Fab Four

• Julie Hennrikus, the executive director of Sisters in Crime, has been chosen to receive the 2026 David Thompson Special Service Award. This prize, named in honor of a Texas bookstore owner and crime-fiction publisher who passed away back in 2010, recognizes Hennrikus for her “extraordinary efforts to develop and promote the crime-fiction field.” In addition to her work for SinC, Hennrikus is the author of mysteries published under the noms de plume Julie Hennrikus, Julia Henry, and Julianne Holmes. She will be given her Special Service Award during this year’s Bouchercon opening ceremonies in Calgary, Alberta, on October 22.

• The Netflix true-crime anthology series Monster returns on Thursday, September 17, with an eight-episode look back at the notorious 1892 ax murders attributed to Lizzie Borden. The official description of this season reads: “When the repressed daughter of a wealthy New England family and her rebellious maid find themselves trapped in a house built on humiliation and cruelty, they escape into a fantasy of sex, power, and revenge. The gruesome unsolved murders that follow don’t just shock the world—they give birth to an icon who refuses to live imprisoned in a cage, choosing instead to forge her own legend: shocking, monstrous, and gloriously free.” Ella Beatty (the daughter of film stars Annette Bening and Warren Beatty) will portray Lizzie, with Vicky Krieps playing the Bordens’ live-in maid, Bridget Sullivan. As series creator Ryan Murphy told The Hollywood Reporter, this show will also find Krieps playing Elizabeth Báthory (1560-1614), a Hungarian noblewoman and alleged serial murderer. “It is an interesting season,” he observed, “because it is the Lizzie Borden story, but there are also other female ‘killers’ who I was always interested in exploring. I always wanted to do something about Aileen Wuornos [a Florida prostitute convicted of slaying some of her male clients in 1989 and 1990]. I’ve always wanted to do something about the Countess Elizabeth Báthory, who Dracula was modeled after. So we are kind of doing this fantasia of women vs. the system, and it’s not what they did, it’s the question of: What made them do it? Why did they do it, if they did it?” A rather horrific trailer for Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story can be found here.

• Swedish journalist-author David Lagercrantz, who continued Stieg Larsson’s Millennium series after Larsson’s demise, and who has a new novel of his own about crime-solving professor Hans Rekke (Post Mortem) due out later this month, recently contributed a list of his 10 favorite Scandi Noir novels to Forbes magazine. Of course Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo made the cut, but so did stories by Henning Mankell, Karin Fossum, and Arnaldur Indriðason.

• Meanwhile, fictionist Anthony Horowitz (A Deadly Episode) picks six of his favorite books for the British news magazine The Week.