Book lists are so popular, it’s no wonder that we have already seen two curated collections of the “best crime, mystery, and thriller books of 2023 … so far.” The first came from Amazon, the second from Goodreads. And now the excellent Web site CrimeReads presents its own choices, 10 of them, mostly well-known:
• Sing Her Down, by Ivy Pochoda (MCD)
• Age of Vice, by Deepti Kapoor (Riverhead)
• Symphony of Secrets, by Brendan Slocumb (Anchor)
• Everybody Knows, by Jordan Harper (Mulholland)
• Confidence, by Rafael Frumkin (Simon & Schuster)
• Beware the Woman, by Megan Abbott (Putnam)
• All the Sinners Bleed, by S.A. Cosby (Flatiron)
• I Have Some Questions for You, by Rebecca Makkai (Viking)
• Hope You Are Satisfied, by Tania Malik (Unnamed Press)
• Ozark Dogs, by Eli Cranor (Soho Crime)
I haven’t tackled all of these, and probably will not be able to before year’s end. However, a number of books featured on CrimeReads’ secondary list of “notable” 2023 releases are beckoning to me from my to-be-read pile, including Chris Offutt’s Code of the Hills (Grove Press), Joyce Carol Oates’ 48 Clues into the Disappearance of My Sister (Mysterious Press), Dennis Lehane’s Small Mercies (Harper), and Samantha Jayne Allen’s Hard Rain (Minotaur). There are surely enough good choices here to keep me busy for a long while, yet hundreds more titles are due for publication over the next six months—enough to defeat even the speediest reader.
FOLLOW-UP: Reviewer and blogger Lesa Holstine has posted her own early favorites for 2023. Click here to read about them.
Friday, June 30, 2023
Applauded in Aotearoa
Organizers of New Zealand’s Ngaio Marsh Awards have announced their longlist of 14 nominees for the 2023 Best Novel prize:
• Too Far from Antibes, by Bede Scott (Penguin SEA)
• Exit .45, by Ben Sanders (Allen & Unwin)
• Remember Me, by Charity Norman (Allen & Unwin)
• Blue Hotel, by Chad Taylor (Brio)
• Poor People with Money, by Dominic Hoey (Penguin)
• The Darkest Sin, by D.V. Bishop (Macmillan)
• The Doctor’s Wife, by Fiona Sussman (Bateman)
• Miracle, by Jennifer Lane (Cloud Ink)
• Better the Blood, by Michael Bennett (Simon & Schuster)
• In Her Blood, by Nikki Crutchley (HarperCollins)
• The Pain Tourist, by Paul Cleave (Upstart Press)
• Blood Matters, by Renée (The Cuba Press)
• The Slow Roll, by Simon Lendrum (Upstart Press)
• Paper Cage, by Tom Baragwanath (Text)
“Now in their fourteenth season, the Ngaio Marsh Awards celebrate excellence in New Zealand crime, mystery, and thriller writing,” reads a news release. “They are named for Dame Ngaio Marsh, one of the Queens of Crime of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, who penned bestselling mysteries that entertained millions of global readers from her home in the Cashmere Hills.” That bulletin goes on to quote awards founder Craig Sisterson as saying, “I’d like to think Dame Ngaio would be proud of how our modern Kiwi storytellers are continuing her literary legacy, bringing fresh perspectives and a cool mix of fascinating tales to one of the world’s most popular storytelling forms. In recent years we seem to be going through our own golden age, with our local writers offering a treasure trove of terrific stories for readers at home and all over the world.”
Lists of the finalists for Best Novel, Best First Novel, and Best Non-Fiction are expected in August, with a declaration of the winners coming later as part of this year’s WORD Christchurch literary festival.
• Too Far from Antibes, by Bede Scott (Penguin SEA)
• Exit .45, by Ben Sanders (Allen & Unwin)
• Remember Me, by Charity Norman (Allen & Unwin)
• Blue Hotel, by Chad Taylor (Brio)
• Poor People with Money, by Dominic Hoey (Penguin)
• The Darkest Sin, by D.V. Bishop (Macmillan)
• The Doctor’s Wife, by Fiona Sussman (Bateman)
• Miracle, by Jennifer Lane (Cloud Ink)
• Better the Blood, by Michael Bennett (Simon & Schuster)
• In Her Blood, by Nikki Crutchley (HarperCollins)
• The Pain Tourist, by Paul Cleave (Upstart Press)
• Blood Matters, by Renée (The Cuba Press)
• The Slow Roll, by Simon Lendrum (Upstart Press)
• Paper Cage, by Tom Baragwanath (Text)
“Now in their fourteenth season, the Ngaio Marsh Awards celebrate excellence in New Zealand crime, mystery, and thriller writing,” reads a news release. “They are named for Dame Ngaio Marsh, one of the Queens of Crime of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, who penned bestselling mysteries that entertained millions of global readers from her home in the Cashmere Hills.” That bulletin goes on to quote awards founder Craig Sisterson as saying, “I’d like to think Dame Ngaio would be proud of how our modern Kiwi storytellers are continuing her literary legacy, bringing fresh perspectives and a cool mix of fascinating tales to one of the world’s most popular storytelling forms. In recent years we seem to be going through our own golden age, with our local writers offering a treasure trove of terrific stories for readers at home and all over the world.”
Lists of the finalists for Best Novel, Best First Novel, and Best Non-Fiction are expected in August, with a declaration of the winners coming later as part of this year’s WORD Christchurch literary festival.
Monday, June 26, 2023
The Story Behind the Story:
“Time Will Break the World,” by Aaron Jacobs
(Editor’s note: This is the 96th entry in The Rap Sheet’s “Story Behind the Story” series. It comes from Aaron Jacobs, who lives mostly in the Catskills with his wife, Katie, and their dog, Monty. Jacobs’s debut novel, The Abundant Life, was published in 2018. Comedian-commentator Samantha Bee called it “delightfully unique, hilarious, and acerbic.” His other writing has appeared in publications such as Tin House, Alaska Quarterly Review, JMWW, 
and The Main Street Rag. Below, he offers some background on his latest novel, a tense thriller titled Time Will Break the World, which is being released this week by Run Amok Crime.)
As far as day jobs go, there aren’t many ways of making a living less connected to the world of books and writing than mine. I sell school buses. But inspiration is a funny thing and reveals itself in unlikely places. There is an industry newsletter called School Transportation News that lands in my inbox fairly regularly. I’m not sure if I ever subscribed to it or if my e-mail address got put on a mailing list. It reports on topics such as new emissions standards, and which air-conditioning manufacturer recently filed for Chapter 11, and which giant transportation company bought or merged with another giant transportation company. It’s about as exciting as you can imagine an industry newsletter to be.
One day, while purging my inbox of newsletter junk mail, I accidentally clicked on a link that opened on the headline: “Last of Chowchilla School Bus Kidnappers Denied Parole.” The article was about a man named Frederick Woods, the mastermind of a massive crime. He’d been incarcerated for almost four decades and recently lost a chance at freedom at his 11th parole hearing. This was the first time I’d ever heard of him and what he had done, and it sent me down a rabbit hole trying to find out more.
In 1976, Woods and two brothers, Richard and James Schoenfeld, hijacked a school bus and kidnapped the 26 students on board, along with the bus driver, as part of a plan to collect $5 million in ransom from the state of California. After driving the victims around in vans for 12 hours, Woods and his co-conspirators transferred them to a moving truck that was buried in a rock quarry 100 miles from where the bus was found. To be clear: they buried the children alive and left them in a suffocating box with just a few moldy mattresses, water, and holes cut in the floor for toilets. It was only through the victims’ bravery and luck, and the assailants’ stupidity, that tragedy was averted. The students and driver managed to escape before a ransom demand was made. The Chowchilla Bus Kidnapping, as the incident became known, was the biggest kidnapping plot in American history.
This crime captured the zeitgeist for a brief moment. In the immediate aftermath, the children were taken to Disneyland and honored as heroes. Robert Goulet sang a novelty song called the “Ballad of Chowchilla Ray,” a tribute to bus driver Ed Ray, and Karl Malden starred as Ray in They’ve Taken Our Children (also known as Vanished Without a Trace), a 1993 made-for-TV movie about the abduction. Then the whole episode faded from consciousness. The more I learned about the case, the harder it became to understand how that incident had been lost from the collective memory of the general public. The details are as sensational as other infamous 1970s crimes: the Patty Hearst kidnapping, or D.B. Cooper’s swashbuckling skyjacking, or Son of Sam terrorizing New York City. There was a school bus that appeared to vanish into thin air on a deserted highway, armed gunmen, terrified children, and an entire community in anguish. This is a story that contains all the elements needed to inspire artists and live on in the imagination of popular culture. How had it been largely forgotten?
The actions of Woods, the Schoenfeld brothers, and their victims stayed with me. I couldn’t shake it and I knew I had to write about it. I recognized that I could use the crime to explore other ideas and subjects that interested me, including how people's lives
turn out the way they do, the stories we tell to explain our lives, the myth of American exceptionalism, the suburbs, money, con men, fraud, and sports.
(Right) Author Aaron Jacobs.
Since I’m a fiction writer, and not a journalist, the story I shaped became a novel. The result is Time Will Break the World. It is a kaleidoscopic portrait of the crime, with a story that moves from character to character, charting the thoughts and fears of the children, kidnappers, parents, and investigators. The novel also contains a parallel story line that takes place 30 years after the crime. My protagonists are Emily and Brenda Mashburn, twin sisters and survivors of the ordeal. Now, at age 40, they must experience their trauma anew as they film a documentary about the event in an attempt to prevent the parole of one of their abductors. Several other key characters also get current-day updates, to reveal the ways in which they, as adults, still grapple with the effects of their childhood horror. Meanwhile, the perpetrator’s brother fights for his release, hoping that a reunited family can finally bring peace to their elderly mother and ease the guilt he feels over his role in the kidnapping. A feud erupts between the criminals and the victims, and neither side is willing to back down.
Like all fiction inspired by fact, I’ve taken many liberties with the actual case and veered and swerved far from reality where the story demanded it. I’ve changed names, moved the location from the West Coast to the East Coast, and shifted the decade of the crime from the ’70s to the ’80s. As a matter of fact, the kidnapping takes place during the 1984 Summer Olympics, on the night gymnast Mary Lou Retton wins her gold medal, allowing me to juxtapose the best our country has to offer with the worst. But, in spite of all my tinkering, the heart of the novel is firmly rooted in a dark moment in American history, one that I likely would have never heard about if I’d gone ahead and deleted that e-mail message.
and The Main Street Rag. Below, he offers some background on his latest novel, a tense thriller titled Time Will Break the World, which is being released this week by Run Amok Crime.)As far as day jobs go, there aren’t many ways of making a living less connected to the world of books and writing than mine. I sell school buses. But inspiration is a funny thing and reveals itself in unlikely places. There is an industry newsletter called School Transportation News that lands in my inbox fairly regularly. I’m not sure if I ever subscribed to it or if my e-mail address got put on a mailing list. It reports on topics such as new emissions standards, and which air-conditioning manufacturer recently filed for Chapter 11, and which giant transportation company bought or merged with another giant transportation company. It’s about as exciting as you can imagine an industry newsletter to be.
One day, while purging my inbox of newsletter junk mail, I accidentally clicked on a link that opened on the headline: “Last of Chowchilla School Bus Kidnappers Denied Parole.” The article was about a man named Frederick Woods, the mastermind of a massive crime. He’d been incarcerated for almost four decades and recently lost a chance at freedom at his 11th parole hearing. This was the first time I’d ever heard of him and what he had done, and it sent me down a rabbit hole trying to find out more.
In 1976, Woods and two brothers, Richard and James Schoenfeld, hijacked a school bus and kidnapped the 26 students on board, along with the bus driver, as part of a plan to collect $5 million in ransom from the state of California. After driving the victims around in vans for 12 hours, Woods and his co-conspirators transferred them to a moving truck that was buried in a rock quarry 100 miles from where the bus was found. To be clear: they buried the children alive and left them in a suffocating box with just a few moldy mattresses, water, and holes cut in the floor for toilets. It was only through the victims’ bravery and luck, and the assailants’ stupidity, that tragedy was averted. The students and driver managed to escape before a ransom demand was made. The Chowchilla Bus Kidnapping, as the incident became known, was the biggest kidnapping plot in American history.
This crime captured the zeitgeist for a brief moment. In the immediate aftermath, the children were taken to Disneyland and honored as heroes. Robert Goulet sang a novelty song called the “Ballad of Chowchilla Ray,” a tribute to bus driver Ed Ray, and Karl Malden starred as Ray in They’ve Taken Our Children (also known as Vanished Without a Trace), a 1993 made-for-TV movie about the abduction. Then the whole episode faded from consciousness. The more I learned about the case, the harder it became to understand how that incident had been lost from the collective memory of the general public. The details are as sensational as other infamous 1970s crimes: the Patty Hearst kidnapping, or D.B. Cooper’s swashbuckling skyjacking, or Son of Sam terrorizing New York City. There was a school bus that appeared to vanish into thin air on a deserted highway, armed gunmen, terrified children, and an entire community in anguish. This is a story that contains all the elements needed to inspire artists and live on in the imagination of popular culture. How had it been largely forgotten?
The actions of Woods, the Schoenfeld brothers, and their victims stayed with me. I couldn’t shake it and I knew I had to write about it. I recognized that I could use the crime to explore other ideas and subjects that interested me, including how people's lives
turn out the way they do, the stories we tell to explain our lives, the myth of American exceptionalism, the suburbs, money, con men, fraud, and sports.(Right) Author Aaron Jacobs.
Since I’m a fiction writer, and not a journalist, the story I shaped became a novel. The result is Time Will Break the World. It is a kaleidoscopic portrait of the crime, with a story that moves from character to character, charting the thoughts and fears of the children, kidnappers, parents, and investigators. The novel also contains a parallel story line that takes place 30 years after the crime. My protagonists are Emily and Brenda Mashburn, twin sisters and survivors of the ordeal. Now, at age 40, they must experience their trauma anew as they film a documentary about the event in an attempt to prevent the parole of one of their abductors. Several other key characters also get current-day updates, to reveal the ways in which they, as adults, still grapple with the effects of their childhood horror. Meanwhile, the perpetrator’s brother fights for his release, hoping that a reunited family can finally bring peace to their elderly mother and ease the guilt he feels over his role in the kidnapping. A feud erupts between the criminals and the victims, and neither side is willing to back down.
Like all fiction inspired by fact, I’ve taken many liberties with the actual case and veered and swerved far from reality where the story demanded it. I’ve changed names, moved the location from the West Coast to the East Coast, and shifted the decade of the crime from the ’70s to the ’80s. As a matter of fact, the kidnapping takes place during the 1984 Summer Olympics, on the night gymnast Mary Lou Retton wins her gold medal, allowing me to juxtapose the best our country has to offer with the worst. But, in spite of all my tinkering, the heart of the novel is firmly rooted in a dark moment in American history, one that I likely would have never heard about if I’d gone ahead and deleted that e-mail message.
Preliminary Results
The social cataloguing site Goodreads is up with its list of “Readers’ Top New Mysteries from the First Half of 2023.” It includes works by Rebecca Makkai (I Have Some Questions for You), Benjamin Stevenson (Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone), Jane Harper (Exiles), S.A. Cosby (All the Sinners Bleed), T.J. Newman (Drowning), and William Landay (All That Is Mine I Carry With Me), plus 24 others.
George Easter, among others, is not impressed, though he concedes “there are a few good books” mentioned. The editor of Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine writes in his blog:
With six more months yet to go in 2023, we’ll see how many of these books are still being touted when “Best of the Year” lists are posted.
George Easter, among others, is not impressed, though he concedes “there are a few good books” mentioned. The editor of Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine writes in his blog:
I’ve read 6 of the books on the list …, none of which have made my own Best of 2023 list so far. There are also quite a few titles that I’ve never heard of.In response, Easter suggests 17 other crime, mystery, and suspense novels he thinks belong on any “Best Crime Fiction of the Year … So Far” list. Among those are City Under One Roof, by Iris Yamashita; Ozark Dogs, by Eli Cranor; Sons and Brothers, by Kim Hays; and Moscow Exile, by John Lawton.
What struck me is the absence of certain titles that should be on any best list of 2023—Small Mercies by Dennis Lehane, for one—my vote (so far) for the best crime novel of 2023. …
It should be noted that Goodreads is owned by Amazon.com and may suffer from the same problem that the reviews found on Amazon products suffer from—the possibility of an author and an author’s friends submitting glowing reviews and inflating the ratings of such products.
With six more months yet to go in 2023, we’ll see how many of these books are still being touted when “Best of the Year” lists are posted.
Sunday, June 25, 2023
Ms. Allen, Meet Mr. Hammett
Atlanta, Georgia, author Samantha Jayne Allen’s first novel, Pay Dirt Road (Minotaur), has been announced as the winner of the 2023 Hammett Award. The Hammett is presented annually by the International Association of Crime Writers, North American Branch to a book, originally published in the English language in either the United States or Canada, “that best represents the conception of literary excellence in crime writing.”
Pay Dirt Road introduced Annie McIntyre, a young private investigator working in an unpromising Texas town. Allen’s author page on the Macmillan Publishers Web site describes the character thusly:
Competing against Pay Dirt Road for the 2023 Hammett Prize were Copperhead Road, by Brad Smith (At Bay Press); Gangland, by Chuck Hogan (Grand Central); Don’t Know Tough, by Eli Cranor (Soho Crime); and What Happened to the Bennetts, by Lisa Scottoline (Putnam).
We still await word on where and when this year’s Hammett Prize will be presented to author Allen.
Pay Dirt Road introduced Annie McIntyre, a young private investigator working in an unpromising Texas town. Allen’s author page on the Macmillan Publishers Web site describes the character thusly:
Annie McIntyre never expected she’d return to her hometown after college, nor be drawn into the family business: a private investigation firm founded by her grandfather and his former deputy in the sheriff’s department. Annie finds a knack for crime-solving while searching the winding back roads and neon lit honky-tonks of small-town Texas, uncovering corruption and long held secrets that keep complicating her relationship to the place that holds such a tight grip on her heart.Prior to its 2022 publication, this novel picked up the 2019 Tony Hillerman Prize for best first mystery set in the American Southwest. Allen has since gone on to pen the Annie McIntyre tale Hard Rain (2023). A third installment in the series, Next of Kin, is due out from Minotaur Books in April 2024.
Competing against Pay Dirt Road for the 2023 Hammett Prize were Copperhead Road, by Brad Smith (At Bay Press); Gangland, by Chuck Hogan (Grand Central); Don’t Know Tough, by Eli Cranor (Soho Crime); and What Happened to the Bennetts, by Lisa Scottoline (Putnam).
We still await word on where and when this year’s Hammett Prize will be presented to author Allen.
Saturday, June 24, 2023
A Few Tidbits to Share
• Today brings the official release of Lawrence Block’s The Autobiography of Matthew Scudder (LB Productions), plus an interview with the author, whose 85th birthday just happens to be June 24. Kevin Burton Smith, editor of The Thrilling Detective Web Site, had an opportunity recently to question Block via e-mail, and he combines the results of their exchange with incisive observations about the book itself—and its unlikely existence. Read all about it here.
• Several of PBS-TV’s most-loved Masterpiece Mystery! programs are slated to reappear on U.S. television screens over the next four months. Season 8 of the British historical detective drama Grantchester, starring Tom Brittney and Robson Green, will make its debut on Sunday, July 9. Season 5 of Unforgotten, the cold-case-focused puzzler featuring Sanjeev Bhaskar and this year introducing Sinéad Keenan in the role of Detective Chief Inspector Jessica “Jessie” James, will premiere on Sunday, September 3. On that same date, watch for the Season 3 start of Van der Valk, the Amsterdam-set crime drama starring Marc Warren and Maimie McCoy, and inspired by the novels of Nicolas Freeling. Finally, the sophomore series of Annika—the Scottish mystery featuring Nicola Walker (formerly of Unforgotten) as the head of a Glasgow-based marine homicide unit—is scheduled to begin airing on Sunday, October 15. Click here to see a brief promotional video covering all of these shows.
• This year’s Shirley Jackson Award nominees have been announced. Named for the author of The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, among other works, these prizes recognize “outstanding achievement in the literature of psychological suspense, horror, and the dark fantastic.” There are six categories of contenders, the following works vying for Best Novel:
— Beulah, by Christi Nogle (Cemetery Gates)
— The Dead Friends Society, by Paul Gandersman and Peter Hall (Encyclopocalypse)
— The Devil Takes You Home, by Gabino Iglesias (Mulholland)
— Jackal, by Erin E. Adams (Bantam)
— Unwieldy Creatures, by Addie Tsai (Jaded Ibis Press)
— Where I End, by Sophie White (Tramp Press)
The five remaining divisions of nominees can be found here. Winners are to be declared on Saturday, July 15, at Readercon 32, the Conference on Imaginative Literature, in Quincy, Massachusetts.
• I love cats, but don’t usually gravitate toward mysteries in which they play significant roles. Kate Jackson, the blogger at Cross-Examining Crime, is of quite another mind altogether. Here she lists her 10 favorite crime novels featuring felines, by authors as renowned as Erle Stanley Gardner, Dolores Hitchins, and Stuart Palmer.
• Martin Edwards offers a few comments about (and photos from) last weekend’s Shetland Noir Festival in Lerwick, Scotland.
• Back in late March, CrimeReads’ Olivia Rutigliano enumerated “The 19 Scruffiest Detectives in Crime Film and TV.” Now she’s balanced that out with a rundown of “The 19 Most Polished Detectives in Crime Film and TV.” Andre Braugher’s Frank Pembleton (Homicide), Bertie Carvel’s Adam Dalgliesh (Dalgliesh), Gene Barry’s Amos Burke (Burke’s Law), and both Pierce Brosnan’s Remington Steele and Stephanie Zimbalist’s Laura Holt (Remington Steele) made the cut.
• It seems made-for-TV movies are once more having a moment, thanks to the proliferation of streaming channels. In my younger years, I loved many such one-off wonders, especially those imbued with considerable suspense (The Night Stalker and Duel, for instance), those with a crime or espionage angle (House on Greenapple Road, Assignment: Munich), others focused on natural disasters (The Day After, Hurricane), and those that served as series pilots (Genesis II, Smile, Jenny, You’re Dead). But teleflicks had pretty much fallen out of favor by the 1990s. Now, however, writes Randee Dawn of the Los Angeles Times, “the explosion of content on streamers (along with changes in the theatrical system during and post-pandemic) is causing filmmakers to rethink what a movie made for television can be.”
• Several of PBS-TV’s most-loved Masterpiece Mystery! programs are slated to reappear on U.S. television screens over the next four months. Season 8 of the British historical detective drama Grantchester, starring Tom Brittney and Robson Green, will make its debut on Sunday, July 9. Season 5 of Unforgotten, the cold-case-focused puzzler featuring Sanjeev Bhaskar and this year introducing Sinéad Keenan in the role of Detective Chief Inspector Jessica “Jessie” James, will premiere on Sunday, September 3. On that same date, watch for the Season 3 start of Van der Valk, the Amsterdam-set crime drama starring Marc Warren and Maimie McCoy, and inspired by the novels of Nicolas Freeling. Finally, the sophomore series of Annika—the Scottish mystery featuring Nicola Walker (formerly of Unforgotten) as the head of a Glasgow-based marine homicide unit—is scheduled to begin airing on Sunday, October 15. Click here to see a brief promotional video covering all of these shows.
• This year’s Shirley Jackson Award nominees have been announced. Named for the author of The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, among other works, these prizes recognize “outstanding achievement in the literature of psychological suspense, horror, and the dark fantastic.” There are six categories of contenders, the following works vying for Best Novel:
— Beulah, by Christi Nogle (Cemetery Gates)
— The Dead Friends Society, by Paul Gandersman and Peter Hall (Encyclopocalypse)
— The Devil Takes You Home, by Gabino Iglesias (Mulholland)
— Jackal, by Erin E. Adams (Bantam)
— Unwieldy Creatures, by Addie Tsai (Jaded Ibis Press)
— Where I End, by Sophie White (Tramp Press)
The five remaining divisions of nominees can be found here. Winners are to be declared on Saturday, July 15, at Readercon 32, the Conference on Imaginative Literature, in Quincy, Massachusetts.
• I love cats, but don’t usually gravitate toward mysteries in which they play significant roles. Kate Jackson, the blogger at Cross-Examining Crime, is of quite another mind altogether. Here she lists her 10 favorite crime novels featuring felines, by authors as renowned as Erle Stanley Gardner, Dolores Hitchins, and Stuart Palmer.
• Martin Edwards offers a few comments about (and photos from) last weekend’s Shetland Noir Festival in Lerwick, Scotland.
• Back in late March, CrimeReads’ Olivia Rutigliano enumerated “The 19 Scruffiest Detectives in Crime Film and TV.” Now she’s balanced that out with a rundown of “The 19 Most Polished Detectives in Crime Film and TV.” Andre Braugher’s Frank Pembleton (Homicide), Bertie Carvel’s Adam Dalgliesh (Dalgliesh), Gene Barry’s Amos Burke (Burke’s Law), and both Pierce Brosnan’s Remington Steele and Stephanie Zimbalist’s Laura Holt (Remington Steele) made the cut.
• It seems made-for-TV movies are once more having a moment, thanks to the proliferation of streaming channels. In my younger years, I loved many such one-off wonders, especially those imbued with considerable suspense (The Night Stalker and Duel, for instance), those with a crime or espionage angle (House on Greenapple Road, Assignment: Munich), others focused on natural disasters (The Day After, Hurricane), and those that served as series pilots (Genesis II, Smile, Jenny, You’re Dead). But teleflicks had pretty much fallen out of favor by the 1990s. Now, however, writes Randee Dawn of the Los Angeles Times, “the explosion of content on streamers (along with changes in the theatrical system during and post-pandemic) is causing filmmakers to rethink what a movie made for television can be.”
Wednesday, June 21, 2023
PaperBack: “Wild and Wicked”
Part of a series honoring the late author and blogger Bill Crider.
Wild and Wicked, by “Laura Duchamp,” aka Sally Singer (Midwood, 1965). Given that today begins summer 2023 in the Northern Hemisphere, posting this beach-set paperback front seems like an ideal way to commemorate the change of seasons.
Cover illustration by David Hatfield.
Wild and Wicked, by “Laura Duchamp,” aka Sally Singer (Midwood, 1965). Given that today begins summer 2023 in the Northern Hemisphere, posting this beach-set paperback front seems like an ideal way to commemorate the change of seasons.
Cover illustration by David Hatfield.
Harts in the Game
Sisters in Crime (SinC) has announced that Nicole Prewitt of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, will be given the 2023 Eleanor Taylor Bland Crime Fiction Writers of Color Award for her work-in-progress, titled Harts Divided. A press release quotes Prewitt as saying, “I’m honestly so excited that opportunities like this exist and feel incredibly honored to have received the 2023 Eleanor Taylor Bland Award. Writing a novel can be such a long process, and this has provided me with encouragement to see it through to the end.”
Harts Divided is described as starring “Neema Hart, a black, bisexual thief-turned-P.I., who owns a detective agency and therapy office with her estranged wife, Genie Hart. When what should be a bread-and-butter infidelity case results in unsuspecting women getting burned, in more ways than one, the Harts are pushed to prove their commitment to their clients, their community, and each other.”
The Eleanor Taylor Bland Award was established in 2014 and is of course named in honor of African-American fictionist Bland, who died in 2010 after penning a series of books about Chicago police homicide detective Marti MacAlister. This annual commendation is designed to “support a recipient at the beginning of their crime-writing career.” Its winner receives a $2,000 grant which may be applied “toward workshops, seminars, conferences, retreats, online courses, and research activities to assist in completion of their work.”
In addition to Prewitt, SinC will give five runners-up in this competition year-long memberships to the organization: Josette Covington of Wilmington, Delaware; Ann Harris of Atlanta, Georgia; Kathryn Harrison of Bingham Farms, Michigan; Karabi Mitra of Toronto, Ontario; and Deena Short of Stonecrest, Georgia.
Congratulations to all!
Harts Divided is described as starring “Neema Hart, a black, bisexual thief-turned-P.I., who owns a detective agency and therapy office with her estranged wife, Genie Hart. When what should be a bread-and-butter infidelity case results in unsuspecting women getting burned, in more ways than one, the Harts are pushed to prove their commitment to their clients, their community, and each other.”
The Eleanor Taylor Bland Award was established in 2014 and is of course named in honor of African-American fictionist Bland, who died in 2010 after penning a series of books about Chicago police homicide detective Marti MacAlister. This annual commendation is designed to “support a recipient at the beginning of their crime-writing career.” Its winner receives a $2,000 grant which may be applied “toward workshops, seminars, conferences, retreats, online courses, and research activities to assist in completion of their work.”
In addition to Prewitt, SinC will give five runners-up in this competition year-long memberships to the organization: Josette Covington of Wilmington, Delaware; Ann Harris of Atlanta, Georgia; Kathryn Harrison of Bingham Farms, Michigan; Karabi Mitra of Toronto, Ontario; and Deena Short of Stonecrest, Georgia.
Congratulations to all!
Speaking Parts
I haven’t spent as much time recently as I used to collecting and posting about author interviews of probable interest to fans of crime, mystery, and thriller fiction. Several have attracted my attention lately, though, and I want to highlight them here.
For CrimeReads, Rob Hart talks with Craig Clevenger, author of the new novel Mother Howl, in which the son of a serial killer struggles to escape his past. Meanwhile, Steve Powell features in his blog a conversation he had with Andrew Nette about Orphan Road, the latter’s second novel (following 2016’s Gunshine State) to feature professional thief Gary Chance. Crimespree Magazine contributor John B. Valeri chats with Charles Salzberg about Man on the Run, Salzberg’s follow-up to Second Story Man (2017). In The Guardian, Tim Adams grills former FBI director James Comey about his first crime thriller, Central Park West. Crime Time FM host Paul Burke questions Swedish novelist Åsa Larsson and her translator, Frank Perry, about Sins of Our Fathers, which was named the 2021 Best Swedish Crime Novel of the Year. NPR’s Don Gonyea quizzes New York City death investigator Barbara Butcher on the subject of her new memoir, What the Dead Know.
And though it’s really more of a “story behind the story” essay than an interview, Alison Gaylin relates in CrimeReads her love for Robert B. Parker’s lesser-known private eye, Sunny Randall, and how she sought to bring Sunny “into the modern age” in Bad Influence.
For CrimeReads, Rob Hart talks with Craig Clevenger, author of the new novel Mother Howl, in which the son of a serial killer struggles to escape his past. Meanwhile, Steve Powell features in his blog a conversation he had with Andrew Nette about Orphan Road, the latter’s second novel (following 2016’s Gunshine State) to feature professional thief Gary Chance. Crimespree Magazine contributor John B. Valeri chats with Charles Salzberg about Man on the Run, Salzberg’s follow-up to Second Story Man (2017). In The Guardian, Tim Adams grills former FBI director James Comey about his first crime thriller, Central Park West. Crime Time FM host Paul Burke questions Swedish novelist Åsa Larsson and her translator, Frank Perry, about Sins of Our Fathers, which was named the 2021 Best Swedish Crime Novel of the Year. NPR’s Don Gonyea quizzes New York City death investigator Barbara Butcher on the subject of her new memoir, What the Dead Know.
And though it’s really more of a “story behind the story” essay than an interview, Alison Gaylin relates in CrimeReads her love for Robert B. Parker’s lesser-known private eye, Sunny Randall, and how she sought to bring Sunny “into the modern age” in Bad Influence.
Monday, June 19, 2023
Revue of Reviewers: 6-19-23
Critiquing some of the most interesting recent crime, mystery, and thriller releases. Click on the individual covers to read more.
Boynton Gets the Rope
Twenty-nine-year-old British actress Lucy Boynton, who stood out so smartly in the small-screen flicks The Ipcress File and Why Didn't They Ask Evans?, has been signed to portray nightclub hostess and convicted murderer Ruth Ellis in ITV-TV’s upcoming four-part drama, Ruth.
For readers not preoccupied with studying the detailed history of homicides, Ruth Ellis was the last woman to be hanged in the United Kingdom, back in 1955. She’d been convicted of slaying a heavy-drinking race-car driver named David Blakely, with whom she had begun an affair in the early 1950s. At that time, Ellis was the manager of a nightclub in London’s Knightsbridge district and enjoyed casual relationships with several different men. Not long after she met Blakely, who was three years younger than she, he moved into her apartment—even though he was already engaged to someone else. Ellis soon took up with another bloke, but didn’t cease seeing Blakely on the side. Their association was said to have become abusive, and in January 1955 Ellis reportedly suffered a miscarriage after the driver punched her in the stomach.
That was, it seems, the beginning of the end.
On the night of April 10, 1955—Easter Sunday—the platinum-blonde Ellis tracked Blakely down to a pub in the Hampstead area, and fired five bullets at him from a .38-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver, three of which she shot after he was already down on the pavement, dying. (That gun is now among the exhibits at New Scotland Yard’s Crime Museum.) According to Wikipedia, Ellis was arrested in short order by an off-duty policeman, who heard her say, “I am guilty, I’m a little confused.” On June 20 of that year, Ellis appeared at the Old Bailey criminal court in central London. Her fate was sealed upon being asked, “When you fired the revolver at close range into the body of David Blakely, what did you intend to do?” She answered, “It's obvious when I shot him I intended to kill him.” The jury needed only 20 minutes to return a guilty verdict, which then required a death sentence. Ellis was hanged on July 13, 1955, at age 28.
The Killing Times says Ruth “will be told over two parallel timelines, and reveals secret truths about the case that have remained hidden for decades, poses tantalising questions about what really happened in the months before Ruth killed her lover David Blakely, and sheds light on the life of one of Britain’s most infamous murderesses.” In Reference to Murder adds that this mini-series will be “written by Kelly Jones (The Long Call) and based on Carol Ann Lee’s biography, A Fine Day for Hanging: The Real Ruth Ellis Story (2013).
There’s no word yet on when this drama will be shown.
READ MORE: “ITV Unveils First-Look Image from Ruth Ellis Drama,” by Paul Hirons (The Killing Times).
For readers not preoccupied with studying the detailed history of homicides, Ruth Ellis was the last woman to be hanged in the United Kingdom, back in 1955. She’d been convicted of slaying a heavy-drinking race-car driver named David Blakely, with whom she had begun an affair in the early 1950s. At that time, Ellis was the manager of a nightclub in London’s Knightsbridge district and enjoyed casual relationships with several different men. Not long after she met Blakely, who was three years younger than she, he moved into her apartment—even though he was already engaged to someone else. Ellis soon took up with another bloke, but didn’t cease seeing Blakely on the side. Their association was said to have become abusive, and in January 1955 Ellis reportedly suffered a miscarriage after the driver punched her in the stomach.
That was, it seems, the beginning of the end.
On the night of April 10, 1955—Easter Sunday—the platinum-blonde Ellis tracked Blakely down to a pub in the Hampstead area, and fired five bullets at him from a .38-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver, three of which she shot after he was already down on the pavement, dying. (That gun is now among the exhibits at New Scotland Yard’s Crime Museum.) According to Wikipedia, Ellis was arrested in short order by an off-duty policeman, who heard her say, “I am guilty, I’m a little confused.” On June 20 of that year, Ellis appeared at the Old Bailey criminal court in central London. Her fate was sealed upon being asked, “When you fired the revolver at close range into the body of David Blakely, what did you intend to do?” She answered, “It's obvious when I shot him I intended to kill him.” The jury needed only 20 minutes to return a guilty verdict, which then required a death sentence. Ellis was hanged on July 13, 1955, at age 28.
The Killing Times says Ruth “will be told over two parallel timelines, and reveals secret truths about the case that have remained hidden for decades, poses tantalising questions about what really happened in the months before Ruth killed her lover David Blakely, and sheds light on the life of one of Britain’s most infamous murderesses.” In Reference to Murder adds that this mini-series will be “written by Kelly Jones (The Long Call) and based on Carol Ann Lee’s biography, A Fine Day for Hanging: The Real Ruth Ellis Story (2013).
There’s no word yet on when this drama will be shown.
READ MORE: “ITV Unveils First-Look Image from Ruth Ellis Drama,” by Paul Hirons (The Killing Times).
Sunday, June 18, 2023
Bullet Points: Father’s Day Edition
• Mystery Fanfare reminds us that tonight will bring the U.S. broadcast, on PBS-TV, of the first episode (of three) in the very last season of Endeavour. That British detective drama series, launched in 2012, is a prequel to the long-running Inspector Morse, both based on Colin Dexter’s novels about the same Oxford investigator. Shaun Evans stars as Detective Sergeant Endeavour Morse, with Roger Allam playing his immediate superior, Detective Chief Inspector Fred Thursday (a character not included in Dexter’s tales). There are many loose ends to tie up in Season 9, which already aired in the UK back in March and April. The Killing Times provides the following overview:
• In other TV news, In Reference to Murder reports that Season 2 of Netflix’s The Lincoln Lawyer, “based on the series of bestselling novels by Michael Connelly, will return with a two-part launch this summer. Part 1 premieres on July 6 while Part 2 drops Aug. 3. Created for TV by David E. Kelley, The Lincoln Lawyer tells the story of Mickey Haller (Manuel Garcia Rulfo), who runs his legal practice from the back of his Lincoln Town Car. Season 1 was based on the second book, The Brass Verdict, while the second season draws from the fourth book in the series called The Fifth Witness.”
• We wish a slightly belated happy 20th anniversary to Television Chronicles, an invaluable Web resource that launched in 2003.
• To have and have another? Eddie Muller's Noir Bar: Cocktails Inspired by the World of Film Noir has brought its author, the colorful host of Turner Classic Movies’ Noir Alley, a good deal of favorable press attention since it was dropped onto the market in late May by Running Press. Entertainment Weekly explains that the 224-page work “pairs 50 different noir films with 50 unique craft cocktails, some of which Muller invented himself,
hearkening back to his earliest career as a bartender in noir-worthy haunts.” Reviewer C.J. Bunce of the blog Borg notes, “This book is certainly not for everyone, but its full-color photographs and Muller’s eye for detail might draw in even teetotaling fans of the Golden Age of cinema. Basically each section is arranged with screencaps from a film, an image of a vintage movie poster or lobby card, and then a recipe for a drink to be paired with the movie, accompanied by commentary where Muller tries to tie his ingredients to a character’s mood or style.” Finally, Terence Towles Canote remarks, “while Eddie Muller's Noir Bar: Cocktails Inspired by the World of Film Noir is somewhat unique, in some ways it is surprising that a book of its sort had not been published years ago. It is no secret that drinking figures heavily in film noir. Bars, nightclubs, and seedy backrooms are tropes of the film style. And while many film noir protagonists took their liquor straight up, cocktails do appear frequently in film noir. There is a good reason many film noir fans are also cocktail connoisseurs.”
• This certainly seems to be the year for celebrating connections between crime fiction and spirited libations. In September, publisher Skyhorse will debut Agatha Whiskey: 50 Cocktails to Celebrate the Bestselling Novelist of All Time, by Colleen Mullaney.
• Editors at the mammoth Internet retailer Amazon are out with a list of what they proclaim are the 20 best mystery, thriller, and suspense novels of the year—so far:
1. All the Sinners Bleed, by S.A. Cosby
2. Small Mercies, by Dennis Lehane
3. Symphony of Secrets, by Brendan Slocumb
4. Sisters of the Lost Nation, by Nick Medina
5. Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers, by Jesse Q. Sutanto
6. Murder Your Employer: The McMasters Guide to Homicide,
by Rupert Holmes
7. Better the Blood, by Michael Bennett
8. The White Lady, by Jacqueline Winspear
9. The Maid’s Diary, by Loreth Anne White
10. A Disappearance in Fiji, by Nilima Rao
11. Bad Summer People, by Emma Rosenblum
12. Murder Book, by Thomas Perry
13. No Life for a Lady, by Hannah Dolby
14. Central Park West, by James Comey
15. Those Empty Eyes, by Charlie Donlea
16. A House With Good Bones, by T. Kingfisher
17. The Bandit Queens, by Parini Shroff
18. All the Dangerous Things, by Stacy Willingham
19. Age of Vice, by Deepti Kapoor
20. Drowning, by T.J. Newman
I’ve read only a few of these works, and there are several I simply won’t find time to tackle. Needless to say, not everyone will agree with Amazon’s choices. Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine editor George Easter suggests that Michael Robotham’s Lying Beside You and Juan Gomez-Jurado’s Red Queen would be among his own top 20. Confining myself to U.S. publications only, I’d wish to add The Nightingale Affair, by Tim Mason, and perhaps Paris Requiem, by Chris Lloyd to the mix. If allowed to incorporate releases from across the pond, I’d nominate Simon Scarrow’s Dead of Night and Simon Mason’s The Broken Afternoon, as well. But the year is still young, with plenty of promising new works yet to appear.
• Not to be seen slacking, Library Journal has selected what it says are the 15 best thriller books published thus far in 2023. Choices include Thomas Mullen’s Blind Spots, Ivy Pochada’s new Sing Her Down, Lee Goldberg’s Malibu Rising (which won’t actually reach stores until September), Don Winslow’s City of Dreams, and of course Cosby’s All the Sinners Bleed and Newman’s Drowning.
• There are just three more months to go, if Mike Ripley follows through on the threat to retire his “Getting Away with Murder” column from Shots come August. His June installment finds Ripley reflecting on his “34 years as a reviewer of crime fiction”; applauding fresh hardcover editions of two Agatha Christie works; recalling his discovery of a Stanley Ellin short-story collection he’d not known existed; and plugging recent releases by Craig Russell, Catherine Aird, Hansjörg Schneider, and others. Click here to read it all.
• Timed to this weekend’s Shetland Noir crime-fiction festival in northern Scotland, author Ann Cleeves’ publisher is making available—free of charge—a brand-new short story featuring her beloved Shetland police protagonists, Jimmy Perez and Alison “Tosh” McIntosh. To procure your own copy of “Missing in the Snow,” simply sign up here to receive the Pan Macmillian newsletter.
• Washington resident Jim Thomsen, a writer, infrequent Rap Sheet contributor, and book editor for Blackstone Publishing, announced on Twitter not long ago that he’s been chosen to edit a short-story anthology pegged to next year’s Left Coast Crime convention, which will be held in Seattle from April 11 to 14.” Stay tuned for a call for submissions!” Thomsen suggested in that same posting.
• Editor Cynthia Swanson has captured the 2023 Colorado Book Award for Best Anthology with her short-story collection, Denver Noir (Akashic). UPDATE: I neglected to mention that two other mystery-fiction works numbered among this year’s Colorado Book Award recipients. Aunt Dimity & the Enchanted Cottage, by Nancy Atherton (Viking), won for Best Mystery, while Leanne Kale Sparks’ The Wrong Woman (Crooked Lane) picked up Best Thriller honors.
• Amid all the chatter about ChatGPT, Nicholas Fuller, at The Grandest Game in the World blog, decided to ask that artificial intelligence chatbot to create new stories by classic mystery novelists—with dubious results. You’ll find ChatGPT’s version of Agatha Christie stories here, and its take on John Dickson Carr tales here.
• R.I.P., Carol Higgins Clark. As The Washington Post explains, Higgins Clark, “a writer of popular suspense novels who infused the corpses-and-clues genre with doses of dark humor, while also teaming up with her mother, famed mystery author Mary Higgins Clark, on Christmas-themed whodunits, died June 12 at a hospital in Los Angeles. She was 66.” The cause of death is said to have been appendix cancer. Deadline recalls that Carol Higgins Clark’s “career highlight was an 18-novel series starring private investigator Regan Reilly, several of them made into television movies. She appeared in each one.” The 15th and presumably final Reilly novel was Gypped (2012). A 16th series installment, Knocked, was announced for 2019 publication, but never reached print.
Set in 1972, [this concluding season] kicks off with “Prelude,” in which murders in an orchestra track back to childhood bullying; but two other deaths are unexplained, leading to a reinvestigation of Blenheim Vale. In “Uniform,” it all becomes a bit self-referential as a TV detective filming in Oxford is tied to two murders; and in the finale, “Exeunt,” there’s some resolution to the Blenheim Vale case, and at least an attempt (if not entirely successful) to explain the subsequent fate of the Thursday family.Endeavour begins at 9 p.m. ET/PT as part of PBS Masterpiece.
• In other TV news, In Reference to Murder reports that Season 2 of Netflix’s The Lincoln Lawyer, “based on the series of bestselling novels by Michael Connelly, will return with a two-part launch this summer. Part 1 premieres on July 6 while Part 2 drops Aug. 3. Created for TV by David E. Kelley, The Lincoln Lawyer tells the story of Mickey Haller (Manuel Garcia Rulfo), who runs his legal practice from the back of his Lincoln Town Car. Season 1 was based on the second book, The Brass Verdict, while the second season draws from the fourth book in the series called The Fifth Witness.”
• We wish a slightly belated happy 20th anniversary to Television Chronicles, an invaluable Web resource that launched in 2003.
• To have and have another? Eddie Muller's Noir Bar: Cocktails Inspired by the World of Film Noir has brought its author, the colorful host of Turner Classic Movies’ Noir Alley, a good deal of favorable press attention since it was dropped onto the market in late May by Running Press. Entertainment Weekly explains that the 224-page work “pairs 50 different noir films with 50 unique craft cocktails, some of which Muller invented himself,
hearkening back to his earliest career as a bartender in noir-worthy haunts.” Reviewer C.J. Bunce of the blog Borg notes, “This book is certainly not for everyone, but its full-color photographs and Muller’s eye for detail might draw in even teetotaling fans of the Golden Age of cinema. Basically each section is arranged with screencaps from a film, an image of a vintage movie poster or lobby card, and then a recipe for a drink to be paired with the movie, accompanied by commentary where Muller tries to tie his ingredients to a character’s mood or style.” Finally, Terence Towles Canote remarks, “while Eddie Muller's Noir Bar: Cocktails Inspired by the World of Film Noir is somewhat unique, in some ways it is surprising that a book of its sort had not been published years ago. It is no secret that drinking figures heavily in film noir. Bars, nightclubs, and seedy backrooms are tropes of the film style. And while many film noir protagonists took their liquor straight up, cocktails do appear frequently in film noir. There is a good reason many film noir fans are also cocktail connoisseurs.”• This certainly seems to be the year for celebrating connections between crime fiction and spirited libations. In September, publisher Skyhorse will debut Agatha Whiskey: 50 Cocktails to Celebrate the Bestselling Novelist of All Time, by Colleen Mullaney.
• Editors at the mammoth Internet retailer Amazon are out with a list of what they proclaim are the 20 best mystery, thriller, and suspense novels of the year—so far:
1. All the Sinners Bleed, by S.A. Cosby
2. Small Mercies, by Dennis Lehane
3. Symphony of Secrets, by Brendan Slocumb
4. Sisters of the Lost Nation, by Nick Medina
5. Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers, by Jesse Q. Sutanto
6. Murder Your Employer: The McMasters Guide to Homicide,
by Rupert Holmes
7. Better the Blood, by Michael Bennett
8. The White Lady, by Jacqueline Winspear
9. The Maid’s Diary, by Loreth Anne White
10. A Disappearance in Fiji, by Nilima Rao
11. Bad Summer People, by Emma Rosenblum
12. Murder Book, by Thomas Perry
13. No Life for a Lady, by Hannah Dolby
14. Central Park West, by James Comey
15. Those Empty Eyes, by Charlie Donlea
16. A House With Good Bones, by T. Kingfisher
17. The Bandit Queens, by Parini Shroff
18. All the Dangerous Things, by Stacy Willingham
19. Age of Vice, by Deepti Kapoor
20. Drowning, by T.J. Newman
I’ve read only a few of these works, and there are several I simply won’t find time to tackle. Needless to say, not everyone will agree with Amazon’s choices. Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine editor George Easter suggests that Michael Robotham’s Lying Beside You and Juan Gomez-Jurado’s Red Queen would be among his own top 20. Confining myself to U.S. publications only, I’d wish to add The Nightingale Affair, by Tim Mason, and perhaps Paris Requiem, by Chris Lloyd to the mix. If allowed to incorporate releases from across the pond, I’d nominate Simon Scarrow’s Dead of Night and Simon Mason’s The Broken Afternoon, as well. But the year is still young, with plenty of promising new works yet to appear.
• Not to be seen slacking, Library Journal has selected what it says are the 15 best thriller books published thus far in 2023. Choices include Thomas Mullen’s Blind Spots, Ivy Pochada’s new Sing Her Down, Lee Goldberg’s Malibu Rising (which won’t actually reach stores until September), Don Winslow’s City of Dreams, and of course Cosby’s All the Sinners Bleed and Newman’s Drowning.
• There are just three more months to go, if Mike Ripley follows through on the threat to retire his “Getting Away with Murder” column from Shots come August. His June installment finds Ripley reflecting on his “34 years as a reviewer of crime fiction”; applauding fresh hardcover editions of two Agatha Christie works; recalling his discovery of a Stanley Ellin short-story collection he’d not known existed; and plugging recent releases by Craig Russell, Catherine Aird, Hansjörg Schneider, and others. Click here to read it all.
• Timed to this weekend’s Shetland Noir crime-fiction festival in northern Scotland, author Ann Cleeves’ publisher is making available—free of charge—a brand-new short story featuring her beloved Shetland police protagonists, Jimmy Perez and Alison “Tosh” McIntosh. To procure your own copy of “Missing in the Snow,” simply sign up here to receive the Pan Macmillian newsletter.
• Washington resident Jim Thomsen, a writer, infrequent Rap Sheet contributor, and book editor for Blackstone Publishing, announced on Twitter not long ago that he’s been chosen to edit a short-story anthology pegged to next year’s Left Coast Crime convention, which will be held in Seattle from April 11 to 14.” Stay tuned for a call for submissions!” Thomsen suggested in that same posting.
• Editor Cynthia Swanson has captured the 2023 Colorado Book Award for Best Anthology with her short-story collection, Denver Noir (Akashic). UPDATE: I neglected to mention that two other mystery-fiction works numbered among this year’s Colorado Book Award recipients. Aunt Dimity & the Enchanted Cottage, by Nancy Atherton (Viking), won for Best Mystery, while Leanne Kale Sparks’ The Wrong Woman (Crooked Lane) picked up Best Thriller honors.
• Amid all the chatter about ChatGPT, Nicholas Fuller, at The Grandest Game in the World blog, decided to ask that artificial intelligence chatbot to create new stories by classic mystery novelists—with dubious results. You’ll find ChatGPT’s version of Agatha Christie stories here, and its take on John Dickson Carr tales here.
• R.I.P., Carol Higgins Clark. As The Washington Post explains, Higgins Clark, “a writer of popular suspense novels who infused the corpses-and-clues genre with doses of dark humor, while also teaming up with her mother, famed mystery author Mary Higgins Clark, on Christmas-themed whodunits, died June 12 at a hospital in Los Angeles. She was 66.” The cause of death is said to have been appendix cancer. Deadline recalls that Carol Higgins Clark’s “career highlight was an 18-novel series starring private investigator Regan Reilly, several of them made into television movies. She appeared in each one.” The 15th and presumably final Reilly novel was Gypped (2012). A 16th series installment, Knocked, was announced for 2019 publication, but never reached print.
Friday, June 16, 2023
So Much Crime for the Summertime
Philip Marlowe is heading back to Los Angeles’ mean streets. Over the more than half a dozen decades since Raymond Chandler released Playback (1958), his seventh and final novel featuring the wisecracking private eye, Marlowe has undertaken a handful of investigations brought his way by other authors. Robert B. Parker initially revived him for Poodle Springs (1989), and followed that up with Perchance to Dream (1991). “Benjamin Black,” aka John Banville, trotted him out to help an alluring young perfume heiress track down her missing paramour in The Black-Eyed Blonde, a 2014 novel adapted to film as Marlowe (2022), starring Liam Neeson. In Only to Sleep (2018), Lawrence Osborne imagined an older but no luckier Marlowe living in Mexico and probing the “accidental” swimming death of a debt-ridden con man/developer. And in last year’s The Goodbye Coast, Joe Ide time-warped Chandler’s gumshoe into modern-day L.A., where he sought the overindulged stepdaughter of a Hollywood filmmaker, a task he undertook with help from his alcoholic ex-cop father.
Now comes Scottish author Denise Mina, the first woman to put Philip Marlowe through his fictional paces. In The Second Murderer—due for publication in Britain in mid-July, and in the States come the start of August—she dispatches the lonely shamus in search of Chrissie Montgomery, a naïve 22-year-old socialite due to inherit a fortune … and perhaps not wishing to be located. He’s joined in this quest by Anne Riordan, a woman to whom we were introduced in Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely (1940), and who’s since established her own rival sleuthing agency. Publishers Weekly
gives this 1940s-set yarn an avid thumbs-up, opining that “On top of nailing Chandler’s atmospherics (‘Out on Santa Monica the heat was oiling up from the ground. Dust whipped past us on a spiteful breeze;), Mina delivers a truly surprising plot.”Every season, there are two or three new crime novels I most look forward to reading, and Mina’s The Second Murderer is on the top of my list for the coming summer months. I already have an advance reader copy waiting in my office for attention, though I’ve so far resisted cracking it open, because there are so many other books in this genre scheduled for release on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean before August.
Among those treats are fresh works by the likes of S.A. Cosby, Ruth Ware, Reed Farrel Coleman, Ann Cleeves, Martin Walker, Naomi Hirahara, Linwood Barclay, Julia Heaberlin, Greg Iles, Sarah Hilary, Vaseem Khan, Laura Lippman, and Steve Cavanagh. You can also anticipate finding Lawrence Block’s “autobiography” of his fictional gumshoe, Matt Scudder; a historical whodunit penned by Ragnar Jónasson and Iceland’s 28th prime minister, Katrin Jakobsdóttir; Richard North Patterson’s latest and previously much-rejected legal thriller; a Georgian-era mystery from Laura Shepherd-Robinson (Daughters of Night) starring a high-society fortune teller; Northern Irish writer Adrian McKinty’s seventh novel headlined by Belfast Detective Inspector Sean Duffy; Swedish author Karin Smirnoff’s debut installment in the Lisbeth Salander series, created by Stieg Larsson; a brand-new Nero Wolfe/Archie Goodwin story by Robert Goldsborough; and the U.S. publication of Andrew Taylor’s The Shadows of London, his sixth 17th-century thriller starring Cat Hakesby (née Lovett) and James Marwood. Expected to appear in short order, as well, are retitled reprints of Edward Marston’s two architect Merlin Richards mysteries, backdropped by the buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright, plus other reissues from John Wyndham, Christina Koning, John Dickson Carr, Christianna Brand, Jacques Futrelle, and Eric Ambler.
The extensive inventory below, containing works of interest to crime, mystery, and thriller readers, lists more than 425 titles! That’s certainly not all of what can be expected from this genre during the coming three summer months. However, it represents what I hope is a cross-section of books that will soon become available. If you are aware of other notable English-language releases due out this season, but that are not mentioned here, please let me know.
As usual, books marked with an asterisk (*) are non-fiction, while the rest are novels or collections of short stories.
JUNE (U.S.):
• All the Sinners Bleed, by S.A. Cosby (Flatiron)
• The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession, by Michael Finkel (Knopf)*
• The Autobiography of Matthew Scudder, by Lawrence Block
(LB Productions)
• Bad Kids, by Zijin Chen (Pushkin Vertigo)
• Because the Night, by James D.F. Hannah (Down & Out)
• Before She Finds Me, by Heather Chavez (Mulholland)
• Blind Man’s Bluff, by Baynard Kendrick (>American Mystery Classics)
• Blonde Bait, by Stephen Marlowe (Black Gat/Stark House Press)
• The Bone Riddle, by Sara E. Johnson (Poisoned Pen Press)
• A Botanist’s Guide to Flowers and Fatality, by Kate Khavari
(Crooked Lane)
• The Bucharest Legacy, by William Maz (Oceanview)
• Charlotte Illes Is Not a Detective, by Katie Siegel (Kensington)
• The Close, by Jane Casey (HarperCollins)
• Code of the Hills, by Chris Offutt (Grove Press)
• Constable Country, by Catherine Aird (Allison & Busby)• Corman/Poe: Interviews and Essays Exploring the Making of Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe Films, 1960-1964, by Chris Alexander (Headpress)*
• The Couples Trip, by Ulf Kvensler (Hanover Square Press)
• The Dark That Doesn’t Sleep, by Simon Mockler (Pegasus Crime)
• Dead Man’s Wake, by Paul Doiron (Minotaur)
• Death Among the Ruins, by Susanna Calkins (Severn House)
• Death Comes to Marlow, by Robert Thorogood (Poisoned Pen Press)
• Death in Fine Condition, by Andrew Cartmel (Titan)
• Death Message, by Damien Boyd (Thomas & Mercer)
• The Devil’s Playground, by Craig Russell (Doubleday)
• A Disappearance in Fiji, by Nilima Rao (Soho Crime)
• The Dissident, by Paul Goldberg (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Don’t Forget the Girl, by Rebecca McKanna (Sourcebooks Landmark)
• The Drowning Woman, by Robyn Harding (Grand Central)
• Eagle Bay, by Ken Cruickshank (Glendoveer Press)
• The Edge of Sleep, by Willie Block and Jake Emanuel with Jason Gurley (St. Martin’s Press)
• The Elissas: Three Girls, One Fate, and the Deadly Secrets of Suburbia, by Samantha Leach (Legacy Lit)*
• A Fatal Affair, by A.R. Torre (Thomas & Mercer)
• A Fatal Illusion, by Anna Lee Huber (Berkley)
• The Final Cut, by Marjorie McCown (Crooked Lane)
• The First Death, by Kendra Elliot (Montlake)
• Flesh and Blood, by David Mark (Severn House)
• Foul Play Suspected, by John Wyndham (Modern Library)
• Gallows Dome, by Nolan Knight (Down & Out)
• The Get, by Dietrich Kalteis (ECW Press)
• Girls and Their Horses, by Eliza Jane Brazier (Berkley)
• The Good Ones, by Polly Stewart (Harper)
• The Guardian, by Joshua Hood (Blackstone)
• The Gulf, by Rachel Cochran (Harper)
• Have You Seen Her, by Catherine McKenzie (Atria)
• Hot Pot Murder, by Jennifer J. Chow (Berkley)
• House Woman, by Adorah Nworah (Unnamed Press)
• How to Kill Men and Get Away with It, by Katy Brent (HQ Digital)
• In a Hard Wind, by David Housewright (Minotaur)
• Inside Threat, by Matthew Quirk (Morrow)
• The IPCRESS File, by Len Deighton (Grove Press)
• The Island of Lost Girls, by Alex Marwood (Harper Paperbacks)
• The Isolated Séance, by Jeri Westerson (Severn House)
• The Italian Squad: The True Story of the Immigrant Cops Who Fought the Rise of the Mafia, by Paul Moses (NYU Press)*
• The Killer Everyone Knew and Other Captain Leopold Stories, by Edward D. Hoch (Crippen and Landru)
• A Killer’s Game, by Isabella Maldonado (Thomas & Mercer)
• Killingly, by Katharine Beutner (Soho Crime)
• The Last Drop of Hemlock, by Katharine Schellman (Minotaur)
• The Last Sinner, by Lisa Jackson (Kensington)
• Lay Your Body Down, by Amy Suiter Clarke (Morrow)
• Let Me In, by Claire McGowan (Thomas & Mercer)
• Little Caesar / The Silver Eagle, by W.R. Burnett (Stark House Press)
• Livingsky, by Anthony Bidulka (Stonehouse)
• The Long Way Back, by Nicole Baart (Atria)
• The Lost Pope, by Glenn Cooper (Grand Central)
• Maddalena and the Dark, by Julia Fine (Flatiron)
• Maeve Fly, by C.J. Leede (Tor Nightfire)
• The Man in the Corduroy Suit, by James Wolff (Bitter Lemon Press)
• Marion Lane and the Raven’s Revenge, by T.A. Willberg (Park Row)
• Misfortune Cookie, by Vivien Chien (St. Martin’s Paperbacks)
• The Missing Heiress, by Robert Goldsborough (MysteriousPress.com/Open Road)
• A Most Agreeable Murder, by Julia Seales (Random House)
• Mother Howl, by Craig Clevenger (Angry Robot)
• Murder at Hendon Aerodrome, by Christina Koning (Allison & Busby)
• Murder at Jaipur, by Bharti Kirchner (Camel Press)
• Murder at the Crown and Anchor, by C.J. Archer (C.J. Archer)
• A Murder in Ashwood, by Robert Brighton (Ashwood Press)
• Murder in Berlin, by Christina Koning (Allison & Busby)
• Murdle, Volume 1: 100 Elementary to Impossible Mysteries to Solve Using Logic, Skill, and the Power of Deduction, by G.T. Karber (St. Martin’s
Griffin)*• My Murder, by Katie Williams (Riverhead)
• Near Miss, by Stuart Woods and Brett Battles (Putnam)
• Nemesis, by Wilbur Smith (Zaffre)
• A Newlywed’s Guide to Fortune and Murder, by Dianne Freeman (Kensington)
• The Night It Ended, by Katie Garner (Mira)
• Night of the Wolf, by Cassandra Clark (Severn House)
• Night Will Find You, by Julia Heaberlin (Flatiron)
• The 9th Man, by Steve Berry and Grant Blackwood (Grand Central)
• No Man’s Ghost, by Jason Powell (Agora)
• The Only One Left, by Riley Sager (Dutton)
• Orphan Road, by Andrew Nette (Down & Out)
• The Other Mistress, by Shanora Williams (Dafina)
• Passport to Spy, by Nancy Cole Silverman (Level Best)
• A Pen Dipped in Poison, by J.M. Hall (Avon)
• The Pigeon, by David Gordon (Mysterious Press)
• Praying Mantis, by RV Raman (Agora)
• Pulp Champagne: The Short Fiction of Lorenz Heller, by Lorenz Heller (Stark House Press)
• The Puzzle Master, by Danielle Trussoni (Random House)
• The Quiet Tenant, by Clémence Michallon (Knopf)
• Relentless Melt, by Jeremy P. Bushnell (Melville House)
• The Resort, by Sarah Goodwin (Avon)
• Retribution, by Robert McCaw (Oceanview)
• Rich Waters, by Robert Bailey (Thomas & Mercer)
• Robert B. Parker’s Bad Influence, by Alison Gaylin (Putnam)
• The Seat of the Scornful, by John Dickson Carr (Poisoned Pen Press)
• A Shadow in Moscow, by Katherine Reay (Harper Muse)
• She Started It, by Sian Gilbert (Morrow)
• Sherlock Holmes: The Monster of the Mere, by Philip Purser-
Hallard (Titan)
• The Siberia Job, by Josh Haven (Mysterious Press)
• The Silent Bride, by Shalini Boland (Thomas & Mercer)
• Southern Man, by Greg Iles (Morrow)
• The Spare Room, by Andrea Bartz (Ballantine)
• Speak of the Devil, by Rose Wilding (Minotaur)
• The Spectacular, by Fiona Davis (>Dutton)
• The Spy Across the Water, by James Naughtie (Head of Zeus)
• A Stolen Child, by Sarah Stewart Taylor (Minotaur)
• Stray Dogs, by Richard John Parfitt (Third Man)
• The Street, by Susi Holliday (Thomas & Mercer)
• The Thinking Machine, by Jacques Futrelle (Poisoned Pen Press)
• A Thread of Violence: A Story of Truth, Invention, and Murder, by Mark O’Connell (Doubleday)*
• The Three Deaths of Willa Stannard, by Kate Robards (Crooked Lane)
• The Traitor Beside Her, by Mary Anna Evans (Poisoned Pen Press)
• Trial, by Richard North Patterson (Post Hill Press)
• Try Not to Breathe, by David Bell (Berkley)
• Twist of Fate, by D.L. Mark (Head of Zeus/Aries)
• Unnatural Ends, by Christopher Huang (Inkshares)
• The Velvet Fleece, by Lois Eby and John C. Fleming
(Stark House Press)
• The Water Tower, by Amy Young (Level Best)
• What Remains, by Wendy Walker (Blackstone)
• What the Dead Know: Learning About Life as a New York City Death Investigator, by Barbara Butcher (Simon & Schuster)*
• What the Neighbors Saw, by Melissa Adelman (Minotaur)
• The Whispers, by Ashley Audrain (Pamela Dorman/Viking)
• The Woman Inside, by M.T. Edvardsson (Celadon)
• You Can Trust Me, by Wendy Heard (Bantam)
• You Look Beautiful Tonight, by L.R. Jones (Thomas & Mercer)
• Zero Days, by Ruth Ware (Gallery/Scout Press)
JUNE (UK):
• An Afterlife for Rosemary Lamb, by Louise Wolhuter (Ultimo Press)
• Bad Liar, by Tami Hoag (Orion)
• Black Fell, by Mari Hannah (Orion)
• Black Valley Farm, by Sheila Bugler (Canelo)
• A Blind Eye, by Marion Todd (Canelo)
• Blood on the Shore, by Simon McCleave (Avon)
• Burning Bridges, by Stephanie Harte (Head of Zeus/Aries)
• By Treason We Perish, by A.J. Mackenzie (Canelo Adventure)
• The Chemical Code, by Fiona Erskine (Point Blank)
• Coming to Find You, by Jane Corry (Penguin)
• Conviction, by Jack Jordan (Simon & Schuster UK)
• The Couple in the Photo, by Helen Cooper (Hodder & Stoughton)
• The Dead Don’t Speak, by Claire Askew (Hodder & Stoughton)
• A Deadly Likeness, by Lesley McEvoy (Zaffre)
• Death at the Chateau, by Ian Moore (Farrago)
• A Death in the Parish, by Richard Coles (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
• Don’t Swipe Right, by L.M. Chilton (Head of Zeus/Aries)
• End Game, by Liz Mistry (HQ Digital)
• The End of Us, by Olivia Kiernan (Riverrun)
• The Expectant Detectives, by Kat Ailes (Zaffre)
• The Fallen, by John Sutherland (Orion)
• The Girls on Chalk Hill, by Alison Belsham (Bookouture)
• Hokey Pokey, by Kate Mascarenhas (Apollo)• Homecoming, by Isabel Ashdown (Orion)
• The Homemaker, by Shari J. Ryan (Bookouture)
• The Horror of Haglin House, by M.R.C. Kasasian (Canelo)
• How to Survive a Classic Crime Novel, by Kate Jackson (British Library)*
• The Inmate, by Sebastian Fitzek
(Head of Zeus/Aries)
• The Interpreter, by Brooke Robinson (Harvill Secker)
• The Last Goodbye, by Tim Weaver (Michael Joseph)
• The Launch Party, by Lauren Forry (Zaffre)
• Midnight, by Amy McCulloch (Michael Joseph)
• The Missing Mummies, by Lisa Tuttle (Jo Fletcher)
• Murder and the Moggies of Magpie Row, by Kate High (Constable)
• Murder in Merrywell, by Jane Bettany (HQ Digital)
• The Murder of Anton Livius, by Hansjörg Schneider
(Bitter Lemon Press)
• No Justice, by Kate Evans (Constable)
• No Sweet Sorrow, by Denzil Meyrick (Birlinn)
• The Other Mothers, by Katherine Faulkner (Raven)
• The People Watcher, by Sam Lloyd (Bantam)
• The Red House, by Roz Watkins (HQ)
• The Rule of Three, by Sam Ripley (Simon & Schuster UK)
• Run to Ground, by Stuart Johnstone (Allison & Busby)
• The Seventh Victim, by Michael Wood (One More Chapter)
• Speak of the Devil, by Rose Wilding (Baskerville)
• The Square of Sevens, by Laura Shepherd Robinson (Mantle)
• Suddenly at His Residence, by Christianna Brand (British Library)
• Their Wicked Games, by D.K. Hood (Bookouture)
• The Trial, by Rob Rinder (Century)
• Voices of the Dead, by Ambrose Parry (Canongate)
• Winter’s Gifts, by Ben Aaronovitch (Orion)
JULY (U.S.):
• All Is Not Forgiven, by Joe Kenda (Blackstone)
• All the Demons Are Here, by Jake Tapper (Little, Brown)
• An Evil Heart, by Linda Castillo (Minotaur)
• At the End of Every Day, by Arianna Reiche (Atria)
• Behold the Monster: Confronting America’s Most Prolific Serial Killer, by Jillian Lauren (Sourcebooks)*
• Between a Wok and a Dead Place, by Leslie Budewitz
(Seventh Street)
• The Bitter Past, by Bruce Borgos (Minotaur)
• Black River, by Matthew Spencer (Thomas & Mercer)
• Blind Fear, by Brandon Webb and John David Mann (Bantam)
• The Block Party, by Jamie Day (St. Martin’s Press)
• The Bones of the Story, by Carol Goodman (Morrow)
• Cascade Manhunt, by Rob Phillips (Latah)
• Chameleon, by Remi Adeleke (Morrow)
• The Collector, by Daniel Silva (Harper)
• Crook Manifesto, by Colson Whitehead (Doubleday)
• Crook o’ Lune, by E.C.R. Lorac (Poisoned Pen Press)
• A Cryptic Clue, by Victoria Gilbert (Crooked Lane)
• Cutting Teeth, by Chandler Baker (Flatiron)
• Dead Fall, by Brad Thor (Atria/Emily Bestler)
• Dead of Winter, by Darcy Coates (Poisoned Pen Press)
• Death on the Beach, by Steph Broadribb (Thomas & Mercer)
• The Devil’s Flute Murders, by Seishi Yokomizo (Pushkin Vertigo)
• Do Tell, by Lindsay Lynch (Doubleday)
• Eventide, Water City, by Chris McKinney (Soho Crime)
• Everyone Here Is Lying, by Shari Lapena (Pamela Dorman)
• Evidence of Things Seen: True Crime in the Era of Reckoning, by Sarah Weinman (Ecco)*
• Excavations, by Hannah Michell (One World)
• Fatal Legacy, by Lindsey Davis (Minotaur)
• Fearless, by M.W. Craven (Flatiron)
• Flags on the Bayou, by James Lee Burke (Atlantic Monthly Press)
• Go Find Daddy, by Steve Goble (Oceanview)
• Golden Age Bibliomysteries, edited by Otto Penzler (American Mystery Classics)
• Gone But Not Forgotten, by C. Michele Dorsey (Severn House)
• Goodbye Earl, by Leesa Cross-Smith Grand Central)
• The Guest Room, by Tasha Sylva (Henry Holt)
• Here in the Dark, by Meagan Lucas (Shotgun Honey)
• Her Father’s Daughter, by T.M. Dunn (Crooked Lane)
• Her, Too, by Bonnie Kistler (Harper)
• Homicide in Chicago, by Edward Marston (Allison & Busby)
• An Honest Man, by Michael Koryta (Mulholland)
• The Horoscope Writer, by Ash Bishop (CamCat)
• The Housekeepers, by Alex Hay (Graydon House)
• How Can I Help You, by Laura Sims (Putnam)
• The Hunt, by Kelly J. Ford
(Thomas & Mercer)
• I Know What You Did, by Cayce Osborne (Crooked Lane)
• In the Shadow of the Bull, by Eleanor
Kuhns (Severn House)
• The Killer’s Wife, by Susan Furlong (Seventh Street)
• The Lady from Burma, by Allison
Montclair (Minotaur)
• The Last Dance, by Mark Billingham (Atlantic Monthly Press)
• The Last Ranger, by Peter Heller (Knopf)
• License to Die, by Haris Orkin (Black Rose)
• A Likeable Woman, by May Cobb (Berkley)
• The Little Dog Laughed, by Joseph Hansen (Soho Syndicate)
• The Long Ago, by Michael McGarrity (Norton)
• Love and Murder in the Time of Covid, by Qiu Xiaolong
(Severn House)
• Lowdown Road, by Scott Von Doviak (Hard Case Crime)
• A Man of Lies, by Ben Crane (Pegasus)
• The Mistress of Bhatia House, by Sujata Massey (Soho Crime)
• Mrs. Plansky’s Revenge, by Spencer Quinn (Forge)
• Murder at the Arizona Biltmore, by Edward Marston (Allison & Busby)
• Murder Before Evensong, by Richard Coles (Titan)
• The Murder Wheel, by Tom Mead (Mysterious Press)
• Not by Blood, by Chris Narozny (Crooked Lane)
• The Ocean Above Me, by Kevin Sites (Harper)
• The Paris Agent, by Kelly Rimmer (Graydon House)
• Pink Lemonade Cake Murder, by Joanne Fluke (Kensington Cozies)
• Prom Mom, by Laura Lippman (Morrow)
• Queen Wallis, by C.J. Carey (Sourcebooks Landmark)
• The Record Keeper, by Charles Martin (Thomas Nelson)
• The Red Hotel: Moscow 1941, the Metropol Hotel, and the Untold Story of Stalin’s Propaganda War, by Alan Philps (Pegasus)*
• The Sandbox, by Brian Andrews and Jeff Wilson (Blackstone)
• Satan Is a Woman / 13 French Street, by Gil Brewer
(Stark House Press)
• Shadow Drive, by Nolan Cubero (Blackstone)
• The Shadow Girls, by Alice Blanchard (Minotaur)
• The Shadows of London, by Andrew Taylor (HarperCollins)
• The Shell House Detectives, by Emylia Hall (Thomas & Mercer)
• A Shimmer of Red, by Valerie Wilson Wesley (Kensington Cozies)
• Sinners of Starlight City, by Anika Scott (Morrow)
• Sleepless City, by Reed Farrel Coleman (Blackstone)
• The Soul Game, by Javier Castillo (Grupo)
• The Spider, by Lars Kepler (Knopf)
• The Spread, by Dana King (Down & Out)
• The St. Ambrose School for Girls, by Jessica Ward (Gallery)
• The Stolen Coast, by Dwyer Murphy (Viking)
• Strange Sally Diamond, by Liz Nugent (Gallery/Scout Press)
• Subject: Murder, by Clifford Witting (Galileo)
• Ten-Acre Rock, by Kris Lackey (Blackstone)
• Thicker Than Water, by Megan Collins (Atria)
• To Have and to Heist, by Sara Desai (Berkley)
• A Twisted Love Story, by Samantha Downing (Berkley)
• The Unforgiven Dead, by Fulton Ross (Inkshares)
• Urgent Matters, by Paula Rodríguez (Pushkin Vertigo)
• The Viper, by John Verdon (Counterpoint)
• The Wayward Prince, by Leonard Goldberg (Minotaur)
• Wednesdays at One, by Sandra A. Miller (Zibby)
• What Harms You, by Lisa Black (Kensington)
• Windfall, by Wendy Corsi Staub (Morrow)
• With a Kiss We Die, by L.R. Dorn; (Morrow)
• The Woman in the Castello, by Kelsey James (John Scognamiglio)
• The Woods Are Waiting, by Katherine Greene (Crooked Lane)
JULY (UK):
• Alchemy, by S.J. Parris (HarperCollins)
• All of Us Are Broken, by Fiona Cummins (Macmillan)
• Barking Mad, by Leigh Russell (Crime & Mystery Club)
• Beast in the Shadows, by Edogawa Rampo (Penguin Classics)
• Black Thorn, by Sarah Hilary (Macmillan)
• The Blood of Others, by Graham Hurley (Head of Zeus/Aries)
• Children of the Mist, by Douglas Skelton (Polygon)
• The Clearing, by Simon Toyne (HarperCollins)
• Clean Kill, by Stephen Leather (Hodder & Stoughton)
• The Conspirators, by G.W. Shaw (Riverrun)
• Consumed, by Greg Buchanan (Orion)
• Devil’s Breath, by Jill Johnson (Black & White)
• The Dive, by Sara Ochs (Bantam)
• Eye for an Eye, by M.J. Arlidge (Orion)
• Fear the Silence, by Robert Bryndza (Raven Street)
• In the Dark, by Claire Allan (Avon)
• Journey into Fear, by Eric Ambler (Penguin Classics)
• Lowbridge, by Lucy Campbell (Ultimo Press)
• Maigret and the Headless Corpse, by Georges Simenon (Penguin Classics)
• Murder at Church Lodge, by Greg Mosse (Hodder Paperbacks)
• Murder at the Tower of London, by Jim Eldridge (Allison & Busby)
• Murder in the Family, by Cara Hunter (HarperCollins)
• The New Wife, by J.P. Delaney (Quercus)
• Old Evils, by Alex Walters (Canelo)
• The Old Rogue of Limehouse, by Ann Granger (Headline)
• One Good Deed, by David Jackson (Viper)
• Outback, by Patricia Wolf (Embla)
• Out of the Ashes, by Louisa Scarr (Canelo Crime)
• Penance, by Eliza Clark (Faber and Faber)
• Prey for the Shadow, by Javier Cercas (MacLehose Press)
• Revenge of the Stormbringer, by Peter Tremayne (Headline)
• Sanderson’s Isle, by James Clarke (Serpent’s Tail)
• Sea Leopard, by Craig Thomas (Canelo Action)
• Silent Bones, by Rachel Lynch (Canelo)
• Silent Voices, by Patricia Gibney (Sphere)
• Someone You Know, by Erin Kinsley (Headline)
• The Venetian Candidate, by Philip Gwynne Jones (Constable)
• A Very Lively Murder, by Katy Watson (Constable)
• The Wheel Spins, by Ethel Lina White (British Library)
• The Wide World, by Pierre Lemaitre (Tinder Press)
• Wish You Were Here, by Nicola Monaghan (Verve)
• The Woman Who Lied, by Claire Douglas (Michael Joseph)
• You Can’t See Me, by Eva Björg Ægisdóttir (Orenda)
• Zero Kill, by M.K. Hill (Head of Zeus/Aries)
AUGUST (U.S.):
• After That Night, by Karin Slaughter (Morrow)
• Best Served Cold, by David P. Wagner (Poisoned Pen Press)
• Birder, She Wrote, by Donna Andrews (Minotaur)
• The Birthday Murder, by Lange Lewis (American Mystery Classics)
• The Blonde Identity, by Ally Carter (Avon)
• Board to Death, by .J. Connor (Kensington Cozies)
• Bomber, by Len Deighton (Grove Press)
• The Bone Hacker, by Kathy Reichs (Scribner)
• The Borgia Portrait, by David Hewson (Severn House)
• The Bridge, by Matt Brolly (Thomas & Mercer)
• Broadway Butterfly, by Sara DiVello (Thomas & Mercer)
• To Catch a Storm, by Mindy Mejia (Atlantic Monthly Press)
• A Chateau Under Siege, by Martin Walker (Knopf)
• Cleveland Noir, edited by Michael Ruhlman and Miesha Wilson Headen (Akashic)
• Come With Me, by Erin Flanagan (Thomas & Mercer)
• The Continental Affair, by Christine Mangan (Flatiron)
• The Coworker, by Freida McFadden (Poisoned Pen Press)
• Dark Corners, by Megan Goldin (St. Martin’s Press)
• The Dark Edge of Night, by Mark Pryor (Minotaur)
• Dead and Gone, by Joanna Schaffhausen (Minotaur)
• Deadlock, by James Byrne (Minotaur)
• Death Comes to Santa Fe, by Amanda Allen (Severn House)
• Death of Jezebel, by Christianna Brand (Poisoned Pen Press)
• The Detective Up Late, by Adrian McKinty (Blackstone)
• The Discreet Charm of the Big Bad Wolf, by Alexander McCall
Smith (Pantheon)
• Double Illusion, by Barbara Nadel (Headline)
• The Drowning at Dyes Inlet, by D.D. Black (Independently published)
• The Enemy at Home, by Kevin O’Brien (Kensington)
• Evergreen, by Naomi Hirahara (Soho Crime)
• Fever House, by Keith Rosson (Random House)
• The Flying Z, by Leo W. Banks (Brash)
• The Girl in the Eagle’s Talons, by Karin Smirnoff (Knopf)
• Gone Tonight, by Sarah Pekkanen (St. Martin’s Press)
• Good Bad Girl, by Alice Feeney (Flatiron)
• Happiness Falls, by Angie Kim (Hogarth)
• Hard Country, by Reavis Z. Wortham (Poisoned Pen Press)
• Harlem After Midnight, by Louise Hare (Berkley)
• The Hike, by Lucy Clarke (Putnam)
• The Hurricane Blonde, by Halley Sutton (Putnam)
• I’m Not Done with You Yet, by Jesse Q. Sutanto (Berkley)
• In a Quiet Town, by Amber Garza (Mira)
• In Her Blood, by Caro Ramsey (Severn House)
• Just Another Missing Person, by Gillian McAllister (Morrow)
• Killin’ Time in San Diego: Bouchercon Anthology 2023, edited by Holly West (Down & Out)
• The Last One, by Will Dean (Atria/Emily Bestler)
• Lethal Range, by Ryan Steck (Tyndale House)
• Liquid Snakes, by Stephen Kearse (Soft Skull)
• Looking Glass Sound, by Catriona Ward (Tor Nightfire)
• The Messenger, by Megan Davis (Pegasus Crime)
• Miss Morton and the Spirits of the Underworld, by Catherine Lloyd (Kensington)
• Mister Magic, by Kiersten White (Del Rey)
• Mrs. Jeffries Aims to Win, by Emily Brightwell (Berkley)
• Murder at the Elms, by Alyssa Maxwell (Kensington)
• None of This Is True, by Lisa Jewell (Atria)
• North of Nowhere, by Allison Brennan (Minotaur)
• One Night, by Georgina Cross (Bantam)
• The Paris Assignment, by Rhys Bowen (Lake Union)• Pet, by Catherine Chidgey
(Europa Editions)
• The Puzzle of Blackstone Lodge, by Martin Edwards (Poisoned Pen Press)
• Ravage & Son, by Jerome Charyn (Bellevue Literary Press)
• Ricochet, by Taylor Moore (Morrow)
• Saving Myles, by Carl Vonderau (Oceanview)
• The Second Murderer, by Denise
Mina (Mulholland)
• A Short History of the World in 50 Lies, by Natasha Todd
(Michael O’Mara)*
• Small Town Sins, by Ken Jaworowski (Henry Holt)
• Someone You Trust, by Rachel Ryan (Gallery)
• The Stranger in the Seine, by Guillaume Musso (Back Bay)
• Sun Damage, by Sabine Durrant (Harper Paperbacks)
• The Sunset Years of Agnes Sharp, by Leonie Swann (Soho Crime)
• Tangled Vines: Power, Privilege, and the Murdaugh Family Murders, by John Glatt (St. Martin’s Press)*
• Tell Me What I Am, by Una Mannion (Harper)
• Things Get Ugly: The Best Crime Stories of Joe R. Lansdale, by Joe R. Lansdale (Tachyon)
• Those We Thought We Knew, by David Joy (Putnam)
• The Trade Off, by Sandie Jones (Minotaur)
• The Trap, by Catherine Ryan Howard (Blackstone)
• Three Fires, by Denise Mina (Pegasus Crime)
• Whalefall, by Daniel Kraus (MTV)
• What Never Happened, by Rachel Howzell Hall (Thomas & Mercer)
• Where the Dead Sleep, by Joshua Moehling (Poisoned Pen Press)
AUGUST (UK.):
• All the Little Liars, by Victoria Selman (Quercus)
• Assassin Eighteen, by John Brownlow (Hodder & Stoughton)
• The Bay, by L.J. Ross (Dark Skies)
• A Bird in Winter, by Louise Doughty (Faber and Faber)
• The Body in Nightingale Park, by Nick Louth (Canelo)
• The City of God, by Michael Russell (Constable)
• A Cornish Seaside Murder, by Fiona Leitch (One More Chapter)
• Day’s End, by Garry Disher (Viper)
• Death of a Lesser God, by Vaseem Khan (Hodder & Stoughton)
• A Discovery in the Costwolds, by Rebecca Tope (Allison & Busby)
• The Drone, by Adrian Magson (Canelo Action)
• The Fine Art of Uncanny Prediction, by Robert Goddard (Bantam)
• Game of Spies, by Ava Glass (Century)
• He Who Whispers, by John Dickson Carr (British Library)
• The Hotel, by Louise Mumford (HQ Digital)
• I Know It’s You, by Susan Lewis (HarperCollins)
• The Inheritance, by Samantha Hayes (Bookouture)
• Just Between Us, by Adele Parks (HQ)
• The Killing Place, by Kate Ellis (Piatkus)
• Kill for Me Kill for You, by Steve Cavanagh (Headline)
• The Lie Maker, by Linwood Barclay (HQ)
• The Marriage Retreat, by Laura Elliot (Bookouture)
• Murder at the Residence, by Stella Blómkvist (Corylus)
• My Husband’s Killer, by Laura Marshall (Sphere)
• Over My Dead Body, by Maz Evans (Headline)
• The Raging Storm, by Ann Cleeves (Macmillan)
• The Red Room, by Mark Dawson (Welbeck)
• Reykjavik, by Ragnar Jónasson and Katrín Jakobsdóttir
(Michael Joseph)
• The Sentence, by Christina Dalcher (HQ)
• The Silent Man, by David Fennell (Zaffre)
• Taste of Blood, by Lynda La Plante (Zaffre)
• Three Card Murder, by J.L. Blackhurst (HQ)
• The Wild Coast, by Lin Anderson (Macmillan)
• Without Trace, by Leigh Russell (No Exit Press)
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