Revue of Reviewers: 8-16-26

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

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.

Plenteous Peepers

If there’s one thing I’ve learned over these last three weeks spent posting tributes to fictional private detectives in Killer Covers, it’s that I cannot keep two blogs cruising along simultaneously at a lively clip. While I have produced two dozen posts in Killer Covers during this period, my work on The Rap Sheet has slowed to a crawl.

Nonetheless, I am pleased with my efforts on that sister site. The “Slice of P.I.” series, as I could not resist calling it, has offered readers book fronts from works by Max Allan Collins, George Harmon Coxe, G.G. Fickling, Lawrence Block, Agatha Christie, Bill S. Ballinger, Stephen Greenleaf, Sara Paretsky, and numerous others. At the same time, it’s showcased artists—familiar and not—ranging from Joe DeVito, David Plourde, and Gerald Powell to Mara McAfee, Robert K. Abbett, James Meese, and Robert McGinnis.

But today I’ll close out that series with a quirky, mostly forgotten novel by a quirky, definitely not forgotten author. While anticipating said post’s arrival, check out previous “Slice of P.I.” entries here.

Bullet Points: Bursting at the Seams Edition

It’s been a good long while since I put together one of these news bits columns, so I have some serious catching-up to do!



• The finalists for 2026’s Hammett Prize have been announced by the International Association of Crime Writers, North American Branch. This commendation is presented annually to a work, published in the previous year, that judges say demonstrates “literary excellence in crime writing.” Here are the five latest candidates:

— El Dorado Drive, by Megan Abbott (Putnam)
— Party of Liars, by Kelsey Cox (Minotaur)
— The Big Empty, by Robert Crais (Putnam)
— The Savage Noble Death of Babs Dionne, by Ron Currie (Putnam)
— The Lizard, by Domenic Stansberry (Molotov Editions)

Expect to hear news of the winner later this summer. Lists of previous Hammett Prize nominees and recipients are available here.

• Believe it or not, among the 13 novels on this year’s longlist of Booker Prize nominees is one plucked straight from the crime/thriller category: All Them Dogs (Riverhead), by Irish fictionist Djamel White. The award’s Web site calls it “by turns savage, thrilling and unexpectedly tender, ... a gripping story of violence, lust, and greed that explores one man's struggles to find his place in an unsparing world.” Whether All Them Dogs will find a place on the Booker shortlist, slated to be revealed on September 22, is anybody’s guess.

• Following this year’s release of A River Red with Blood, the 23rd outing for cop-turned-P.I. Charlie Parker, John Connolly explains in his latest newsletter that his next novel—due out in May 2027—will be The Castle, “a standalone thriller with political overtones, set in a Connecticut suburb in 1973.” He goes on to say:

The Castle is a safe haven, a gated community in a U.S. nation troubled by the war in Vietnam, political assassinations, and the growing shadow of Watergate. For the disillusioned publisher Hamer, it is an escape from a world that has disappointed him.

But something is very wrong in the Castle. A teenage boy has gone missing. There are thefts, threats, shootings. Hamer has begun to fear the Castle may not be so safe after all, and he and his neighbors are the targets of a conspiracy with a single purpose: to destroy five families and punish them for the sins of their children. And one of those families could be his own.

Connolly calls this “a book about secrets: the secrets of the state, the secrets of families, and perhaps the secrets we hide even from ourselves. I’ve been working on it for three years now, and I think—I hope—that it’s about as good a thriller as I can write.”

• If you haven’t yet noticed, my Killer Covers blog is currently rolling out a succession of posts celebrating private eyes.

• I’m a huge fan of stories that illuminate small, seemingly insignificant aspects of crime-fiction storytelling. So Olivia Rutigliano’s new CrimeReads piece, “The 8 Best Fake Crime Novels in Film and TV, Ranked,” is right up my alley.

• The debut of Amazon Prime’s Reacher, Season 4, is teed up for Wednesday, August 12. This latest run of eight episodes will be based on Lee Child’s 2009 novel, Gone Tomorrow. It finds Reacher (played by Alan Ritchson) having “a chance encounter with a distraught stranger on a train [that] goes horribly wrong,” only to see our hero “drawn into a complex and deadly game that pits him against ruthless foes from the highest echelons of power.” A trailer for Reacher is below.



• The program is already looking ahead to its next season. “Amanda Ip, Jay Baruchel, Ciara Bravo and Kevin Durand will star opposite Alan Ritchson,” says The Hollywood Reporter, “as Reacher in the fifth season ... will be based on Lee Child’s novel Make Me. The series ... will catch up with Ritchson’s title character after his train stops in the mysterious town of Mother’s Rest where he teams with a private investigator in the search for a missing person.”

• Meanwhile, watch for the premiere of Prime’s Reacher spin-off series, Neagley, starring Danish actress Maria Sten as the most dangerous operative among Jack Reacher’s Special Investigators, on Wednesday, September 16. (It has its own trailer here.) And Kill Zone, the third entry in Dan Ames’ Frances Neagley novel series, is due out on August 17, with another, Blow Back, coming in November.

• In other television news, The Chelsea Detective, with Adrian Scarborough and Vanessa Emme, will return to Acorn TV for a fourth season on Monday, August 10. A trailer and brief synopses of the four new 90-minute episodes can be found here.

• Max Allan Collins reports that Death by Fruitcake, his 90-minute indie film that brings to life main characters from the Trash ’n’ Treasures mystery series he’s been penning for almost two decades with his wife, Barbara (under their joint pseudonym, Barbara Allan) recently debuted on the streaming TV service Tubi.

• Deadline brings word that “Cooper & Fry are heading to the U.S. after streamer BritBox snapped up the British crime drama. The show has performed well on Paramount-owned broadcast network 5 in the UK and now has a U.S. home. BritBox has snagged Season 1 of the show for U.S. and Canada, while Netflix has taken second window UK rights. Adapted from Stephen Booth’s bestselling detective novels, Cooper & Fry follows unlikely detective duo Ben Cooper and Diane Fry, played by Robert James-Collier (Downton Abbey) and Mandip Gill (Doctor Who). Set in and around England’s picturesque Peak District, the series follows Cooper, who is struggling to emerge from the shadow of his late father, while Fry is an outsider fleeing tragedies in her past. Together, they tackle grisly crimes in the remote countryside.” All eight episodes of Season 1 will drop on Monday, August 17; look for a one-minute trailer here. A second season has already been commissioned, with episodes adapted from Booth’s novels The Devil’s Edge, Fall Down Dead, One Last Breath, and The Murder Road. 

• Maigret, based on Georges Simenon’s many mysteries, will return to PBS-TV’s Masterpiece rotation for a sophomore season beginning on Sunday, October 18. Benjamin Wainwright (Belgravia: The Next Chapter, Lord of the Rings: War of the Rohirrim) reprises his lead role as French police detective Jules Maigret, with Stephanie Martini (The Gold, Last Kingdom) playing his wife, Louise. What can we expect from the half-dozen new episodes? PBS offers this plot brief:

An epic power struggle is happening in La Brigade Criminelle in Maigret Season 2. Maigret’s boss, Director of Police Xavier Guichard, has become suspicious of Maigret’s methods and decides to ‘take him down a peg.’ One of Maigret’s colleagues leaves, another is transferred by Guichard and replaced by George Bonfils, who is immediately unpopular with Les Maigrets. As Maigret investigates new crimes, the line between guilt and innocence is blurred. The unconventional detective will have to work out his own unique form of justice for victims and perpetrators alike.

These stories are adapted from Simenon’s The Hanged Man of Saint-Pholien, Maigret’s Revolver, and The Yellow Dog.

• Agatha Christie created the characters Thomas Beresford and his wife, Prudence (née Cowley), for her 1922 novel, The Secret Adversary. They carried on their detecting escapades through four more books, into the early 1970s. Their debut on television came in the 10-part, 1983-1984 series Agatha Christie’s Partners in Crime, starring Francesca Annis and James Warwick. A terrific six-episode show, Partners in Crime, resurrected the pair in 2015, this time portrayed by David Walliams and Call the Midwife’s Jessica Raine in a drama set during the 1950s. Now, Britbox has scheduled a six-part reboot, Agatha Christie’s Tommy & Tuppence, to commence airing on Tuesday, September 15. The action in this new TV serial takes place in the present day, with the private detective protagonists reimagined as on-and-off romantic partners. Antonia Thomas (The Good Doctor, Still Up) will play “spirited actress” Tuppence, while Josh Dylan (The Buccaneers, Mamma Mia 2) portrays Tommy, “a meticulous and charming crime writer.” Mystery Fanfare furnishes a video preview.

• According to In Reference to Murder, “Morgan Spector is in talks to headline Netflix’s series adaptation of Dan Brown‘s latest novel, The Secret of Secrets, tackling the role of Professor Robert Landgon played by Tom Hanks in the film versions. Rebecca Hall (The Town) is also in talks for the female lead opposite Morgan. Spector already stars in HBO’s The Gilded Age as railroad tycoon George Russell, but sources say he would be able to do both series with proper scheduling should Gilded Age get renewed for a fifth season. In The Secret of Secrets, symbologist Robert Langdon (Spector) races against ancient forces and time to rescue his girlfriend, missing scientist Katherine Solomon (Hall), and her groundbreaking manuscript whose discoveries have the power to forever change humanity’s understanding of the mind. If the deals come to fruition, it will mark the first TV series acting collaboration for real-life couple Spector and Hall, who have starred together in a handful of plays and movies, including the Broadway revival of Machinal, Christine, and Permission.”

• And Icelandic author Lilja Sigurðardóttir has reached a deal with Germany’s ZDF Studios and Iceland producer Glassriver to translate her five “Áróra Investigation” novels for the small screen. Variety delivers this synopsis of Sigurðardóttir’s popular yarns: “Set across Iceland and London, the series follows Áróra, a tough fraud investigator with Icelandic roots who returns home to search for her missing sister. What begins as a family mission soon expands into a wider criminal investigation as she teams with Daniel, an Icelandic police detective and potential love interest, exposing corruption, betrayal and violence beneath Iceland’s rugged landscape.”

• It seems every time I think about how many free hours I might gain by signing off from Facebook, that social-networking site dispenses some fresh nugget of information I didn’t know I needed. Case in point: A post from somebody named Donald Bishop, who writes:

If you ever wondered who that beautiful young woman was who was running down the beach combing her hair and then turning to face the camera in the opening of [the original] Hawaii Five-O, now you know, her name is Elizabeth Logue. She is a native Hawaiian, apparently still alive. Her full name is Elizabeth Louise Malamalamaokalani White Logue. Apart from that iconic shot in the intro, she has only 2 other screen credits to her name. In 1961, she had a role in a low-budget Italian exploitation film shot in Tahiti called Nude Odyssey. Her only other part was in the Julie Andrews/Max Von Sydow film Hawaii, based on James Michener’s novel of the same name. She also did a short promotional film for the state of Hawaii to lure tourists to the island paradise.

Below is a compilation of opening sequences from Hawaii Five-O’s 12 seasons as part of CBS’s prime-time line-up (1968-1970).



• Speaking of Facebook, Frederick, Maryland-based publisher Level Best Books declared there weeks ago that it has formed Level Best Books UK, “a wholly owned subsidiary based in London that will serve as the publisher's official presence in the United Kingdom and represent the company's interests throughout Great Britain.” The venture “will be led by Shawn Reilly Simmons, publisher and CEO of Level Best Books, and internationally acclaimed mystery author Martin Edwards, who will serve together as co-directors.”

• This “collaborative mystery” from Britain’s Detection Club should be fun. Sadly, we must wait until 2028 for its appearance.

• I’m quite behind in drawing reader attention to Frank Gregorsky’s fine Detective Drama Gems. Issue 18 marks the start of that publication’s sixth year, and contains background on the 1961-1962 ABC-TV series The New Breed, as well as the Canadian cop drama Night Heat (1985-1989) and “Fade in to Murder,” a memorable 1976 episode of Columbo that pitted Peter Falk’s shabby but clever Los Angeles police lieutenant against former Star Trek captain William Shatner, who played the self-obsessed star of a TV detective show. Issue 19 celebrates the radio version of Dragnet, the 1966-1969 ABC program Felony Squad, and another episode of Night Heat. The next edition of Gems is expected in November.

• Published and unpublished works alike have achieved wins in this year’s contest for the Daphne du Maurier Awards for Excellence in Mystery/Suspense, sponsored by the Kiss of Death Chapter of Romance Writers of America. Click here to see the full results.

• A new crime-fiction periodical is to be launched soon! Beginning in October (so, in time for it to be heavily promoted at Bouchercon in Calgary), SMFS Mystery Magazine will appear three times a year featuring content from some familiar members of the Short Mystery Fiction Society. In addition to short stories, the mag is expected to incorporate interviews by Kevin Tipple and M.E. Proctor, and reviews by June Lorraine Roberts and Mat Coward. I’m guessing we will hear more about buying subscriptions once we get closer to the publication date. The cover of Issue 1 is embedded on the left.

• Hot off the presses (or at least still warm) is the Summer 2026 “Mysteries Set in France” edition of Mystery Readers Journal. Grab a copy for yourself here. And note that this follows a similarly themed number of the magazine from the spring of 2012, which looks to be available now only in PDF format.

• The next issue of MRJ will address the topic of “Cross-Genre Mysteries.” Submissions of articles, reviews, and author essays are due by August 20. Guidelines can be accessed here.

• This is good news, indeed! Scottish novelist Peter May wrote recently on Facebook (yeah, damn Facebook again!): “I know that I indicated strongly that The Black Loch [2024] would be my last book. But I also said, never say never. So there’s going to be just one more.” His post also drops “some visual clues” to a location he suggests is “very similar” to an imaginary one featured in Island of the Dead, set to go on sale from Riverrun next January.

• Sometime Rap Sheet contributor Peter Handel hatched his own blog almost a year ago. It’s called Carnivorous: A Steady Diet of Crime Fiction and has of late brought forth a couple of interviews destined to reward your scrutiny. The first is with Amy Bloom and focuses around Blunt Instrument (Mysterious Press), which marks her entry into the mystery-fiction world. The second finds Handel talking with Greg Shepard, the director of vintage publisher Stark House Press. Bookmark Carnivorous, if you have not already done so.

• Finally, we must say good-bye to some people who greatly impacted this field of fiction. Gail Bowen, the Canadian author of more than 20 novels starring Joanne Kilbourn, a political science professor in Saskatchewan with a sideline in solving crimes, passed away on June 25 at age 83, “following a brief battle with cancer.” Japanese writer Keigo Higashino, who reportedly produced 106 books during his lifetime, but may be remembered best for his Detective Galileo mysteries (The Devotion of Suspect X, etc.), perished on July 23 as a result of colorectal cancer; he was 68 years old. And Joanna Pettet may have been a London-born actress, rather than a wordsmith, but her contributions to crime and mystery fiction were still important. She guested on such boob-tube series as The Fugitive, Mannix, The Delphi Bureau, Banacek, Harry O, and Murder, She Wrote, and played “the scantily clad Mata Bond,” daughter of David Niven’s James Bond, in the 1967 spy parody Casino Royale. Pettet was 83 when she died in Temecula, California, on July 7.

Aussie Women Show Their Stuff

Sisters in Crime Australia has announced its shortlists of books being considered for the 2026 Davitt Awards. The winners will be revealed on Friday, September 12, during a special ceremony in Melbourne.

Adult Fiction:
• At Café 64, by Shaeden Barry (Echo)
• Learned Behaviours, by Zeyneb Gamieldien (Ultimo Press)
• Unbury the Dead, by Fiona Hardy (Affirm Press)
• Mad Mabel, by Sally Hepworth (Macmillan Australia)
• The Bluff, by Joanna Jenkins (Allen & Unwin)
• Melaleuca, by Angie Faye Martin (HQ Fiction)

Non-fiction:
• Groomed, by Sonia Orchard (Simon & Schuster)
• Outrageous Fortunes: The Adventures of Mary Fortune, Crime-writer, and Her Criminal Son, by Megan Brown and Lucy Sussex (Black Inc.)
• The Red House, by Kate Wild (Allen & Unwin)

Young Adult:
• What Have They Done to Liza McLean? by Amy Doak (Penguin
Random House Australia)
• A Murder Is Going Down, by Kate Emery (Allen & Unwin)
• We Saw What You Started, by Carla Salmon (Pan Macmillan Australia)

Children’s Books:
• Run, by Sarah Armstrong (Hardie Grant Children’s)
• The Girl and the Ghost, by Jacqueline Harvey (Penguin Random
House Australia)
• Oceanforged: The Wicked Ship, by Amelia Mellor (Simon &
Schuster Australia)
• True South, by Gisela Ervin-Ward (Midnight Sun)

PaperBack: “Keep Cool, Mr. Jones”

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



Keep Cool, Mr. Jones, by Timothy Fuller (Dell, 1952), with a front cover painted by Robert Stanley.

Author Fuller was still a student at Harvard University when he published his first mystery novel, Harvard Has a Homicide (1936). It introduced Edmund “Jupiter” Jones, described as a cocky, “eccentric grad student in the fine arts at Harvard who wins a valet in a craps game.” There was more than a modicum of Ellery Queen in Jones, and at least one latter-day reviewer has criticized the character for treating his Black servant, Sylvester, “in a ‘status quo’ racist way.” Yet Fuller proved to be a “sly and witty writer,” and his whodunits were deemed sinuous and entertaining enough that he was invited to produce another three over the next seven years—Reunion with Murder (1941), Three Thirds of a Ghost (1941), and This Is Murder, Mr. Jones (1943)—all following his gentleman sleuth as he graduated college then remained at Harvard as an assistant professor of fine arts.

Seven more years passed after the release of This Is Murder, Mr. Jones, with readers presuming the series had ended, before Fuller finally delivered his fifth and final puzzler with the same lead, Keep Cool, Mr. Jones. As the blog Beneath the Stains of Time explains, this “compact, breezy story” imagines “an older Jones living in the suburban Boston village of Saxon with a wife and three young children. Jupiter had hung up his deerstalker nearly six years ago, however, ‘much as the banker must bank or the preacher preach,’ Jupiter ‘had been grotesquely conditioned to deduce amateurishly.’” Two incidents get his investigative juices flowing again: the trapping of four people in a walk-in freezer, which he surmises was a failed murder attempt; and the subsequent slaying of Saxon’s chief of police. Might those events be connected in some manner?

Following the Scribes and Claymores

These days, there are so many prizes given in the field of crime, mystery, and thriller fiction, that it’s easy to fall behind in reporting them all. So consider this essentially a catch-up post.

Yesterday, the International Association of Media Tie-in Writers announced the winners of its 2026 Scribe Awards for “excellence in the field of writing tie-in fiction for media franchises.” There were seven categories of contenders this year, but the one that seems most pertinent to Rap Sheet readers is General Fiction. Among those nominees, the winner is Raymond Benson’s The Hook and the Eye (Ian Fleming), which employs ex-CIA op Felix Leiter—familiar from several James Bond novels—as the lead in a story that finds him tangling with spies in Manhattan and tasked with safely transporting an “impossibly beautiful and impossibly secretive” woman to Texas.

Also vying for top honors in General Fiction were Murder, She Wrote: Snowy With a Chance of Murder, by Barbara Early (Berkley); Cwej: The Midas Touch, by James Hornby (Independently published); Return of the Maltese Falcon, by Max Allan Collins (Hard Case Crime); Thunder’s Edge: Echoes of Memory, by Sarah Cawkwell (Aconyte); and Murder, She Wrote: The Body in the Trees, by Terrie Farley Moran (Berkley).

* * *

In addition to the Silver Falchion Awards, next month’s Killer Nashville conference will see presented the Claymore Awards, “given to a diverse collection of the top unpublished manuscripts submitted in 2026.” Below are the finalists in just two of 19 divisions.

Best Mystery:
• Exit, Wound, by Mark Dillman
• The Mystery of the Wolf, by David Goodlett
• Answers Will Come, by Henry James Kaye
• All the Buried Secrets, by Kim Nuesse
• The Holiday Slayer, by Janet Shawgo
• The End of Us, by Elissa Thompson

Best Investigator (includes procedural, serious private eye, detective, and noir):
• In Plain Sight, by Jacquelyn Dohoney
• Hunting the Archer, by John Foley
• Victim’s Voice, by Henry James Kaye
• Reflections in the Mist, by Avram Lavinsky
• Centaur Standing, by Clare Monteschio
• Return to Newstead Hills, by CJ Prince

Click here to see the full lineup of 2026 Claymore candidates. The winners of these commendations as well as the Silver Falchions will be revealed in the Tennessee capital on Saturday, August 22.

A Warm Reception for “Frozen”

Last evening brought the news that British crime novelist Elly Griffiths (aka Domenica de Rosa) has won this year’s Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year award for The Frozen People (Quercus).

Also contending for that prize were The Midnight King, by Tariq Ashkanani (Viper); The Death of Us, by Abigail Dean (Hemlock Press); Beautiful Ugly, by Alice Feeney (Pan); Clown Town, by Mick Herron (Baskerville); and Quantum of Menace, by Vaseem Khan (Zaffre).

The announcement of Griffiths’ victory was delivered on the opening night of the 2026 Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival.

Revue of Reviewers: 7-23-26

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