Cameron Scores a Double

For the second year running, Alaska thriller writer Marc Cameron has won the Spotted Owl Award. That prize is given out annually by the Portland, Oregon-based Friends of Mystery organization to celebrate crime fiction produced by authors living in the Pacific Northwest (Alaska, British Columbia, Canada, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington).

The 2025 Owl honors Cameron’s Bad River, the seventh book in his series about Anchorage’s Arliss Cutter, a deputy U.S. marshal. His previous Cutter adventure, Breakneck, picked up this same commendation in 2024. He has an eighth installment, Dead Line, due out from Kensington in July.

The Friends of Mystery says its Spotted Owl judging committee considered 71 nominees for the 2025 prize. Runners-up were:

2. Baron Birtcher for Knife River
3 (tie). Rene Denfeld for Sleeping Giants and Warren Easley for
Deadly Redemption
4. J.A. Jance for Den of Iniquity
5. Phillip Margolin for An Insignificant Case
6. Katrina Carrasco for Rough Trade
7. Frank Zafiro and Colin Conway for The Silence of the Dead
8. Kerri Hakado for Cold to the Touch
9. Eric Redman for Death in Hilo

The choice of Bad River for this honor was announced during the March meeting of Friends of Mystery. The Spotted Owl Award was established in 1995. A list of previous recipients can be found here.