Fighting Over Cats

Janet Rudolph, the director of Mystery Readers International, has just announced the rundown of nominees for the 2010 Macavity Awards, chosen and voted on by MRI members.

Best Mystery Novel:
• Bury Me Deep, by Megan Abbott (Simon & Schuster)
• Tower, by Ken Bruen and Reed Farrel Coleman (Busted Flush Press)
• Necessary as Blood, by Deborah Crombie (Morrow)
• Nemesis, by Jo Nesbø; translated by Don Bartlett (HarperCollins)
• The Brutal Telling, by Louise Penny (Minotaur)
• The Shanghai Moon, by S.J. Rozan (Minotaur)

Best First Mystery Novel:
• The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, by Alan Bradley (Delacorte)
• Running from the Devil, by Jamie Freveletti (Morrow)
• A Bad Day for Sorry, by Sophie Littlefield (Minotaur)
• The Ghosts of Belfast, by Stuart Neville (Soho Crime)
• A Beautiful Place to Die, by Malla Nunn (Picador)

Best Mystery Non-fiction:
• L.A. Noir: The Struggle for the Soul of America’s Most Seductive City, by John Buntin (Random House)
• Talking about Detective Fiction, by P.D. James (Knopf)
• Rogue Males: Conversations & Confrontations About the Writing Life, by Craig McDonald (Bleak House Books)
• The Line Up: The World’s Greatest Crime Writers Tell the Inside Story of Their Greatest Detectives, edited by Otto Penzler (Little, Brown)
• Provenance: How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art, by Laney Salisbury and Aly Sujo (Penguin Press)
• Dame Agatha’s Shorts: An Agatha Christie Short Story Companion, by Elena Santangelo (Bella Rosa Books)

Best Mystery Short Story:
• “Last Fair Deal Gone Down,” by Ace Atkins (from Crossroad Blues; Busted Flush Press)
• “Femme Sole,” by Dana Cameron (from Boston Noir, edited by Dennis Lehane; Akashic Books)
• “Digby, Attorney at Law,” by Jim Fusilli (Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, May 2009)
• “Your Turn,” by Carolyn Hart (from Two of the Deadliest: New Tales of Lust, Greed, and Murder from Outstanding Women of Mystery, edited by Elizabeth George; Harper)
• “On the House,” by Hank Phillippi Ryan (from Quarry: Crime Stories by New England Writers, edited by Kate Flora, Ruth McCarty, and Susan Oleksiw; Level Best Books)
• “The Desert Here and the Desert Far Away,” by Marcus Sakey (from Thriller 2: Stories You Just Can’t Put Down, edited by Clive Cussler; Mira)
• “Amapola,” by Luis Alberto Urrea (from Phoenix Noir, edited by Patrick Millikin; Akashic Books)

Sue Feder Historical Mystery:
• A Trace of Smoke, by Rebecca Cantrell (Forge)
• In the Shadow of Gotham, by Stephanie Pintoff (Minotaur)
• A Duty to the Dead, by Charles Todd (Morrow)
• Serpent in the Thorns, by Jeri Westerson (Minotaur)
• Among the Mad, by Jacqueline Winspear (Henry Holt)

The winners will be announced this coming October during Bouchercon in San Francisco. As Rudolph explains, “This award is named for the ‘mystery cat’ of T.S. Eliot (Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats).”