The Los Angeles Times’ annual Book Award finalists were announced, including those in the Mystery/Thriller category:
- Megan Abbott, Give Me Your Hand
- Kent Anderson, Green Sun
- Lou Berney, November Road: A Novel
- Oyinkan Braithwaite, My Sister, The Serial Killer: A Novel
- Leila Slimani, The Perfect Nanny: A Novel
Winners will be handed out at the LAT Festival of Books on April 12 at the University of Southern California, and tickets for the event go on sale March 7.
The Mystery Writers of America announced the inaugural Sue Grafton Memorial Award will be given at Mystery Writers of America’s 73rd Annual Edgar Awards in New York City on April 25, 2019, the day after what would have been Sue’s 79th birthday. Nominees for the award were chosen by the 2019 Best Novel and Best Paperback Original Edgar Award judges from the books submitted to them throughout the year:
- Lisa Black, Perish
- Sara Paretsky, Shell Game
- Victoria Thompson, City of Secrets
- Charles Todd, A Forgotten Place
- Jacqueline Winspear, To Die But Once
The Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance is honoring Lisa Gardner with their CrimeMaster Award for Distinguished Achievement. Fellow author and previous CrimeMaster Award winner, Tess Gerritsen, will introduce Gardner at the ceremony Friday, May 1 at 6:00 p.m. at USM’s Glickman Library in Portland. The event is part of the kickoff to the 2019 Maine Crime Wave conference (HT to Shelf Awareness). As part of the conference, readers and writers can participate the 2019 CrimeFlash Contest where you’re invited to finish Gardner’s opening line (written exclusively for this contest) with your own flash fiction of no more than 500 words.
BookExpo announced the lineup for its Adult Book & Author Breakfast series, which this year will include crime author Karin Slaughter discussing her upcoming thriller, The Last Widow. The annual conference will take place May 29-31, 2019, at the Javits Center in New York City.
A new biennial festival in Tasmania focused on crime fiction has announced the first guests for its inaugural program. Taking place in Cygnet and locations around Tasmania’s Huon Valley over Halloween in 2019, the inaugural Terror Australis Readers and Writers Festival will feature writing workshops and masterclasses, panel sessions, a NaNoWriMo program, a murder mystery dinner, a 1920s-themed dress up dinner with jazz and spoken word poetry, and a day-long “hall of writers.” Headlining authors include Tara Moss, Kerry Greenwood, Sulari Gentill, Meg Keneally, Tansy Rayner Roberts, Jack Heath, and Joanna Baker.
The Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts in the UK is hosting Crime in the North East this weekend, a festival which celebrates murder, mayhem and mystery in the region. Scottish crime author Val McDermid kicks off the event Saturday in a Q&A with festival curator Dr Stacy Gillis.
Titan Comics and Hard Case Crime announced a new collection of the classic cult character Ms. Tree, said to be inspired by Velda, the assistant to Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer, and often hinted to be the daughter of Dragnet’s Joe Friday. The concept behind the character is that she’s a widow carrying on her dead husband’s private detective business, but is even more capable and more deadly than he ever was. The new collection will be written by Max Allan Collins and Terry Beatty and published later this year.
An article in The Atlantic profiled a scientist who specializes in “book DNA”: specifically the animal materials used in old parchment, book covers, and even the beeswax used in seals is rich with data about the past, including the flowers that grew in that region year to year.
The Telegraph had an article about crime writers through the years (starting with Ian Fleming) who have appeared on the British radio program Desert Island Discs where celebrities riff on the theme of what they'd want to have on a desert island in music and books. It's a subscription-only piece, alas, but if you’re a member, check it out. The article mentioned the latest “victim” of the show, crime author Ann Cleeves, and you can hear her choices via this link.
The latest edition of Yellow Mama is available online for reading here. It's the Valentine’s Day issue, with a little bit of everything: romantic love; romantic hate; parental obsession; love of animals; revenge served both steaming-hot, and ice-cold, in new stories and poems.
Switchblade #8 is available for purchase online with fourteen new stories, including some from seven Switchblade veterans plus many more newcomers, plus the poetry of Doug Knott. The ’zine promises to offer up “no-luck tales from the dark corners of some of the most cutting edge criminal minds.”
Laura Benedict, the Edgar- and ITW Thriller Award- nominated author of seven novels of suspense, applied the Page 69 Test to her newly released title,The Stranger Inside.
Many “cozy” crime authors include recipes in their books, and James Patterson has jumped on that bandwagon with his latest thriller, although you can guess why he took this tactic from the title of the book, Chef. Woman's World chatted with Patterson and included links to the recipes.
A woman recently returned an overdue library book - hardly newsworthy except that it was 72 years overdue. Mora Gregg, now 75 and a retired librarian herself, checked out the children’s book The Postman by Charlotte Kuh during a library visit with her mother. Instead of a fine, however, Gregg has received interview requests and internet glory.
The latest poem at the 5-2 crime poetry weekly is "Kim Wall Speaks" by Sally Weston Ziph.
In the Q&A roundup, Declan Burke interviewed Dublin author Jo Spain for the Irish Times, talking about her bestsellers and hit TV series, Taken Down; Rolling Stone magazine snared Don Winslow to talk about “about writing a trilogy, the War on Drugs and what’s it like to delve so deeply into the narco world for so long”; the Mystery People chatted with Ian Rankin about his latest novel featuring John Rebus, In a House of Lies, which has the now retired inspector drawn into an old missing persons case; and Criminal Element welcomed author Charles Finch and his longtime editor, Charles Spicer, as the pair discussed Finch’s newest Charles Lenox mystery, The Vanishing Man, as well as Shakespearean London, England’s class system, and the what-ifs of time travel.
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