Mystery Melange

The shortlists were revealed for the 2025 An Post Irish Book Awards, and now it's time for readers and fans to vote for their favorite among these finalist titles. Winners to be announced on November 27. This year's eight contenders for Crime Fiction Book of the Year include:

• Burn After Reading, by Catherine Ryan Howard (Bantam)
• Fair Play, by Louise Hegarty (Picador)
• It Should Have Been You, by Andrea Mara (Bantam)
• The Killing Sense, by Sam Blake (Corvus)
• The Secret Room, by Jane Casey (Hemlock Press)
• The Stolen Child, by Carmel Harrington (Headline Review)
• The Stranger Inside, by Amanda Cassidy (Canelo Crime)
• Two Kinds of Stranger, by Steve Cavanagh (Headline)

The next virtual Mystery Writers of America University (MWA-U), titled, "So You’ve Written a Novel? 10 Things Bestselling Authors Do to Make Their Manuscripts Sing," is scheduled for November 18. It will be led by bestselling author Alex Finlay, who interviewed nearly 100 bestselling writers – Lee Child, Michael Connelly, Lisa Gardner, among others – about their “rules” of writing. Along the way, he realized that many literary legends identified some of the same rules. This course on Zoom distills those bestsellers’ rules into 10 practical tips, including things you can do to immediately improve your manuscript. You can register via this link.

A new bookstore, Thrillerdelphia, is opening on Main Street in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The "thrilling" store will offer horror, psychological thrillers, detective fiction, and true crime books. It will also host various literary events, author book signings, true crime talks, and book clubs. Although the shop had a soft opening over Halloween, the Grand Opening is scheduled for November 15th with special giveaways. Owners Tina and Anthony Long also own and operate the romance-themed bookstore, Cupid's Bookshop.

Northern California Mysteries: Mystery Readers Journal, volume I, is now available. This new issue includes reviews, articles, and author essays, a couple of which are available for free online, including "Highway 49 Revisited by Taffy Cannon"; "Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay" by Glenda Carroll; and "Why Sacramento?" by James L’Etoile. Editor Janet Rudolph is still seeking submissions for volume II, so if you have a potential contribution to the Northern California mysteries theme, there's still time to submit.


On Art Taylor's "The First Two Pages" blog feature, Twist Phelan stopped by to discuss her new story for Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, “Authorized Treatment.”


This week's crime poem up at the 5-2 Crime Poetry Weekly is "Hideout" by Robert Plath.


In the Q&A roundup, author Annette Dashofy was interviewed by E. B. Davis about The Devil Comes Calling, her third book in the Detective Honeywell Mystery series; Crime Fiction Lover chatted with Abir Mukherjee, who won the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year and British Book Award Crime Thriller of the Year awards in 2024 for Hunted; and Author Interviews spoke with multiple award-winning British author Martin Edwards, whose novels include the eight Lake District Mysteries and four books featuring Rachel Savernake, about his new book, Miss Winter in the Library with a Knife.