Mystery Melange

The latest issue of Mystery Readers Journal: Animal Mysteries is now available to PDF subscribers, with the hardcopy out late this week. Animal fans rejoice: there are "lots of dogs and cats, but some birds, pigs, horses and insects." Three online articles you can read to whet your appetite include Watching Eagles Soar by Margaret Coel, When Wild Pigs Fly by Bill Crider and Animals In and Out of Books by Deborah Crombie.

Janet Rudolph, the editor of Mystery Readers Journal, is also the driving force behind the Mystery Fanfare blog and offers up a list of Halloween mysteries for you.

Patti Abbott posted a flash fiction challenge on her blog for stories based on Reginald Marsh paintings. The results are in, and Patti has links to all 23 stories.

If you're not familar with the magazine Yellow Mama, check out their latest issue for October with offerings from the likes of Richard Godwin and AJ Hayes. The online zine publishes cutting edge, hardboiled, horror, literary, noir and psychological/horror short stories and poems and book reviews, too. (Hat tip to Sandra Seamans.)

As Terrie Moran notes, fellow author/blogger Ed Gorman just released his latest Sam McCain novel, Bad Moon Rising. Set in a 1968 hippie commune just outside Sam’s hometown of Black River Falls, the plot involves the murder of troubled daughter of a prominent citizen with the social and moral upheavals of the day.

Another fellow writer/blogger, Nigel Bird, released a digital collection of his short stories earlier this year, titled Dirty Old Town (And Other Stories), downloadable from Smashwords and Amazon. He also has a print version available via the art house press KUBOA. If you're on Goodreads, you can enter by the end of the month to win a print copy of the collection. The giveaway celebrates the arrival of Nigel's debut novella, "Smoke", a spin off of a story included in this year's Mammoth Book Of Best British Crime.

Early bird registration is now open for both Thrillerfest and Malice Domestic conferences for 2012. For Thrillerfest, scheduled for July 11-14 in NYC, this includes the CraftFest writers workshop and AgentFest pitch sessions, as well as the regular conference with special guests Jack Higgins, R.L. Stine, Lee Child, John Sandford and Catherine Coulter. You have until December 31st to register for Malice Domestic and still get the cheapest registration rate, as well as a nomination form for the Agatha Awards. You can also register from now through January to get an early-bird discount for the Public Safety Writer's Conference held in July.

The Q&A roundup this week includes author Denise Mina (The End of the Wasp Season), who was interviewed by fellow author Kate Atkinson (Case Histories and Started Early, Took my Dog) talking about genre, character and the best place to write.

The Appalachian Prison Book Project is a program trying to rehabilitate inmates by giving them free books to read. Unfortunately, their funding was cut. The West Virginia University Department of English is accepting donations on the program's behalf, with the most requested books being dictionaries, auto repair manuals, psychology textbooks and fiction (for security purposes, all donations must be paperback).