Bullet Points: Long Overdue Edition

During the four days I spent in San Francisco this last February, attending the latest Left Coast Crime convention, more than one fellow attendee came up to me to say how much they like my periodic, multiple-subject “Bullet Points” posts. While that gladdened my heart, it also reminded me of how long it had been since I’d produced such a compilation. I think the last one went up in October, which in these tense, turbulent times seems like a lifetime ago.

With a few free hours on my hands today, I went trolling through my computer bookmarks to find new subjects worth sharing.

• Well, what do you know: In Reference to Murder reports that the American author who, since 2013, has published best-selling psychological thrillers (such as The Housemaid, The Tenant, and The Divorce) under the name Freida McFadden has finally revealed her true identity. She is “in reality Sara Cohen, a doctor who treats brain disorders and only created the pseudonym because she didn’t want her writing career to conflict with her hospital job. ‘My whole goal was to keep it a secret until I was [ready to] step back from my doctor job, so it wouldn’t be like everyone I work with suddenly knew and it compromised my ability to do my job,’ McFadden says. In late 2023, she stopped working full-time.” But even her nom de plume is rooted in the medical profession; Cohen told the BBC that “She chose the name Freida as a medical in-joke—after a hospital training registry, the Fellowship and Residency Electronic Interactive Database.”

• April 1 marked the 28th anniversary of Kevin Burton Smith launching that essential online crime-fiction resource, The Thrilling Detective Web Site. His page went live on that date back in 1998! Congratulations to my old friend Kevin for sticking with this project for so long and growing it so expertly.

• Speaking of milestones, it was half a century ago this year—on September 22, 1976, to be precise—that the hour-long “jiggle TV” crime drama Charlie’s Angels debuted on America’s ABC network. In early commemoration of that fact, three of the show’s stars, Kate Jackson, Jaclyn Smith, and Cheryl Ladd, “reunited” earlier this week at PaleyFest in Los Angeles (“an annual television festival hosted by the Paley Center”). According to the Associated Press, “They were greeted with a standing ovation and whoops and cheers from an audience at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood.” Smith, now 80 years old (!), may have delivered the occasion’s best line: “I knew the show was different, special and unique. Three women chasing danger instead of getting rescued.” Charlie’s Angels aired for five seasons and was a pop-culture hit (despite talk of it undermining feminism), but underwent several cast changes over time, the first of those coming in 1977, when Fawcett left amid a contract dispute. She was replaced by Ladd.

• London’s two-day Capital Crime festival has issued its full program of 2026 events, which are set to kick off at the Leonardo Royal Hotel on Thursday, June 18. Among the headliners will be authors Elly Griffiths, Jeffrey Archer, Jane Harper, and Sophie Hannah, with Irish comedian and actor Ardal O’Hanlon (formerly of Death in Paradise) also participating. An overview of events can be found here. Winners of the annual Fingerprint Awards, celebrating the foremost crime and thriller fiction in more than half a dozen categories, will be honored in a special ceremony on the 18th.

• Erle Stanley Gardner’s The D.A. Calls It Murder (1937)—the first of his legal mysteries starring small-town California district attorney Douglas Selby—was reissued last summer through Otto Penzler’s American Mystery Classics imprint. What I hadn’t realized until recently, however, was that publisher Open Road Integrated Media has also returned to print seven of the eight other entries in the Selby line. Which is good news! As I wrote in CrimeReads, “While those stories never enjoyed the same level of reader enthusiasm Perry Mason’s escapades did, and were neither as humorous nor as briskly paced as another series Gardner launched in 1939, built around mismatched L.A. gumshoes Bertha Cool and Donald Lam, they certainly offered plenty in the way of knotty plots, ill-starred suspects, and razzle-dazzle legal shenanigans.” Click here for more about those paperbacks.

• By the way, the remaining Selby novel, 1948’s The D.A. Takes a Chance, was last reprinted in 2014 by The Murder Room, an imprint of UK publisher Orion. Although The Murder Room is evidently now defunct, Open Road hasn’t yet added it to its catalogue. Maybe soon?

• There seems be no end of television-related news lately, beginning with word that the ITV and BritBox “reimaginging” of Dalziel and Pascoe has begun filming in the North of England. This sex-switching update of characters born in novels by Reginald Hill—and made additionally famous in a 1996-2007 BBC One series—finds grumpy, intransigent, and very politically incorrect Detective Superintendent Andy Dalziel (played in the original show by Warren Clarke) being transformed into Detective Inspector Andrea Dalziel and portrayed by Kerry Godliman, while Dalziel’s more forward-thinking police partner, DI Peter Pascoe (Colin Buchanan) becomes Detective Sergeant Paige Pascoe, brought to the small screen by Nina Singh. The opening season of this new crime drama will comprise six episodes; there’s no official debut date at present. Jon Farrar, executive vice president of programming, BritBox, is quoted in Variety as assuring fans of the earlier production that this one will hew to familiar themes: “Dalziel and Pascoe has always been about friction, intellect, and the uneasy bond of opposites, forged in pursuit of truth. Dalziel and Pascoe’s chemistry, wit, and moral clarity perfectly complement this richly layered mystery. It’s timeless crime storytelling that not only honours but sharpens its legacy.” I look forward to judging for myself.

• For all of those people who, like me, watched and enjoyed the slow-burning “cat-and-mouse thriller” The Game, and thought its ambiguous but not unsatisfying ending offered zero chance of a sequel … well, what the hell do we know? Even the Web site TVGuide.co.uk concedes this is “rather surprising” news; Channel 5 thrillers are usually one-season wonders, “self-contained nuggets of deliciously daft drama” (e.g., The Au Pair and The Rumour). But The Game, which had its UK airing in 2025 and found Jason Watkins (McDonald & Dodds) playing Huw Miller, a recently retired police detective who becomes convinced that his suave new neighbor, Patrick Harbottle (Grantchester’s Robson Green), is the repeat killer he’s long pursued, “left viewers wanting more,” says TVGuide.co.uk. At the close of Series 1, Patrick was being arrested and Huw was seriously injured. The follow-up is set a year on. It sees Huw having survived and thinking himself free of the psychological grip Patrick held him in. “Retreating with his wife, Alice (Sunetra Sarker), to an isolated house by the sea,” The Killing Times explains, “Huw is determined to rebuild a quiet life, far from the violence that nearly destroyed them. But peace, he soon realises, is an illusion.” Channel 5 says The Game will return in 2027.

• Robson Green is much in demand. The Killing Times reports that, with his work done on Grantchester’s 11th and final season (set to premiere on PBS Masterpiece come June 14), he will assume one of the leading roles in an eight-part BBC serial, The Northumbria Mysteries.

Set against the sweeping Northumberland coastline and its surrounding market towns, the series centres on an unlikely crime-solving duo.

Green will star as Joe Ruby, a jack-of-all-trades whose life has been shaped by mistakes, regrets and missed opportunities, alongside Oxford-educated DI Rose O’Connell (casting to be announced), a rarefied intellectual, a deep thinker with a brilliant mind and an ice-cool disposition. In a classic odd-couple pairing, Joe and Rose combine their talents as they frustrate, confound, and ultimately surprise one another while unravelling a series of compelling crime mysteries.

• Something I should have mentioned long ago: HBO-TV has ordered an eight-episode drama based on Adrian McKinty’s best-selling 2019 child-abduction novel, The Chain. Behind this project is Damon Lindelof, who previously gave us Lost and The Leftovers, and was once a writer on Nash Bridges and Crossing Jordan. As The Wrap recalls, Irish author McKinty’s chilling tale “follows Rachel, a divorcée who is undergoing treatment for cancer, who gets a call that her daughter, Kylie, has been kidnapped and is now part of The Chain. To get Kylie back, she must kidnap another child after paying a ransom. Kylie will be released when the parents of the child Rachel has kidnapped take yet another child and continue the chain.” The Wrap notes, however, that “Lindelof is said to be expanding the mythology of McKinty’s award-winning thriller.”

• Blogger Lou Armagno points me toward a piece in Variety that’s likely to delight fans of Earl Derr Biggers’ renowned Charlie Chan. It says actor Tzi Ma (Mulan, Kung Fu) will executive produce and headline a possible new Canadian Chan TV series reimagining Biggers’ Chinese-American Honolulu policeman as a Hong Kong immigrant to Vancouver, British Columbia, “who, after retiring from the Vancouver police department in frustration, quietly launches a private investigation agency, taking on cases for the city’s overlooked and forgotten.”

• Meanwhile, Stranger Things’ Maya Hawke has signed up to play a criminal investigator in Netflix’s adaptation of Liz Moore’s 2024 hit novel, The God of the Woods. … Actor-writer Stephen Fry will star as a quirky but brilliant former MI6 agent in a forthcoming Fox-TV show called The Interrogator. … See-Saw films, the production company behind Slow Horses, has acquired the rights to develop a fresh TV series from Jonathan Gash’s novels about a British antiques dealer-cum-sleuth known only as Lovejoy—books that were already the source material for a 1986-1984 BBC1 comedy-drama featuring Ian McShane. … Filming is underway on the sophomore season of Lynley, based on Elizabeth George’s Inspector Lynley yarns. … And Murder, She Wrote, a Universal Pictures film inspired by the 1984-1996 CBS-TV series starring Angela Lansbury as a mystery writer and amateur crime-solver, is slated to reach theaters just in time for Christmas, 2027. Jamie Lee Curtis will play Fletcher in this version.

• My other blog, Killer Covers, returns from a too-long hiatus with proof that there are simply too many crime, mystery, and thriller novels fronted by silhouettes of people in windows.

• We still await any information regarding the next James Bond feature film (now under the control of Amazon). But in the meantime, we can look forward to a new Bond novel for adults. Titled King Zero, it’s by Charlie Higson, the author of a half a dozen Young Bond yarns, as well as the 2023 007 adventure, On His Majesty’s Secret Service. Shotsmag Confidential provides this plot précis:

Beginning with the murder of an agent in Saudi Arabia by a weapon never before seen by the Secret Service and spanning the globe in an epic race against time to avert global catastrophe, the novel brings the literary Bond squarely into the twenty-first century, where the old world that made him is crumbling and a terrifying new order emerges while a dangerous villain—the most distinctive since Goldfinger –moves in the shadows. Higson explores themes of power, technology, and international tensions over resources in an extraordinarily timely story.

UK publisher Michael Joseph has promised to deliver King Zero to bookshops on the other side of the pond by September 24.

• Wow, a Kickstarter campaign to create action figures based on monster-hunting reporter Carl Kolchak and other characters featured in two 1970s teleflicks (The Night Stalker and The Night Strangler) and a subsequent TV series collected way more money than was sought! I guess old Carl hasn’t been forgotten, after all.

• Finally, this CrimeReads piece by writer and artist Frank Ladd, comparing the oeuvres of American private eye novelists Ross Macdonald and Raymond Chandler, deserves attention from fans of both. He concludes that “In a way, Macdonald is writing moral ghost stories. The present is haunted by the past, and the novel becomes a kind of exorcism. Chandler is writing moral fever dreams, hallucinatory journeys through corruption. There is no past worth redeeming.”

Pithy and Powerful

I was apparently so distracted by other editorial projects, that I failed to notice the Short Mystery Fiction Society (SMFS) releasing its complete lists of finalists for the 2026 Derringer Awards earlier this week. Let me now post those contenders.

Best Flash Story (up to 1,000 words):
• “Bradycardia,” by Elizabeth Dearborn (Punk Noir, 2/4/2025)
• “Check Rear Seat,” by Carl Tait (Exquisite Death, 5/1/2025)
• “It All Comes Out in the Wash,” by James Patrick Focarile (Gumshoe Review, 10/31/2025)
• “Just Like Old Times,” by Shari Held (Yellow Mama, 2/15/2025)
• “The Man Under the Bridge,” by Bern Sy Moss (Spillwords, 6/1/2025)

Best Short Story (1,001 to 4,000 words):
• “Blind Pig,” by Michael Bracken (Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, September/October 2025)
• “Chains,” by Frank Vatel (All Due Respect, 9/1/25)
• “Hollywood Prometheus,” by Christa Faust (from Crime Ink: Iconic: An Anthology of Crime Fiction Inspired by Queer Icons, edited by by John Copenhaver and Salem West; Bywater)
• “The Artist,” by Linda Ann Bennett (from Midnight Schemers & Daydream Believers: 22 Stories of Mystery & Suspense, edited by by Judy Penz Sheluk; Superior Shores Press)
• “Wax On, Wax Off,” by Nina Mansfield (from Donna Andrews Presents Malice Domestic: Mystery Most Humorous, edited by John Betancourt, Michael Bracken, and Carla Coupe; Wildside Press)

Best Long Story (4,001 to 8,000 words):
• “A Sign of the Times,” by Tom Milani (from Sleuths Just Wanna Have Fun: Private Eyes in the Materialistic Eighties, edited by Michael Bracken; Down & Out)
• “Masterpiece,” by Mark Thielman (Black Cat Mystery Magazine, September 2025)
• “Six-Armed Robbery,” by Ashley-Ruth M. Bernier (from Donna Andrews Presents Malice Domestic: Mystery Most Humorous)
• “Whatever Kills the Pain,” by C.W. Blackwell (from Whatever Kills the Pain, by C.W. Blackwell; Rock and a Hard Place Press)
• “Zebra Finch,” by donalee Moulton (from The Most Dangerous Games, edited by Deborah Lacy; Level Short)

Best Novelette (8,001 to 20,000 words):
• “Aswarby Hall,” by David Dean (Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, March/April 2025)
• “Loose Change from a Mini Cooper,” by Frank Zafiro (Chop Shop Episode 10, Down & Out)
• “Saint Bullethead,” by Nick Kolakowski (from Fighting Words: Bruisers, Brawlers, & Bad Intentions, edited by Scott Blackburn; Leonardo Audio)
• “The High Priest of Low Men,” by C.W. Blackwell (Myopic Duplicity: Do the Ends Ever Justify the Means?, edited by Jeff Circle;
Leonardo Audio)
• “The Temporary Murder of Thomas Monroe,” by Tia Tashiro (Clarkesworld, January 2025; audio version)

The half-dozen nominees for this year’s Best Anthology Derringer Award were announced at the beginning of February.

As the SMFS explains, the winners in all of these categories “will be determined by member vote in April and announced May 1.”

Spring in the Air, Books in the Bag

Incredible as this seems, The Rap Sheet will turn 20 years old in 2026. (Its actual “birth date” is May 22.) And throughout most of those two decades, I've assembled lists of forthcoming crime, mystery, and thriller releases to help readers choose what they should pick up next. Those started as just occasional lists, but they quickly evolved into quarterly offerings. Rarely since then have I failed to deliver my selections on schedule and at rather intimidating length. My fall 2025 rundown, for example, extended to more than 425 reading recommendations from both sides of the Atlantic.

But last summer I found I was desperately short of time and unable to post my usual seasonal selections. Then the computer crash I experienced at the end of 2025 put an end to my hope of compiling picks for the first three months of this year. I promised myself I would get back on track again come spring; yet here we are near the close of March, and my suggestions of which new books from our favorite genre deserve special attention remain incomplete.

Rather than wait any longer, I’ve decided to go with what I have so far: more than 200 works of note due out in the United States between now and the end of May. Those include fresh novels by headliners in the field such as Charles Todd, Tana French, Anthony Horowitz, Jane Harper, Vaseem Khan, Sujata Massey, John Katzenbach, and Michael Connelly, together with stories from less-familiar fictionists on the order of Nicola Whyte, Joshua Moehling, Libby Klein, Jeff Boyd, and A. Rae Dunlap. The next three months will deliver to bookshops the late Anne Perry’s Death Times Seven, her concluding case for attorney Daniel Pitt; Craig Johnson’s The Brothers McKay, his 22nd Sheriff Walt Longmire novel, inspired by Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov; Murder and Acquisitions, “a gripping story of greed, rivalry, and revenge in the publishing industry” by veteran publisher Thomas Dunne; the third and last installment in Kim Sherwood’s Double O Trilogy, Hurricane Room, which imagines a perhaps “broken” James Bond joining his fellow British secret agents to head off a worldwide cyberattack; Alison Gaylin’s Booked, her latest lively yarn featuring Sunny Randall, Robert B. Parker’s other Boston private invetigator; and Michael Crichton’s never-before-published Tinseltown thriller, Murder in Hollywood.

Beyond all those, expect three more George Gross police procedurals by Tim Sullivan; Jordan Harper’s new portrayal of Los Angeles' criminal underbelly, A Violent Masterpiece; Mad Mabel, Sally Hepworth’s clever tale of a cantankerous 81-year-old woman with a “shady past,” who becomes entangled in her neighbor’s dubious demise; and Thomas Perry’s The Tree of Light and Flowers, the presumably final outing for trouble-tackling Native American “guide” Jane Whitfield (as that Edgar-winning author perished last September).

While I regret not including here my customary myriad listings of coming attractions from UK publishing houses, it cannot be helped. The time necessary to gather all of those as well might delay the posting of The Rap Sheet’s list until mid-April, when it would be signally less useful. I shall simply have to find another way, either through a separate compilation or perhaps by including more British titles in my “Revue of Reviewers” posts, to get the word out about near-future releases from the opposite side of the pond.

As it is, I suspect there are a few fine U.S.-published works of crime fiction absent from the lengthy catalogue below, which I shall endeavor to find and add in updates over the next two and a half months. (Please let me know in the Comments section at this post’s end if you are already aware of any I have missed.) For now, though, I invite you to explore the following 200-plus. Non-fiction works are marked here with asterisks (*); the rest are novels or short-story collections.

MARCH (U.S.):
• Agatha Christie Seek-and-Find: Find Clues and Criminals in 20 Classic Mysteries! by Sarah Dvojack (Chronicle)
• The Antique Hunter’s Murder at the Castle, by C. L. Miller (Atria)
• A Bad, Bad Place, by Frances Crawford (Soho Crime)
• The Baffle Book, by Lassiter Wren and Randle McKay (Penzler/American Mystery Classics)
• Beatrice Ophelia Is Flickering Out, by Megan Gerig (Lamplighter)
• The Best Little Motel in Texas, by Lyla Lane (Harper Perennial)
• Bloodlust, by Sandra Brown (Grand Central)
• The Boy in the Wall, by Jeffrey B. Burton (Severn House)
• Bright and Tender Dark, by Joanna Pearson (Bloomsbury)
• Buried in a Book, by T.C. LoTempio (Severn House)
• Chaos Man, by Andrew Mayne (Thomas & Mercer)
• A Crime Through Time, by Amelia Blackwell (Pan)
• The Dark Time, by Nick Petrie (Putnam)
• The Daughters, by Joanna Margaret (Mysterious Press)
• A Day of Judgment, by Charles Todd (Mysterious Press)
• A Defiant Woman, by Karen E. Olson (Pegasus Crime)
• The Delivery, by Andrew Welsh-Huggins (Mysterious Press)
• The Dreadfuls, by A. Rae Dunlap (Kensington)
• The End of the Sahara, by Saïd Khatibi (Bitter Lemon Press)
• Enemy of My Enemy, by Alex Segura (Hyperion Avenue)
• Everyone in This Bank Is a Thief, by Benjamin Stevenson (Mariner)
• Everything on Black, by F.T. Grant (Vigilante Crime & Pulp)
• Felony Review: Tales of True Crime and Corruption in Chicago, by Randy E. Barnett (Encounter)*
• Finlay Donovan Crosses the Line, by Elle Cosimano (Minotaur)
• Frederick Knott and Dial M for Murder: The Creation and Evolution of an Iconic Thriller, by Richard Weill (McFarland)*
• From the Dust, by David Swinson (Mulholland)
• A Ghastly Catastrophe, by Deanna Raybourn (Berkley)
• Girl in a Shroud / The Girl Who Was Possessed / The Lady is Available, by Carter Brown (Stark House Press)
• A Good Person, by Kirsten King (Putnam)
• A Grave Mistake, by Kate MacLean (Kate MacLean)
• The Guilty Daughter, by Victoria Jenkins (Bookouture)
• Hard Times, by Jeff Boyd (Flatiron)
• The Harvey Girl, by Dana Stabenow (Head of Zeus/Aries)
• The Hiding Season, by Ava Glass (Bantam)
• I Came Back for You, by Kate White (Thomas & Mercer)
• I Did Not Kill My Husband, by Linda Keir (Blackstone)
• The Imposter, by Adriane Leigh (Podium)
• Incidentals, by Sheila Yasmin Marikar (Little A)
• The Jewish Policeman, by Jonathan Dunsky (Lion Cub)
• Judge Stone, by Viola Davis and James Patterson (Little, Brown)
• The Keeper, by Tana French (Viking)
• A Killing Breath, by Faye Snowden (Flame Tree Press)
• Killing Me Softly, by Sandie Jones (Minotaur)
• The Last Celebrity, by Madeleine Henry (Little A)
• A Lie for a Lie, by Ren DeStefano (Berkley)
• Little Sins, by Clifford Beal (Little Brigand)
• London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family’s Search for Truth, by Patrick Radden Keefe (Doubleday)*
• Missing, by E.A. Jackson (Atria/Emily Bestler)
• Missing Sister, by Joshilyn Jackson (Morrow)
• The Most Mysterious Bookshop in Paris, by Mark Pryor (Kensington)
• Murder As a Fine Art, by Carol Carnac (Poisoned Pen Press)
• My Grandfather, the Master Detective, by Masateru Konishi (Putnam)
• Never Spar with a Viscount, by Lindsay Lovise (Forever)
• No Good Deed, by Katherine Kovacic (Poisoned Pen Press)
• The Perfect Girl, by Andy Maslen (Thomas & Mercer)
• The Pie & Mash Detective Agency, by J. D. Brinkworth (Berkley)
• A Place to Die For, by A.M. Strong and Sonya Sargent (Thomas & Mercer)
• The Plans I Have for You, by Lai Sanders (Simon & Schuster)
• The Politician, by Tim Sullivan
(Atlantic Crime)
• Poured Out, by Steve Exeter (Independently published)
• The Primrose Murder Society, by Stacy Hackney (Morrow Paperbacks)
• The Pryce of Fame, by Kari Bovée (Vinci)
• Robbie McNeil’s Hit List, by Brianna Heath (Poisoned Pen Press)
• Ruby Falls, by Gin Phillips (Atlantic Crime)
• The Secret Lives of Murderers’ Wives, by Elizabeth Arnott (Berkley)
• Served Him Right, by Lisa Unger (Park Row)
• She Fell Away, by Lenore Nash (Atria/Emily Bestler)
• Sisters in Yellow, by Mieko Kawakami (Knopf)
• Society Women, by Adriane Leigh (Harper Perennial)
• Sorry for Your Loss, by Georgia McVeigh (Dutton)
• Stakeouts and Strollers, by Rob Phillips (Minotaur)
• The Star from Calcutta, by Sujata Massey (Soho Crime)
• Storm Warning, by Alice Henderson (Morrow)
• Strange Buildings, by Uketsu (HarperVia)
• Strangers in the Villa, by Robyn Harding (Grand Central)
• The Survivor, by Andrew Reid (Minotaur)
• The Tree of Light and Flowers, by Thomas Perry (Mysterious Press)
• The Story of Marceau Miller, by Marceau Miller (Blackstone)
• This Story Might Save Your Life, by Tiffany Crum (Pine & Cedar)
• To Sleep, Perchance to Kill, by James Quentin (Over It)
• Two Kinds of Stranger, by Steve Cavanagh (Atria)
• Vanished in the Crowd, by Rhys Bowen and Clare Broyles (Minotaur)
• Vengeance in Venice, by Erica Ruth Neubauer (Kensington)
• Want to Know a Secret? by Freida McFadden (Poisoned Pen Press)
• What the Fields Saw, by Linda Norlander (Severn River)
• Where the Truth Lies, by Katherine Greene (Crooked Lane)
• Whidbey, by T. Kira Madden (Mariner)
• Yesteryear, by Caro Claire Burke (Knopf)

APRIL (U.S.):
• Afternoon Hours of a Hermit, by Patrick Cottrell (Ecco)
• Agnes Sharp and the Wedding to Die For, by Leonie Swann
(Soho Crime)
• All Them Dogs, by Djamel White (Riverhead)
• The Architect of Deception, by Debbie Baldwin (Gatekeeper Press)
• As Far as She Knew, by Diana Awad (Mindy’s Book Studio)
• Brenda, by Samuel S. Taylor (Stark House Press)
• The Caretaker, by Marcus Kliewer (Atria/Emily Bestler)
• Cat on a Hot Tin Woof, by Spencer Quinn (Minotaur)
• Cats Don’t Need Coffins, by Dolores Hitchens (Penzler/American Mystery Classics)
• The Chambermaid’s Key, by Genevieve Graham (Simon & Schuster)
• City of the Muse, by Kate Hilton
(Simon & Schuster)
• Confessions of an Amateur Sleuth, by Lynn Cahoon (Kensington Cozies)
• Countdown, by Sara Driscoll (Kensington)
• A Cruise to Die For, by Heather
Graham (Mira)
• Dark Hazard / The Quick Brown Fox, by W.R. Burnett (Stark House Press)
• The Dead Can’t Make a Living, by Ed
Lin (Soho Crime)
• A Deadly Episode, by Anthony Horowitz (Harper)
• The Dead Ringer, by Dane Bahr (Counterpoint)
• Death Times Seven, by Anne Perry and Victoria Zackheim (Ballantine)
• Double Shadow, by Andrew Ludington (Minotaur)
• The Edge of Darkness, by Vaseem Khan (Hodder & Stoughton)
• The Ending Writes Itself, by Evelyn Clarke (Harper)
• An Enigma by the Sea, by Carlo Fruttero and Franco Lucentini
(Bitter Lemon Press)
• Everyone Is Perfect Here, by Jane Haseldine (Severn House)
• The Faces of the Dead, by Chris Nickson (Severn House)
• Fair Chase, by Travis Mulhauser (Grand Central)
• Gimme Shelter, by Libby Klein (Kensington)
• The Girls Trip, by Ally Condie (Grand Central)
• Guilt, by Keigo Higashino (Minotaur)
• Gunner, by Alan Parks (Pegasus Crime)
• Harmless Women, by Rebecca Sharpe (Minotaur)
• Her First Lie, by Lucinda Berry (Thomas & Mercer)
• Hollywood Payback, by Jon Lindstrom (Crooked Lane)
• Holy Island, by L.J. Ross (Poisoned Pen Press)
• Hope Rises, by David Baldacci (Grand Central)
• Hot Shots: Celebrating Thirty Years of the Short Mystery Fiction Society, edited by Josh Pachter (Level Short)
• How to Cheat Your Own Death, by Kristen Perrin (Dutton)
• The Insomniacs, by Allison Winn Scotch (Berkley)
• In the Spirit of French Murder, by Colleen Cambridge (Kensington)
• Kill Dick, by Luke Goebel (Red Hen Press)
• Last One Out, by Jane Harper (Pine & Cedar)
• Liar’s Creek, by Matt Goldman (Minotaur)
• The Lost Angels, by Michele Domínguez Greene (Thomas & Mercer)
• The Lost Book of Elizabeth Barton, by Jennifer N. Brown
(St. Martin’s Press)
• Mad Mabel, by Sally Hepworth (St. Martin’s Press)
• The Missing Ones, by A.R. Torre (Thomas & Mercer)
• The Monk, by Tim Sullivan (Atlantic Crime)
• Mrs. Shim Is a Killer, by Kang Jiyoung (Harper Perennial)
• Murder Mindfully, by Karsten Dusse (Soho Crime)
• Murders and Acquisitions, by Thomas Dunne (Blackstone)
• The Museum of Unusual Occurrence, by Erica Wright (Severn House)
• Obelists Fly High, by C. Daly King (Penzler/American
Mystery Classics)
• One Second Away, by Rick Mofina (Doubleday Canada)
• The Patriot’s Daughter, by Brittany Butler (Crooked Lane)
• The Plunge, by Lila Raicek (Park Row)
• Pomona Afton Can Totally Catch a Killer, by Bellamy Rose (Atria/Emily Bestler)
• Raskin’s World, by Charlie Stella
(Stark House Press)
• Reasonable Suspicion, by James Chandler (Severn River)
• Redbelly Crossing, by Candice Fox (Crooked Lane)
• Revenge Prey, by John Sandford (Putnam)
• Sanctuary, by James Cleary (Berkley)
• The Secret of Saint Olaf’s Church, by Indrek Hargla (Pushkin Vertigo)
• The Secrets of the Abbey, by Jean-Luc Bannalec (Minotaur)
• Short Circuit, by Wolf Haas (HarperVia)
• The Silent Ones, by Anna McPartlin (Canelo)
• The Silver Fish, by Connor Martin (Mysterious Press)
• The Sound, by Ruth McIver (Blackstone)
• Spies and Other Gods, by James Wolff (Atlantic Crime)
• Staged Evidence, by Traci Hunter Abramson (Shadow Mountain)
• The Summer House Murder, by Ava Roberts (Crooked Lane)
• The Ten Teacups, by Carter Dickson (Poisoned Pen Press)
• Thanks for Watching, by Kate Cavanaugh (Inimitable)
• This Weekend Doesn’t End Well for Anyone, by Catherine
Mack (Minotaur)
• Too Close to Home, by Seraphina Nova Glass (Park Row)
• To the End of Reckoning, by Joseph Moldover (Mysterious Press)
• Two Truths and a Lie, by Mark Stevens (Thomas & Mercer)
• Vanessa’s Men, by Jason Starr (Jason Starr)
• A Violent Masterpiece, by Jordan Harper (Mulholland)
• The Washashore, by Christopher Mirabile (Slack Tide Press)
• We Would Never Tell, by Anne-Sophie Jouhanneau (Sourcebooks Landmark)
• What Happened Next, by Edwin Hills (Thomas & Mercer)
• When the Wolves Are Silent, by C.S. Harris (Berkley)
• Yours Always, by Corinne Sullivan (Thomas & Mercer)

MAY (U.S.):
• Against Their Will, by Karina Kilmore (Blackstone)
• An Accidental Death, by Peter Grainger (Union Square)
• And the Corpse Wore Tartan, by Stuart MacBride (Macmillan)
• The Anniversary, by Alex Finlay (Minotaur)
• The Architect, by John Katzenbach (Blackstone)
• The Author Weekend, by Laura Zigman (Blackstone)
• Beneath a Broken Sky, by Joshua Moehling (Poisoned Pen Press)
• The Brothers McKay, by Craig Johnson (Viking)
• Caller Unknown, by Gillian McAllister (Morrow)
• City on Fire, by Simon Elegant (Pegasus Crime)
• Days of Feasting and Rejoicing, by David Bergen (Blackstone)
• Dissection of a Murder, by Jo Murray (Dutton)
• The Divorce, by Freida McFadden (Poisoned Pen Press)
• Dreadful Summit, by Stanley Ellin (Penzler/American
Mystery Classics)
• The Echo of Crows, by Phil Rickman (Atlantic)
• The Fine Art of Lying, by Alexandra Andrews (Harper)
• Five, by Ilona Bannister (Crown)
• A Fortune of Sand, by Ruta Sepetys (Ballantine)
• Going, Going, Gone, by Nasheema Lennon (HarperNorth)
• The Great Houses of Pill Hill, by Diane Josefowicz (Soho Crime)
• Hawai’i Rage, by Tori Eldridge
(Thomas & Mercer)
• Hidden in Lies, by Viveca Sten
(Amazon Crossing)
• Holy F*ck, by Joseph Incardona (Bitter Lemon Press)
• Hurricane Room, by Kim Sherwood (Morrow)
• Ironwood, by Michael Connelly
(Little, Brown)
• I, Spy, by L.M. Kemp (Minotaur)
• The Last Mandarin, by Louise Penny and Mellissa Fung (Minotaur)
• The Lemon Twist, by Élan Les Vies (Keylight)
• The Library After Dark, by Ande Pliego (Bantam)
• A Little Bit Bad, by Cassandra Neyenesch (S&S/Summit)
• The Lost Soldiers, by Andrey Kurkov (HarperVia)
• The Mediator, by Robert Bailey (Thomas & Mercer)
• Moonlight Murder, by Uzma Jalaluddin (Harper Perennial)
• Murder at the Hotel Orient, by Alessandra Ranelli (Gallery/
Scout Press)
• A Murder in Hollywood, by Michael Crichton (Blackstone)
• Murder Like Clockwork, by Nicola Whyte (Union Square)
• Murder on the Rocks, by T.E. Kinsey (Thomas & Mercer)
• My Name Was Gerry Sass, by Tiffany Hanssen (Atlantic Crime)
• Not to Be Taken: A Puzzle in Poison, by Anthony Berkeley
(Poisoned Pen Press)
• Ode to the Bones, by Carolyn Haines (Minotaur)
• The One Day You Were My Husband, by Rosie Walsh (Pamela Dorman)
• An Ordinary Sort of Evil, by Kelley Armstrong (Minotaur)
• Red Verdict, by James Comey (Mysterious Press)
• Robert B. Parker’s Booked, by Alison Gaylin (Putnam)
• Reverse, by Steven F. Havill (Severn House)
• Safari Murder Party, by Rachel Moore (Berkley)
• Storm Warning, by James Byrne (Minotaur)
• The Teacher, by Tim Sullivan (Atlantic Crime)
• True Crime: A Memoir, by Patricia Cornwell (Grand Central)*
• The Tuxedo Society, by Paul Rudnick (Atria)
• 26 Beauties, by James Patterson (Little, Brown)
• The Vampyre Client, by Jeri Westerson (Old London Press)
• A Very Vexing Murder, by Lucy Andrew (Morrow)
• You Can Tell Me, by Melinda Leigh (Montlake)

Wish me luck in trying to get things back in order here, so I can produce a full summer books list for early June.

How About Some Prizes?

This last week brought word of which books have been chosen as finalists for the 2026 Lambda Literary Awards, “celebrating outstanding LGBTQ+ voices in literature.” There are 26 categories of contenders, with five works vying for top LGBTQ+ Mystery honors:

• A Queer Case, by Robert Holtom (Titan)
• Every Sweet Thing Is Bitter, by Samantha Crewson (Crooked Lane)
• Girl Falling, by Hayley Scrivenor (Flatiron)
• Mirage City, by Lev AC Rosen (Minotaur)
• The Case of the Missing Maid, by Rob Osler (Kensington)

Recipients of this year’s “Lammys,” as they’re familiarly known, are to be announced on Friday, June 12, during the 38th Annual Lambda Literary Awards Ceremony in New York City.

* * *

Meanwhile, In Reference to Murder reports that four popular works are competing for the 2026 Minnesota Book Award for Genre Fiction.

• Apostle’s Cove, by William Kent Krueger (Atria)
• Broken Fields, by Marcie Rendon (Soho Crime)
• The Codebreaker’s Daughter, by Amy Lynn Green (Bethany House)
• The Quiet Librarian, by Allen Eskens (Mulholland)

The winners in all nine Minnesota Book Award divisions will be revealed during a ceremony on Wednesday, May 6.

* * *

Finally, a commendation I somehow failed to mention until now. From Elizabeth Foxwell at The Bunburyist:

The latest recipient of the Dove Award—which is awarded by the Popular Culture Association’s Mystery and Detective Fiction Area and recognizes contributions to the serious study of mystery, detective, and crime fiction—is Stewart King, associate professor of European languages at Monash University (Melbourne, Australia). King, a specialist in Spanish and Catalan crime fiction, has edited or co-edited 6 books (e.g., The Cambridge Companion to World Crime Fiction, 2022), produced 35 book chapters and 28 articles, as well as co-edits the journal Crime Fiction Studies. He previously served on the editorial board of Clues: A Journal of Detection (I am managing editor of the journal).

Past Dove Award winners include Martin Edwards, Barry Forshaw, Douglas G. Greene, H.R.F. Keating, Janet Rudolph, and Foxwell herself.

Revue of Reviewers: 3-20-26

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

A Modest Man, a Masterful Career

Just a month after celebrating his 97th birthday, British spy novelist Len Deighton—author of The IPCRESS File, Funeral in Berlin, SS-GB, and other classics of the genre—died Sunday at his home on the island of Guernsey. No cause for his passing has yet been specified.

In his excellent obituary for The Guardian, Mike Ripley recalls,

When he made the remark that he was “the most illiterate writer ever”, in an interview with Argosy magazine in 1969, Len Deighton ... had already published five bestselling spy novels, starting with The Ipcress File, three of which had been made into successful films. He had also written two cookbooks and a comic novel, edited an iconic guide to London in the swinging 60s and a book on fine wines and spirits, written a television play for the Armchair Theatre [TV anthology] series and two film scripts, become travel editor for Playboy and produced two films. He was to go on to write a further 21 novels and a collection of short stories, and to establish a reputation as a military historian.

Deighton was an established and “quite comfortable” freelance graphic artist when he began writing The Ipcress File “for a lark” while living in France in 1960, completing it the following year while on holiday, but it was not until he met the literary agent Jonathan Clowes at a party in London that he was persuaded to submit it for publication.

Rejected by two publishers, one of whom remarked sniffily that there was no market for spy stories, it was taken by a third and published in November 1962 after serialisation in the London Evening Standard. It was an instant success, the first print-run of 4,000 copies selling out on the day of publication, and its impact on spy fiction has been called seismic.

The New York Times mentions that the London-born Deighton regarded The IPCRESS File (as its title appeared originally) as “a riposte to the James Bond novels of Ian Fleming.

Instead of Bond’s cartoonish and morally simplistic take on spycraft, Mr. Deighton offered a shadow world through which his unnamed hero—christened Harry Palmer for the film versions—made his way, beset by disinformation, triple-crosses and dim bureaucrats.

Unlike the impossibly suave, action-oriented Bond or George Smiley, John le Carré’s dumpy, cerebral, upper-class spy hero, Mr. Deighton’s central character is self-consciously proletarian, with a jaded, frequently hostile attitude toward his superiors, a droll sense of humor and a love of cooking.

Mr. Deighton took a sardonic view of his sudden achievement as a brand-name writer. “All you need is a profound inferiority complex, no training as a writer and growing up a victim of the English class system,” he told Publishers Weekly in 1993.

In its own posthumous tribute, The Washington Post adds,

Mr. Deighton dismissed writing as a “goof-off profession,” but he said he thrilled at the impact his novels had on readers. “When you make a book, it’s like making a hand grenade,” he told the Telegraph. “It’s a dull process but when you throw it, the person at the other end gets the effect.”

His spy works are marked by elliptical narratives short on explanatory details, reflecting the mysteries of espionage, yet filled with unforgettable moles, traitors and other characters who double- and triple-cross one another.

“Deighton’s wry and ironic recognition of the realities of espionage and the crackling energy that motivates his fiction place him in the first rank of spy novelists,” critic George Grella wrote in the 1985 edition of Twentieth Century Crime and Mystery Writers. “He writes thrillers that are witty, thoughtful, authentic, and entertaining, a rare combination of merits.”

In his later years, Mr. Deighton’s shyness and his pivot to historical fiction and nonfiction works left him more removed from public awareness. “I’ve never written books for people more clever than I am, or more stupid,” he once said. “I’ve always tried to direct things at people like me.”

“Fiercely protective of his private life, he rarely gave interviews and avoided public appearances at festivals and conventions,” Ripley observes. “He was elected to the Detection Club in 1969, but turned down the offer of a Diamond Dagger for lifetime achievement from the Crime Writers’ Association on three occasions, maintaining that ‘two things destroy writers—alcohol and praise.”

Len Deighton was a fictionist of distinction, for sure.

READ MORE: “Len Deighton, R.I.P.,” by Martin Edwards (‘Do You Write Under Your Own Name?’); “Len Deighton Dies at 97,” by Bill Koenig (The Spy Command); “Len Deighton: A Personal Appreciation,” by Mike Ripley (Shotsmag Confidential); “Len Deighton (1929-2026) Remembered,” by Chris Connor (Crime Fiction Lover).

Barry Tough Choices

Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine has released its list of contenders for the 2026 Barry Awards, in four separate categories.

Best Mystery:
• The Impossible Thing, by Belinda Bauer (Atlantic Monthly)
• Crooks, by Lou Berney (Morrow)
• King of Ashes, by S.A. Cosby (Flatiron)
• The Black Wolf, by Louise Penny (Minotaur)
• The White Crow, by Michael
Robotham (Scribner)
• Presumed Guilty, by Scott Turow
(Grand Central)

Best First Mystery:
• Leverage, by Amran Gowani (Atria)
• All the Other Mothers Hate Me, by Sarah Harman (Putnam)
• Dead Money, by Jakob Kerr (Bantam)
• The Vanishing Place, by Zoë
Rankin (Berkley)
• Stillwater, by Tanya Scott (Atlantic Monthly)
• Julie Chan Is Dead, by Liann Zhang (Atria)

Best Paperback Original Mystery:
• Crimson Thaw, by Bruce Robert Coffin (Severn River)
• Splintered Justice, by Kim Hays (Seventh Street)
• Making a Killing, by Cara Hunter (Morrow)
• If Two Are Dead, by Rick Mofina (Mira)
• Wolf Six, by Alex Shaw (Boldwood)
• The Dentist, by Tim Sullivan (Atlantic Crime)

Best Thriller:
• Witness 8, by Steve Cavanagh (Atria)
• The Oligarch’s Daughter, by Joseph Finder (Harper)
• Midnight Black, by Mark Greaney (Berkley)
• Clown Town, by Mick Herron (Soho Crime)
• Head Cases, by John McMahon (Minotaur)
• The Mailman, by Andrew Welsh-Huggins (Mysterious Press)

To select the winners, we are told that “Readers of Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine are eligible to vote. One vote per category. Send votes to george@deadlypleasures.com.” The results will be announced on October 22, during the opening ceremonies at this year’s Bouchercon in Calgary, Alberta.

The Barry Awards, established in 1997, are named in honor of Barry Gardner, a longtime DP “fan reviewer.”

Sam, Scarlett, and the Tarts All Weep

This wasn’t the sort of news I was longing to receive on a Thursday morning. As Shotsmag Confidential’s Ayo Onatade reports,

It is with deep sadness that the crime writing community have learned of the recent death of the award-winning crime writer Lauren Milne Henderson. As well as being an author, Lauren worked as a journalist for a number of well-known newspapers and magazines. [She was 59 years old.]

Under the name of Lauren Milne Henderson, she was the author of the Sam Jones series featuring sculptor-turned-sleuth Sam Jones. The first book in the series is Dead White Female [which] was published in 1995 and … was followed by six more books: Too Many Blondes (1996), The Black Rubber Dress (1997), Freeze My Margarita (1998), The Strawberry Tattoo (1999), Chained (2001) and Pretty Boy (2002).

Following on from her Sam Jones series, she also wrote the Young Adult Kiss/Scarlett series starting with Kiss Me Kill Me in 2008, which featured 16-year-old Scarlett Wakefield, who must clear her name after the last boy she kisses dies in her arms and she is accused of his death. There were 3 more books in this series published: Kisses and Lies (2009), Kisses in the Dark (2010) and Kisses of Death (2011). Kiss Me Kill Me was nominated for an Anthony Award in 2009. ...

Under the name Rebecca Chance she was also the author of 10 glamourous thrillers and what was known as ‘Bonkbusters’. Whilst all standalones, previous characters could be found in other books. The first book in the series was Divas (2009), and the last book Killer Affair (2017). Killer Heels (2012), Bad Angels (2012), Killer Queens (2013) and Bad Brides (2014) all made the Sunday Times best-seller list.

Wikipedia adds that Henderson helped establish Tart Noir, “a branch of crime fiction that is characterized by strong, independent female detectives with an amount of sexuality often involved. The books in the genre also occasionally feature a murderer protagonist and are sometimes presented in a first person point of view.” What I hope is a full list of her books can be found here.

Eliza’s Mettle Is No Longer in Doubt

This is rather sad news, but was certainly expected at some point: PBS-TV’s Masterpiece umbrella series has announced that the upcoming Season 7 of Miss Scarlet will bring an end to that well-written Victorian-era mystery drama. Filming of the six episodes to comprise this final run has already begun in Belgrade, Serbia.

Miss Scarlet, you will recall, debuted in Great Britain in March 2020 as Miss Scarlet and the Duke (and made its way to Masterpiece early the following year). It starred Kate Phillips as Eliza Scarlet, London’s resourceful first female private detective, with Stuart Martin cast as her childhood friend and reluctant Scotland Yard ally, Inspector William “the Duke” Wellington. But Martin left the show after Season 4, Tom Durant-Pritchard joined the ensemble as Inspector Alexander Blake, and the drama’s title was necessarily shortened.

So what might we expect to see in Miss Scarlet’s concluding installments? According to a news release, “Eliza Scarlet has found love, but with it comes a new set of challenges, both on a professional and personal level. As she faces mounting pressures both at work and at home, she is reunited with familiar friendly faces, as well as a powerful new crime boss who has arrived in town—and it’s not who you might expect. Meanwhile, Blake’s promotion brings its own complications, as he finds himself answering to a surprising new boss with whom he shares a complicated history. Season 7 raises the stakes, deepens the drama, and brings Eliza and Blake’s journey to a thrilling and satisfying close.”

“What a journey this has been,” Kate Phillips is quoted as saying. “Miss Scarlet has been one of the greatest joys of my career, and I will forever be grateful to Rachael New for creating such a witty, sharp, and delightful character in Eliza. It’s been a privilege to work on a show crafted with so much love and dedication and as we prepare to say goodbye, I’m so proud of what we’ve achieved and the memories we’ve made. Thank you to everyone who has supported us—I can’t wait to share the farewell Miss Scarlet deserves.”

Despite a bit of unevenness in its early years, Miss Scarlet will be remembered as a delightful blend of whodunit, humor, and thoughtful character study. I, for one, will miss it greatly.

A Hammett-Seasoned Assembly

(Above) R-Evolution, American artist Marco Cochrane’s 47-foot-tall, steel rod-and-mesh sculpture of a nude woman, rises from Embarcadero Plaza on the San Francisco waterfront. It has stood there in front of the Ferry Building since April 2025.

Time was when I visited San Francisco regularly—maybe once a year, or at least once every couple of years. However, before last week, a full decade and a half had elapsed since my previous call on Northern California’s most colorful and captivating metropolis; the last time was back in 2010, when Bouchercon took over the Hyatt Regency hotel on the Embarcadero, directly across from the historic Ferry Building. During the interim, I’d seen stories about how that City by the Bay had fallen into social and financial decline. Elon Musk, the South Africa-born right-winger who founded Tesla and destroyed Twitter (today’s X)—and who is a product of Silicon Valley, the high-tech hub located just to the south—had portrayed San Francisco as “a crime-ridden wasteland where homeless drug addicts freely roam.”

So I was fully prepared to see this place I have loved for so long reduced to a shadow of its erstwhile glory. Yet that isn’t what I found. In fact, central San Francisco looked pretty much like every other big city I’ve traveled to since the COVID-19 pandemic. There were scattered empty storefronts along Market Street, and one of my all-time favorite breakfast venues—Dottie’s True Blue Café, formerly on Jones Street but moved since my last drop-by to a larger, Sixth Street location—had shut its doors. Yes, there were some unhoused residents on sidewalks, benefiting from this burg’s moderate climate and extensive public services, but no more than I see nowadays in Seattle or Portland ... and none of them were shooting up in the gutters. San Francisco struck me as a locale that’s weathered bad economic times and is on its way to finding its footing again.

It certainly did a superb job of hosting the 2026 Left Coast Crime convention, which was held last week (Thursday, February 26, to Sunday, March 1) in the same Hyatt Regency I’d frequented 15 years ago.

Not surprisingly, given that (1) we were in Dashiell Hammett country and (2) this year brought an end to copyright restrictions on the author’s detective-fiction masterpiece, The Maltese Falcon, there was considerable attention paid to that 1930 novel. Falcon statuettes were presented to all four of LCC 2026’s guests of honor. One of the gathering’s Thursday panel discussions found Bay Area author Mark Coggins and Randal S. Brandt—who writes The Rap Sheet’s “Book Into Film” column and curates the California Detective Fiction Collection at the University of California, Berkeley’s Bancroft Library—examining the book’s still-enduring impact on crime fiction. And that same night, Coggins and Brandt appeared together at a downtown used bookshop to chat with other mystery enthusiasts about Poltroon Press’ recent re-release of The Maltese Falcon, to which both contributed.

One of this convention’s first panel exchanges was “Let’s Talk About the Black Bird,” which addressed Dashiell Hammett’s best-known novel, The Maltese Falcon. Participating were—left to right—authors Elizabeth Crowens (Bye Bye Blackbird), Domenic Stansberry (the North Beach mysteries, The Lizard), and Kelli Stanley (the Miranda Corbie series, The Reckoning), as well as librarian Randal Brandt, who moderated the colloquy. Not shown, but also part of the group, was Mark Coggins. He took this shot and e-mailed it to me with a note that joked, “Looks like someone photobombed them.”

Hours after that panel presentation concluded, Brandt and Coggins (shown above on the left and right, respectively) joined San Francisco author and philanthropist Robert Mailer Anderson (center) at Kayo Books, a treasury of used works on Post Street downtown, to celebrate Hammett’s considerable influence on today’s detective fiction. Afterward, Anderson—who rents the pocket-edition apartment at 891 Post where Hammett lived from 1927 to 1929 and penned his first three novels—escorted a few members of the audience on a brief tour of those rehabbed digs.

Yes, that’s me, Jeff Pierce, seated in the very apartment (#401) where ex-Pinkerton operative Hammett crafted his earliest novels and many of his short stories. Neither the wooden desk nor the typewriter are original fixtures, but they certainly add to the crib’s Jazz Age ambiance. (Photograph by Mark Coggins)

In a memorable treat for yours truly, immediately prior to the Kayo Books event, Coggins and I accompanied local novelist Robert Mailer Anderson (Boonville) to the fourth-floor apartment Hammett once rented at 891 Post Street, one block east of the bookshop. It was there, in the late 1920s, that Red Harvest, The Dain Curse, and The Maltese Falcon were all batted out noisily on a typewriter, the author likely working longer into the night than his neighbors would have preferred. For many years, architect and Hammett fan Bill Arney lived in those 275-square-foot lodgings, but after his passing in 2021, Anderson took over the rent. He has since restored the apartment to how it might have looked during Hammett’s time. Anderson is also working on a project that will bring modern authors into the place and film them reading excerpts from Hammett’s prose.

For a guy like me, who discovered Dashiell Hammett, Sam Spade, and the Continental Op during college, and who’s been re-reading their adventures ever since, this opportunity to stand where their fictional lives began was nothing short of electrifying.

Those four days in mostly sunny San Francisco were a whirlwind of activities, from genre panel discussions and serendipitous encounters in hallways with friends to the discovery of new attractions the city has to offer. A few of my other favorite experiences:

• My daily morning walks around downtown, during which I not only got exercise and fresh air, but made a point of reaching buildings and monuments familiar to me from my years of writing about SF history.

• Sitting down with local author Kelli Stanley and talking about her efforts to relocate from the United States to Europe; her latest novel, The Reckoning; and how she couldn’t relax at LCC because she needed to get home and finish her sequel to that book by its deadline.

• Chatting up the friendly doorkeepers at the Hyatt Regency and finally questioning them about where to find the best Mexican food in the Mission District. This provoked much debate and research, until they finally directed me to Gallardos at 3248 18th Street (corner of 18th and Shotwell). I took the BART train down to the 16th and Mission station, then walked south on Mission and left on 18th for three more blocks. My being the only white guy in the restaurant suggested authenticity, as did the fact that credit cards weren’t accepted—Gallardos is cash-only. And the food? Well, I ordered the Guadalajara Dinner, a combination plate featuring an enchilada, a chili relleno, and a taco. With a side of house-made tortillas! It was savory and filling, and more than I could eat, but I had no refrigerator in my hotel room to hold the leftovers. I’ll definitely go back there the next time I’m in the Bay Area.

• Finding myself at the hotel bar next to Chicago’s Lori Rader-Day, an hour before Saturday night’s Lefty Awards banquet was to commence. I first met Lori during an airport shuttle ride into Raleigh, North Carolina, for Bouchercon 2015—back when she was just starting her career composing fiction. Since then, she’s produced six more novels, among them this year’s Wreck Your Heart, and survived breast cancer. I have done … well, nothing even remotely so courageous or dramatic. But it was good to catch up for a spell over gin-and-tonics.

• And then after the banquet and prize dispersals, joining Los Angeles author Gary Phillips at that same bar. He told me about the delights of rearing his late daughter’s young child, and briefed me on his soon-forthcoming novel, The Haul, which recounts the story of a professional thief coming out of retirement to engineer “a multi-million-dollar raid of a tech billionaire’s secret bunker.” Gary and Lori are such kind and generous people; I’m sorry I live so far from them.

When Sunday rolled around, I was not close to being ready for departure. I mused on how wonderful it might be to spend another week roaming San Francisco, just photographing sidewalk scenes and the elegant decorations of old buildings. I hadn’t had a chance during my stay to wander out to spacious Golden Gate Park. Or to hop a Powell-Hyde Cable Car to The Buena Vista café, which is credited with introducing Irish coffees to the United States in 1952. Nor had I stopped at John’s Grill on Ellis Street, where Spade ordered “chops, baked potatoes, [and] sliced tomatoes” in The Maltese Falcon.

But I had to be back home the next day, so couldn’t stay. Next time, I told myself. And next time would be sooner than 15 years off!

Thursday’s “Thoughts on Podcasting” session was moderated by Jaime Parker Stickle (far left), author of the Corey in Los Angeles series and host of The Girl with the Same Name. Tackling the topic with her were Sabrina Thatcher (Slaying the Craft: Inside the Mind of a Thriller Writer), Jim Fusilli (Writers at Work), Mike Adamick (Crime Adjacent), and Dan White (OutWithDan).

“The Liars Panel” on Friday was one of this convention’s more unusual offerings, but its title says it all. Five writers told stories of their encounters with famous people, and the audience was charged with identifying which were factual and which were fabricated. Shown from left to right: Lee Matthew Goldberg (The Great Gimmelmans), Holly West (The Money Block), the legendary Sara Paretsky (creator of the V.I. Warshawski series), Lori Rader-Day (this panel’s moderator), and Lina Chern (Tricks of Fortune).

Guest of Honor Gary Phillips was interviewed onstage Friday afternoon by fellow fictionist Christa Faust (The Get Off). During their engaging 45-minute exchange, Phillips was asked which of all his books he would like to have outlast him. His answer: Violent Spring, his 1994 debut novel (featuring private eye Ivan Monk), and his 1999 standalone, The Jook.

Finally, Lori Rader-Day’s selfie showing the two of us enjoying chilled libations in the Hyatt Regency’s lobby bar.