Some More Peculier Than Others

Well, drat! The Rap Sheet’s most recent guest blogger, Patrick Lennon, isn’t going to be in the running for the 2008 Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award, after all. His 2007 novel, Corn Dolls, featured on the longlist of nominees but hasn’t made the shortlist cut. Neither, surprisingly, did Christine Falls, John Banville’s much-hyped debut as a crime novelist (under the pseudonym Benjamin Black), or John Harvey’s Darkness and Light.

That new shortlist of contenders looks like this:

• The Chemistry of Death, by Simon Beckett (Bantam)
• Buried, by Mark Billingham (Sphere)
• A Tale Etched in Blood and Hard Black Pencil, by Christopher Brookmyre (Abacus)
• The Death of Dalziel, by Reginald Hill (Harper)
• One Under, by Graham Hurley (Orion)
• Not Dead Enough, by Peter James (Macmillan)
• Relentless, by Simon Kernick (Corgi Books)
• Dying Light, by Stuart MacBride (HarperCollins)
• Blue Shoes and Happiness, by Alexander McCall Smith (Abacus)
• The Tenderness of Wolves, by Stef Penney (Quercus)
• Piece of My Heart, by Peter Robinson (Hodder)
• Sovereign, by C.J. Sansom (Pan)

The winner will be announced on Thursday, July 17 during the Harrogate Crime Writing Festival.

(Hat tip to EuroCrime.)