 

The International Thriller Writers organization announced the finalists for the 2020 Thriller Awards for Best Hardcover Novel, Best First Novel, Best Paperback Original, Best E-Book Original, Best Short Story, and Best Young Adult Novel. The winners are usually announced at the annual Thrillerfest in New York City, but unfortunately that conference has fallen to the coronavirus like so many other events this year. However, organizers plan on holding a virtual conference in July that you can enjoy from the safety of your own home, which will include PitchFest, ConsultFest, Master Class, the Debut Author Breakfast, and the awards presentation.

Sadly, another major crime fiction conference, Bouchercon, has had to cancel this year's event due to the coronavirus outbreak. Although scheduled for October 15-18, organizers decided that, with no way of knowing what the balance of this year holds for groups of people gathering or what the state of travel will be, they are canceling "out of an abundance of caution and concern for the health and safety of our community." The Anthony Awards will go on in some form, and there will be efforts to find other ways to present a traditional Bouchercon experience, possibly going online as other conferences have done.

Sales at Bookshop.org continue to grow, with founder Andy Hunter noting that the site is selling about 8,000 books a day and has more than 450 bookstores on the platform. Sales have risen 2,000% in a month, and Bookshop has raised more than $400,000 for distribution to independent bookstores. Hunter added that "We basically experienced two years' worth of normal growth in about three weeks."

In other indie book news, Independent Bookstore Day, which was originally scheduled for Saturday, April 25, and postponed until "late summer or early fall," has a new date: Saturday, August 29. And there are signs of life among stores outside the U.S., with Canadian bookstore chain Indigo Books & Music rehiring about 545 of its retail staff, two weeks after the government announced subsidies to help businesses pay wages amid the coronavirus crisis; and Italy announcing "a modest loosening, with bookstores, stationery stores and clothing stores for children allowed to reopen."

In honor of April being National Poetry Month (as established by the Academy of American Poets in 1996), the 5-2 Crime Weekly continues its "Thirty Days of the Five-Two" this week. In addition to the usual Poems of the Week (most recently, "Prom Queen" by Tom Barlow), organizer Gerald So is encouraging readers to link to any Five-Two poems you enjoy on your social media.

CrimeReads continues its series of entertaining articles with a look at "The New Wave of California Crime Fiction," which looks at the intersection of race, class, gender, and community; and "10 Must-Read Crime-Fighting Duos," from Sherlock and Watson to Rizzoli and Isles.

Featured at the Page 69 Test this week: Three Hours in Paris by Cara Black, the first standalone spy thriller from the bestselling author of the Aimée Leduc series. In June of 1940, when Paris fell to the Nazis, Hitler spent a total of three hours in the City of Light—abruptly leaving, never to return. To this day, no one knows why, but Black reimagines history in her pulse-pounding tale of one young woman with the temerity—and drive—to take on Hitler himself.

In the Q&A roundup, Gerald So (of the Five-Two Weekly crime poetry site and a former Short Mystery Fiction Society president) has been interviewing finalists for the Derringer Awards; Criminal Element's Book Series Binge continues with Kate Mosse on The Burning Chambers series; and over at the Writers Who Kill blog, E.B. Davis interviewed Edgar Award winner Art Taylor about his short stories and why he sets many of them in North Carolina.