Passing the Word Around

• Yesterday brought news that The Clues in the Fjord, by Finnish author Satu Rämö, has won the 2025 Petrona Award for Best Scandinavian Crime Novel of the Year. That book, which judges described as “a sophisticated and atmospheric police procedural with a pleasingly unpredictable dark and twisty plot,” was translated by Kristian London and published in Britain by Zaffre. Also nominated for the Petrona were Dead Island, by Samuel Bjørk, translated by Charlotte Barslund (Norway, Bantam); The Widows, by Pascal Engman, translated by Neil Smith (Sweden, Legend Press); Deliver Me, by Malin Persson Giolito, translated by Rachel Willson-Broyles (Sweden, Simon & Schuster UK); The Dancer, by Óskar Guðmundsson, translated by Quentin Bates (Iceland, Corylus); The Sea Cemetery, by Aslak Nore, translated by Deborah Dawkin (Norway, MacLehose Press); and Pursued by Death, by Gunnar Staalesen, translated by Don Bartlett (Norway, Orenda). Incidentally, the annual Petrona Award memorializes Maxine Clarke, the British editor, crime-fiction blogger, and “champion of Scandinavian crime fiction” who passed away in December 2012 (Petrona was the name of her long-running blog).

• And so it begins—the annual roll out of “best books of the year” lists. First up comes Publishers Weekly, which today revealed its dozen favorite mystery and thriller novels of 2025:

— Cape Fever, by Nadia Davids (Simon & Schuster)
— Crooks, by Lou Berney (Morrow)
— The Doorman, by Chris Pavone (MCD)
— Fever Beach, by Carl Hiaasen (Knopf)
— The Human Scale, by Lawrence Wright (Knopf)
— Listen, by Sacha Bronwasser (Viking)
— A Murder in Paris, by Matthew Blake (Harper)
— Saint of the Narrows Street, by William Boyle (Soho Crime)
— Salt Bones, by Jennifer Givhan (Little, Brown)
— The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne, by Ron Currie (Putnam)
— We Don’t Talk About Carol, by Kristen L. Berry (Bantam)
— Your Steps on the Stairs, by Antonio Muñoz Molina (Other Press)

I have read only a few of those, but own a couple more that I should probably now move up in my TBR stack.

• Variety reports that BAFTA nominee John Hannah (The Last of Us, Rebus, Four Weddings and a Funeral) will lead a new, Death in Paradise-like detective drama titled Death in Benidorm, expected to debut next year on the Paramount Skydance-owned UK network Channel 5. This six-part series finds Hannah playing Dennis Crown, “a former detective trying to escape his past who swaps the chaos of the UK for a quieter life running a bar in Benidorm [on Spain’s Mediterranean coast]. But when tourists start turning up dead, he’s reluctantly drawn back into detective work — egged on by his barmaid Rosa, a crime drama superfan. … [W]ith Dennis’ real-world experience and Rosa’s encyclopaedic TV knowledge, ‘each episode sees the duo tackling a new murder in paradise, whilst trying to remain on the right side of the local Spanish cops.’” Spanish actress Carolina Bécquer (8 años, On/Off) has the role of Rose, with Ariadna Cabrol Damian Schedler Cruz also helping to fill out the cast.

• Speaking of television, I’m currently watching Season 2 of Keri Russell’s political thriller The Diplomat on Netflix, and will soon sign up for BritBox in order to see the six-episode third season of Kris Marshall’s Beyond Paradise. But I’m looking forward as well to the Season 2 premiere—on Thursday, November 20—of A Man on the Inside. You’ll recall that it stars Cheers alumnus Ted Danson as Charles Nieuwendyk, a retired and widowed college engineering professor who works undercover for a San Francisco private investigator. The opening season of this half-hour Netflix comedy-drama found Nieuwendyk trying to solve mysteries at an assisted-living facility on Nob Hill. The latest batch of eight episodes will send him to probe dubious doings on a college campus. Danson’s real-life wife of three decades, Mary Steenburgen, is among the guest stars we will see this time around.

• I’d never heard of M.M. Bodkin’s Victorian “lady detective,” Dora Myrl, until Olivia Rutigliano wrote about her in CrimeReads.

• The location for Left Coast Crime 2027 has been chosen, and it’s … Santa Fe, New Mexico, which last hosted that convention in 2011.

• With Halloween coming right up, on Friday, October 31, I’ve noticed some new attention being paid to American artist Edward Gorey, famous for his oft-macabre pen-and-ink illustrations. Clues magazine editor Elizabeth Foxwell recently posted in her blog about visiting the Edward Gorey House in Yarmouth Port, Massachusetts, which she says a docent quipped was “the house that Dracula built.” Meanwhile, Ohio’s Ironton Gazette notes that Gorey, who died back in 2000 at age 75, had his ashes interred in that southern Ohio town’s Woodland Cemetery (near his maternal ancestors), but only recently has the gravesite been given “its first proper marker.” The white, two-part headstone features an appropriate quote, taken from Gorey’s 1969 surrealist country-house mystery, The Iron Tonic: Or, A Winter Afternoon in Lonely Valley: “The monuments above the dead / Are too eroded to be read.”