Casey and Close Emerge Victorious

A Stranger in the Family (Hemlock Press), by Irish-born London author Jane Casey, has won the 2024 Irish Independent Crime Fiction Book of the Year prize. That announcement was made this week in Dublin during a ceremony honoring the recipients of this year’s An Post Irish Book Awards competition. Stranger is the 11th title in Casey’s series starring ambitious London police detective Maeve Kerrigan.

Competing against Casey’s novel for Crime Fiction Book of the Year were Witness 8, by Steve Cavanagh (Headline); Where They Lie, by Claire Coughlan (Simon & Schuster); Someone in the Attic, by Andrea Mara (Bantam); Somebody Knows, by Michelle McDonagh (Hachette Ireland); and When We Were Silent, by Fiona McPhillips (Bantam).

There were numerous other categories of contenders for the 2024 An Post Irish Book Awards, sponsored by Ireland’s state-owned postal service. Click here to see a full rundown.

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In other European literary news, Ajay Close’s sixth novel, What Doesn’t Kill Us (Saraband), has been selected as this year’s Scottish Fiction Book of the Year. Her tale is described as a police procedural “based on the true events of the [1970s] Yorkshire Ripper murders and the feminist arson campaign it triggered targeting porn outlets.”

Other 2024 Scottish National Book Award winners are listed here.

READ MORE: “And the Winner of the Saltire Prize Is …,” by Ajay Close (Murder Is Everywhere).