What the Strand Says

The Strand Magazine has announced the nominees for its 2024 Critics Awards. The Best Novel category is short of surprises; however, the Best Debut list includes a few works of rather less familiarity.

Best Mystery Novel:
• All the Sinners Bleed, by S.A. Cosby (Flatiron)
• Everybody Knows, by Jordan Harper (Mulholland)
• Small Mercies, by Dennis Lehane (Harper)
• Resurrection Walk, by Michael Connelly (Little, Brown)
• Prom Mom, by Laura Lippman (Morrow)
• Time’s Undoing, by Cheryl A. Head (Dutton)
• The Secret Hours, by Mick Herron (Soho Crime)

Best Debut Mystery:
• Fadeaway Joe, by Hugh Lessig (Crooked Lane)
• Mother-Daughter Murder Night, by Nina Simon (Morrow)
• The House in the Pines, by Ana Reyes (Dutton)
• Don’t Forget the Girl, by Rebecca McKanna (Sourcebooks Landmark)
• Adrift, by Lisa Brideau (Sourcebooks Landmark)
• The Peacock and the Sparrow, by I.S. Berry (Atria)

As was true last year, The Strand will give out two Lifetime Achievement Awards for 2024—to both Kathy Reichs and Max Allan Collins. Jonathan Karp of Simon and Schuster has been chosen to receive the magazine’s Publisher of the Year Award.

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And I missed mentioning that S.A. Cosby’s Razorblade Tears (published originally in 2021) has been named by the Maltese Falcon Society of Japan as the winner of its 2024 Maltese Falcon Award. The Falcon prize (“a wood-crafted Falcon statuette”) is given to “the best hard-boiled/private eye novel published in Japan in the previous year.”

(Hat tip to The Gumshoe Site.)