Dusting for Fingerprints

(Above) Adele Parks picked up the Audiobook of the Year honor for her 2022 thriller, One Last Secret.

By Fraser Massey
Delighted crime-fiction fans and avid literary festivalists in London, England, learned last week that they won’t have to wait another whole year for the next Capital Crime three-day extravaganza. The festival’s co-founder, David Headley, announced that Capital Crime 2024 will take place in just eight months, from May 30 to June 1.

He made his declaration amid the presentation of the Fingerprint Awards on August 29, the opening night of Capital Crime 2023. After all of those prizes had been handed out, festival director Lizzie Curle revealed that the scheduling move from the fall to the spring next year was “all down to a certain Mr. Osman.”

This year’s festival, and the dates on which it has been held in the past, were timed to be close to “Super Thursday,” the traditional day each September when the bulk of new books from all genres are published in the UK to get them into the shops in plenty of time for Christmas gift-buying.

But the demand in recent Super Thursdays for each new mystery by British TV quizmaster-turned-mystery-novelist Richard Osman (The Thursday Murder Club, The Last Devil to Die, etc.) has reached such a pitch that interest in other crime-fiction titles has suffered by comparison. “The publishing industry responded to this by bringing out their books earlier in the year,” explained Curle. With authors and their publishers preferring to promote their latest works at a time when they’ve freshly arrived in bookshops, she added, it made sense for the Capital Crime organizers to bring forward next year’s event.

(Right) British mystery-fiction publishing heavyweight Richard Osman.

One benefit of this change will be that authors and readers will no longer have to choose between going to Bouchercon or Capital Crime, as they did this year. Elly Griffiths was among the new crop of Fingerprint Award recipients who couldn’t be there in person to pick up her Capital Crime trophy. She’d decided to go to Bouchercon instead, and was in San Diego when she discovered that Bleeding Heart Yard had been chosen as Crime Book of the Year in London.

In a message read out by her UK publisher Jane Wood—herself one of the ceremony’s award winners—Griffiths said she was particularly proud to have scored the Capital Crime commendation, as Bleeding Heart Yard is her only novel set in the UK’s capital.

This year’s Fingerprint Awards were broken down into eight categories.

Crime Book of the Year:
Bleeding Heart Yard, by Elly Griffiths (Mariner)

Also nominated: The Botanist, by M.W. Craven (Constable); The It Girl, by Ruth Ware (Gallery/Scout Press); The Family Remains, by Lisa Jewell (Atria); and The Twist of a Knife, by Anthony Horowitz (Harper)

Thriller Book of the Year:
Wrong Place Wrong Time, by Gillian McAllister (Morrow)

Also nominated: Like a Sister, by Kellye Garrett (Mulholland); Do No Harm, by Jack Jordan (Simon & Schuster); Truly Darkly Deeply, by Victoria Selman (Union Square); and A Good Day to Die, by Amen Alonge (Quercus)

Historical Book of the Year:
A Fatal Crossing, by Tom Hindle (Penguin)

Also nominated: The Lost Man of Bombay, by Vaseem Khan (Hodder); The Clockwork Girl, by Anna Mazzola (Hachette); Miss Aldridge Regrets, by Louise Hare (Berkley); and Shrines of Gaiety, by Kate Atkinson (Anchor)

Genre-Busting Book of the Year:
The Skeleton Key, by Erin Kelly (Mobius)

Also nominated: The House of Ashes, by Stuart Neville (Soho Crime); The Cartographers, by Peng Shepherd (Morrow); Wild and Wicked Things, by Francesca May (Redhook); and Suicide Thursday, by Will Carver (Orenda)

Debut Book of the Year:
The Maid, by Nita Prose (Ballantine)

Also nominated: Wahala, by Nikki May (Mariner); That Green-Eyed Girl, by Julie Owen-Moylan (Penguin); A Fatal Crossing, by Tom Hindle (Penguin); and Death and the Conjuror, by Tom Mead (Mysterious Press)

Audiobook of the Year:
One Last Secret, by Adele Parks, narrated by Kristin Atherton (Harlequin Audio)

Also nominated: The Ink Black Heart, by Robert Galbraith, narrated by Robert Glenister (Mulholland); The Skeleton Key, by Erin Kelly, narrated by Helen Keeley (Hodder & Stoughton); The Twyford Code, by Janice Hallett; narrated by Thomas Judd (Simon and Schuster Audio); and Better the Blood, by Michael Bennett, narrated by Miriama McDowell and Richard Te Are (Recorded Books)

The Thalia Proctor Lifetime Achievement Award:
Jane Wood, fiction publisher at Quercus

Publishing Campaign of the Year 2023:
Viking Books UK for The Bullet that Missed, by Richard Osman