Revue of Reviewers: 6-30-22

Critiquing some of the most interesting recent crime, mystery, and thriller releases. Click on the individual covers to read more.

So Far, So Good

Although I have engaged in similar exercises in the past, I’m not sure I would feel comfortable right now posting a list of the “best crime novels of the year … so far.” Thanks to my concussion in March, I lost more than a month of reading, and still have a stack of untouched new books waiting for my attention. Glancing through my list of works consumed this year, I’m guessing that only one or two will rank among my favorites of 2022. I still have a lot of catching up to do.

That’s apparently not the case for editors at online retailer Amazon, who recently posted their picks of what they say are the 20 best mysteries and thrillers released in the United States during the first half of the year. Here are their choices:

• The Maid, by Nita Prose (Ballantine)
• City on Fire, by Don Winslow (Morrow)
• Carolina Moonset, by Matt Goldman (Forge)
• The Overnight Guest, by Heather Gudenkauf (Park Row)
• Blood Sugar, by Sascha Rothchild (Putnam)
• The Love of My Life, by Rosie Walsh (Pamela Dorman)
• Hidden Pictures, by Jason Rekulak (Flatiron)
• The Bangalore Detectives Club, by Harini Nagendra (Pegasus Crime)
• The Violence, by Delilah S. Dawson (Del Rey)
• A Flicker in the Dark, by Stacy Willingham (Minotaur)
• The Christie Affair, by Nina de Gramont (St. Martin’s Press)
• The Chase, by Candice Fox (Forge)
• The Cartographers, by Peng Shepherd (Morrow)
• The Island, by Adrian McKinty (Little, Brown)
• The Children on the Hill, by Jennifer McMahon (Gallery/Scout Press)
• One-Shot Harry, by Gary Phillips (Soho Crime)
• One of Us Is Dead, by Jeneva Rose (Blackstone)
• Two Nights In Lisbon, by Chris Pavone (MCD)
• Once a Thief, by Christopher Reich (Mulholland)
• When You Are Mine, by Michael Robotham (Scribner)

I have read a measly two of those tales, and a couple more can be found in my swaying to-be-read stack. I don’t know how many other of those 20 I’ll get to before the end of the year. Sigh ...

* * *

Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine editor George Easter has been busy, as well, compiling his contributors’ preferred titles of 2022. Here are Easter’s own top-five selections to date:

• The Dark Flood, by Deon Meyer (Atlantic Monthly)
• Bad Actors, by Mick Herron (Soho Crime)
• Even the Darkest Night, by Javier Cercas (Knopf)
• The Botanist, by M.W. Craven (Constable)
• Shifty’s Boys, by Chris Offutt (Grove Press)

You’ll find many more favored releases—both from DP critics and other editorial sources—by clicking here.

Five Comers

Organizers of this year’s Bloody Scotland international crime-writing festival (September 15-18) have announced their shortlist of five nominees for the 2022 Bloody Scotland Debut Prize:

• Welcome to Cooper, by Tariq Ashkanani (Thomas & Mercer)
• Meantime, by Frankie Boyle (John Murray)
• The Wolf Hunters, by Amanda Mitchison (Fledgling Press)
• The Girl, The Crow, The Writer and The Fighter, by George Paterson (Into Books)
• Hear No Evil, by Sarah Smith (Two Roads)

The winners of both this award and the 2022 McIlvanney Prize will be declared in Stirling, Scotland, on Thursday, September 15.

New Zealand Rolls Out Its Finest

“A dozen years after we launched the Ngaio Marsh Awards to celebrate Kiwi crime, thriller, and mystery writing,” writes Craig Sisterson, founder of those annual New Zealand prizes, “it’s really gratifying to see how our local authors, experienced and new, continue to raise the bar and produce world-class stories.” This year’s longlist of Best Novel nominees—shown below—includes a trio of previous winners, a few past finalists, and five first-time contestants.

• City of Vengeance, by D.V. Bishop (Macmillan)
• Before You Knew My Name, by Jacqueline Bublitz (Allen & Unwin)
• The Quiet People, by Paul Cleave (Upstart Press)
• To the Sea, by Nikki Crutchley (HarperCollins)
• Polaroid Nights, by Lizzie Harwood (Cuba Press)
• Isobar Precinct, by Angelique Kasmara (Cuba Press)
• Nancy Business, by R.W.R. McDonald (Allen & Unwin)
• She’s a Killer, by Kirsten McDougall (Te Herenga Waka
University Press)
• The Last Guests, by J.P. Pomare (Hachette)
• The Devils You Know, by Ben Sanders (Allen & Unwin)
• Quiet in Her Bones, by Nalini Singh (Hachette)
• Waking the Tiger, by Mark Wightman (Hobeck)

The Best Novel and Best First Novel finalists will be announced sometime in early August, with the ultimate winners set to be revealed during a special event at this year’s WORD Christchurch Festival, held on the South Island of New Zealand from August 31 to September 4.

The Pause That Refreshes

Postings in The Rap Sheet will be sparser than normal over the next couple of weeks, as I try to take a mini-vacation from work responsibilities. Things should return to normal around here by the beginning of July. I hope to see you back then.

“Tears” Triumphs Once More

Shawn “S.A.” Cosby is definitely on a winning streak. Just two weeks ago, his latest novel, Razorblade Tears, won two—count ’em, two—Thriller Awards from the International Thriller Writers organization. Now comes word that Tears has also picked up the 2021 Hammett Prize, a commendation given by the International Association of Crime Writers, North America, to a book, originally published in the English language in the United States or Canada, “that best represents the conception of literary excellence in crime writing.”

Also nominated for this award were Stung, by William Deverell (ECW Press); Five Decembers, by James Kestrel (Hard Case Crime); Harlem Shuffle, by Colson Whitehead (Doubleday); and The Sacrifice of Lester Yates, by Robin Yocum (Arcade Crime Wave).

Previous winners of the annual Hammett Prize include Stephen Mack Jones (August Snow), Lou Berney (November Road), Jane Stanton Hitchcock (Bluff), and David Joy (When These Mountains Burn).

Revue of Reviewers: 6-17-22

Critiquing some of the most interesting recent crime, mystery, and thriller releases. Click on the individual covers to read more.

Stirling Finalizes Its Lineup

Once again, I shall be unable to attend the Bloody Scotland international crime-writing festival this coming September 15-18 in Stirling, Scotland. This is too bad, because the schedule of speakers, panels, and other happenings that will comprise this 10th-anniversary celebration sounds terrific. From a news release:

2022 sees the return of several Bloody Scotland favourites that we haven’t seen since the pre-pandemic days of 2019. Our dramatic torchlit procession through Stirling[’s] historic old town led by the pipes and drums of the Royal Burgh of Stirling Pipe Band and Stirling and District Schools Pipe Band encourages locals who don’t normally attend literary events to get involved. Scotland tackle England in our crime writers’ football match at the new venue of King’s Park, a free fun event which is also aimed at breaking down barriers. There will be a return of the ever-popular Crime at the Coo cabaret featuring an array of crime writers showing off their musical talents and the much-loved Quiz this year takes the form of Vaseem Khan and Abir Mukherjee’s ‘Red Hot Night of a Million Games’ in which they steal the best bits from the game shows of yesteryear and mash them up into something truly remarkable.

The complete program of events, as well as a link to where you can purchase various tickets, is to be found here.

Softcover Standouts

Last month, organizers of the annual Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year award announced the 18 books and authors longlisted for the 2022 prize. Today, we have the half-dozen finalists:

• The Night Hawks, by Elly Griffiths (Quercus)
• True Crime Story, by Joseph Knox (Penguin)
• Daughters of Night, by Laura
Shepherd-Robinson (Pan)
• Slough House, by Mick Herron
(John Murray)
• Midnight at Malabar House, by Vaseem Khan (Hodder Paperbacks)
• The Last Thing to Burn, by Will Dean (Hodder Paperbacks)

Members of the public are invited to vote here for their favorites among that shortlist. This selection process will close on Friday, July 8, with the winner to be declared on Thursday, July 21—opening night of the 2022 Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival, in Harrogate, England. The victor will receive £3,000 in prize money, plus “a handmade, engraved beer barrel provided by T&R Theakston Ltd.”

As has been explained previously by In Reference to Murder, this award, “now in its 18th year, is presented by Harrogate International Festivals and recognizes the best crime novels published in the UK and Ireland in paperback over the past year.”

Copenhaver Lands a Lammy

The Savage Kind (Pegasus), the opening installment in a trilogy by Richmond, Virginia, author John Copenhaver, has received the 2022 Lambda Literary Award for Best LGBTQ Mystery. That news was made last evening during a virtual ceremony.

Also vying for top honors in that category were Bath Haus, by P.J. Vernon (Doubleday); Finding the Vein, by Jennifer Hanlon Wilde (Ooligan Press); Lies With Man, by Michael Nava (Amble Press); and Murder Under Her Skin, by Stephen Spotswood (Doubleday).

Note that Best LGBTQ Mystery was just one of 25 different classifications of nominees for this year’s “Lammy” awards. You’ll find the full list of winners here.

A Few End-of-the-Week Links

• The Sisters in Crime organization has announced that Shizuka Otake, a resident of Jackson Heights, New York, has won the 2022 Eleanor Taylor Bland Crime Fiction Writers of Color Award. According to a news release, “Her submission, Murder in Tokyo, is a story of a Japanese American teen’s life which is shattered when her boyfriend is arrested as the prime suspect in a classmate’s murder. ‘I lived in Tokyo as an adult and found it painful to be viewed as different,’ said Otake. ‘I expected to fit in and wondered how much harder that experience would have been if I was a vulnerable teen.’” Otake’s victory brings her a $2,000 grant, which she can apply toward “workshops, seminars, conferences, retreats, online courses and research activities to assist in completion of their work.” Five runners-up in this contest, which is named for police-procedural author Bland (who died in 2010), will receive a one-year membership to Sisters in Crime. They are Danielle Arceneaux (Brooklyn, N.Y.), Amber Boothe (Crowthorne, England), Jennifer K. Morita (Sacramento, Calif.), Valerie Kemp (Ann Arbor, Mich.), and Kathy A. Norris (Los Angeles, Calif.).

• It’s been so long since I last heard about third-series plans for the genial ITV-TV crime drama McDonald & Dodds, that I’d stopped checking for them. But The Killing Times brings news now that four fresh 90-minute episodes of the ofttimes humorous whodunit are due for transmission in the UK, beginning on Sunday, June 19. You’ll remember that Tala Gouveia and Jason Watkins play Detective Chief Inspector Lauren McDonald and Detective Sergeant Dodds, respectively, in this program set in modern-day Bath, England. The Killing Times tells us what they’ll be up to right out of the gate:

In episode one, a young woman dies in a busy park in broad daylight and the mismatched McDonald and Dodds are called in to untangle the mysterious circumstances of her death. Who is she? How did she die surrounded by witnesses? And how is it possible that she is … smiling? All roads seem to lead to Professor George Gillan [Alan Davies], a linguistic anthropologist who lives in a rambling mansion with his eccentric mother, Agnes, whose 100th birthday is days away. DS Dodds is sure that the house has something to do with the murder, but in uncovering Belvedere’s history, Dodds also unearths secrets in his own past.

Radio Times shares the basic plot lines of subsequent installments. There’s no word yet on when this latest set of McDonald & Dodds stories will become available to Amazon Prime subscribers, but as one who’s enjoyed the previous seasons, I hope it will be soon!

• Did you know that Shutter Island author Dennis Lehane was working on Black Bird, a psychological thriller for the Apple TV+ streaming service, and that it’s scheduled to debut on July 8? Deadline reports that the six-episode drama features Taron Egerton, Paul Walter Hauser, Greg Kinnear, Sepideh Moafi, and Ray Liotta—in his last screen role (he died in May)—“and was adapted from the true-crime memoir In With the Devil: A Fallen Hero, a Serial Killer, and a Dangerous Bargain for Redemption by James Keene and Hillel Levin.” The plot is said to follow “high school football hero and Big Jim Keene’s son Jimmy Keene (Egerton), who is sentenced to 10 years in a minimum security prison. He is given a choice: enter a maximum-security prison for the criminally insane and befriend suspected serial killer Larry Hall (Hauser), or stay where he is and serve his full sentence with no possibility of parole. Keene’s only way out is to elicit a confession and find out where the bodies of several young girls are buried before Hall’s appeal goes through. But is this suspected killer telling the truth?” Deadline’s story includes a trailer for the show.

• Last but not least, Sunshine State journalist Craig Pittman points me toward his recent story about how a Florida Panhandle town became the site of “enough grisly discoveries to fuel a couple of seasons of Forensic Files,” thanks to a Tennessee fiction writer.

PaperBack: “Girl in a Cage”

Part of a series honoring the late author and blogger Bill Crider.



Girl in a Cage, by “Carlton Gibbs,” aka Gifford Paul (Beacon, 1962). As the Facebook page Vintage Paperback & Book Covers explains, author Paul was “a pulp veteran who wrote in several genres; primarily westerns. As the 1960s started to swing, he used the Gibbs moniker to explore the carnal carnival exploding in the sub-divisions of post-war America as the station-wagon set shed an inhibition or six behind the doors of their split-level abodes.” Other of his Gibbs-bylined books include Neighbors and Lovers (1962), That Kind of Widow (1963), and Suburbia After Dark (1965). If you’re interested, the full text of Girl in a Cage can be read here, courtesy of the Internet Archive.

The cover art for Girl in a Cage is by Robert Maguire. That same illustration appeared on the 1964 Beacon Signal paperback Sex Around the Clock, by “Alex Carter,” aka Charles Boeckman Jr.

Bell Stars

London’s Goldsboro Books is out today with its longlist of nominees for the 2022 Glass Bell Award, a prize “awarded annually to a compelling novel, of any genre—from romance and thrillers, to historical, speculative and literary fiction—with brilliant characterisation and a distinct voice that is confidently written and assuredly realized.” Among the nominees are—arguably—three to four books drawn from the crime and mystery fiction category.

• Ariadne, by Jennifer Saint (Wildfire)
• Daughters of Night, by Laura Shepherd Robinson (Mantle)
• Mrs. March, by Virginia Feito (Fourth Estate)
• Sistersong, by Lucy Holland (Macmillan)
• Tall Bones, by Anna Bailey (Transworld)
• The Book of Form and Emptiness, by Ruth Ozeki (Canongate)
• The Last Thing to Burn, by Will Dean (Hodder & Stoughton)
• The Other Black Girl, by Zakiya Dalila Harris (Bloomsbury)
• The Prophets, by Robert Jones Jr. (Riverrun)
• The Wolf Den, by Elodie Harper (Head of Zeus)
• Threadneedle, by Cari Thomas (HarperVoyage)
• We Are All Birds of Uganda, by Hafsa Zayyan (Merky)

A Goldsboro Books news release informs us that a shortlist of half a dozen contenders “will be announced on 28th July, with the winner, who will receive both a cash prize, and a beautiful, handmade glass bell, to be announced on 8th September 2022.”

The Glass Bell Award was founded in 2017. Previous winners are Clare Whitfield (People of Abandoned Character), Taylor Jenkins Reid (Daisy Jones and the Six), Christina Dalcher (Vox), John Boyne (The Heart’s Invisible Furies), and Chris Cleave (Everyone Brave Is Forgiven).

Coveting the Munsey

For the second year in a row, prolific Los Angeles crime novelist (and Friend of The Rap Sheet) Gary Phillips has been nominated for the Munsey Award, presented by organizers of the annual PulpFest convention. Honoring America’s first pulp magazine publisher, Frank A. Munsey, this prize “recognizes an individual or organization that has bettered the pulp community, be it through disseminating knowledge about the pulps or through publishing or other efforts to preserve and foster interest in the pulp magazines we all love and enjoy.”

Also among this year’s Munsey nominees are Airship 27 Productions, created by veteran comic-book writer Ron Fortier; John Betancourt, the publisher of Wildside Press; pulp collector and frequent pulp-fiction conventiongoer Sheila Vanderbeek; and Dan Zimmer, the publisher of Illustration Magazine. The full list of contenders is here.

The winner will be announced during PulpFest 2022, which is set to run from Thursday, August 4, through Sunday, August 7, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Click here to register.

From Mashed Peas to Mysteries

What do baby food and crime fiction have in common? They were both influenced by Anne Turner Cook, who passed away on June 3.

Born Ann Leslie Turner on November 20, 1926, in Bridgeport, Connecticut, she was the daughter of Leslie Turner, a cartoonist who became famous for his long-running, syndicated action-adventure comic strip Captain Easy. Ann had her own early claim to fame, as Wikipedia recalls: “The [Turner] family’s neighbor was the artist Dorothy Hope Smith, who did a charcoal drawing of Ann when she was a [5-month-old] baby. In 1928, when [the U.S. baby food company] Gerber announced it was looking for baby images for its upcoming line of baby food, Smith’s drawing was submitted and subsequently chosen. It was trademarked in 1931. The drawing of Ann Turner Cook has since been used on virtually all Gerber baby food packaging. Cook’s identity was a secret until 1978. In 1990, Cook appeared as a guest on To Tell the Truth in a one-on-one segment.”

The Turner family moved to Florida at some point later in Ann’s childhood. She went on to receive a bachelor’s degree in English from Texas’ Southern Methodist University, and later earn a master’s degree in English education from the University of South Florida. She taught school for many years in Tampa, Florida, at both the elementary and high school levels, before retiring to write fiction.

With assistance from her husband, James Cook, a one-time criminologist with the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office in west central Florida, Ann Cook adopted the crime and mystery genre as her own. The Gumshoe Site explains that “Trace Their Shadows (iUniverse, 2001) was her first published novel set on Florida’s Gulf Coast, featuring news reporter Brandy O’Bannon.” She went on to pen three more O’Bannon yarns: Shadow Over Cedar Key (2003), Homosassa Shadows (2005), and Micanopy in Shadow (2008).

The author was 95 years old at the time of her demise.

In its obituary of Cook, The New York Times elaborated on the fact that “for decades, Gerber chose not to identify its flagship baby, or even to disclose its sex: The very universality of the sketch—in it, any mother could glimpse her own child—was a marketing boon,” wrote the Times’ Margalit Fox. “As a result, rumors flew.” Child stars Shirley Temple and Elizabeth Taylor were both said to have provided inspiration for the Gerber corporate logo. But Fox says that actor Humphrey Bogart, “who was in his late 20s when Ms. Smith made her drawing,” was most often alleged to have been the model. That claim “was so persistent that for years Gerber kept a Bogart-denying form letter on hand to send to inquisitors.”