Saturday, September 10, 2022

Awaiting a Stirling Performance

When you’re operating what is at least partly a news site, there’s never a good time to go on vacation. But this week proved to be even less opportune than I expected. Not only did Queen Elizabeth II die (an event that scored worldwide front-page newspaper coverage, and even hit the James Bond-oriented Spy Command blog), but the latest Bouchercon is currently in progress in Minneapolis, Minnesota (more on that shortly), and the Bloody Scotland International Crime Writing Festival chose this last Tuesday to announce its finalists for the 2022 McIlvanney Prize for “best Scottish crime book of the year.”

Let’s deal with that last development first. Three months after Bloody Scotland organizers released their longlist of 10 candidates for the McIlvanney (named in honor of William McIlvanney, who passed away in 2015), they’re back with a shortlist of just four contenders:

The Heretic, by Liam McIlvanney (HarperCollins)
May God Forgive, by Alan Parks (Canongate)
A Corruption of Blood, by Ambrose Parry (Canongate)
The Second Cut, by Louise Welsh (Canongate)

The judges will reveal their newest McIlvanney award winner—plus the recipient of this year’s Bloody Scotland Debut Prize—on Thursday, September 15, as part of the festivities surrounding the opening of the 2022 Bloody Scotland festival in Stirling, Scotland.

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