Rants and Raves

It seems that everyone and his kid sister wants to get into the end-of-the-year prizes game, including true-crime authors Gregg Olsen and M. William Phelps, who earlier this year launched the Crime Rant blog. They’ve just announced the winners of their first-ever Trickey Awards, named in honor of a reporter who covered the 1893 Lizzie Borden murder trial, and given to people and events that generated crime coverage over the last 12 months. In addition to presenting victors in such categories as Crime Story of the Year (the Iraq war), Crime Media Disaster of the Year (CNN legal commentator Nancy Grace), and Dumbest Criminal of the Year (John Mark Karr, “the creep who said he had murdered JonBenet Ramsey and had the media on him 24/7”), Olsen and Phelps pronounce John Grisham’s The Innocent Man (Doubleday) to be the True Crime Book of the Year.

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Elsewhere, the seemingly ubiquitous Gerald So taps Paul Levine’s Solomon vs. Lord as the best novel he read in 2006 (with honorable mentions going to James O. Born’s Walking Money and J.D. Rhoades’ The Devil’s Right Hand). Sometime January contributor Edward Campion names Joe Meno’s The Boy Detective Fails among his 10 favorite books of the last year. Editor-author Sandra Ruttan says the two books that haunted her most in 2006 were Ian Rankin’s The Flood and Anne Frasier’s Pale Immortal. And this will come as no surprise to anyone who follows the site: Bookgasm chooses Paul Malmont’s The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril (a novel I thought started out well, but then died the death of 1,000 ridiculous turns) as its favorite novel of 2006. Runners-up include Seymour Shubin’s Witness to Myself, Joseph Wambaugh’s Hollywood Station, and Christopher Fowler’s Ten Second Staircase.