Stav Sherez has won the 2018 Theakston Old Peculier award for crime fiction with his novel, The Intrusions. The book, a 2017 Guardian and Sunday Times book of the year, was dubbed "A Silence of the Lambs for the internet age" by Ian Rankin. Now in its fourteenth year, the award is considered one of the most coveted crime writing prizes in the UK. (HT to Ayo Onatade at Shots Magazine)
Also announced during the Theakston conference were the 2018 Dead Good Reader Awards, sponsored annually by the British crime-fiction book site Dead Good. The Holmes and Watson Award for Best Detective Duo went to Ruth Galloway and Harry Nelson, created by Elly Griffiths; The Whodunnit Award for the Book That Keeps You Guessing went to the novel Let Me Lie, by Clare Mackintosh; The Cabot Cove Award for Best Small-Town Mystery: The Chalk Man, by C.J. Tudor; The Wringer Award for the Character Who’s Been Put Through It All: Jack Reacher, created by Lee Child; The House of Horrors Award for Most Dysfunctional Family: Then She Was Gone, by Lisa Jewell; and The Dead Good Recommends Award for Most Recommended Book: The Dark Angel, by Elly Griffiths
Cynthia E. Tobisman has won the 2018 Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction for her second published novel, Proof. The Harper Lee Prize is awarded by the ABA Journal and the University of Alabama School of Law each year to a novel-length work of fiction that best that best illuminates the role of lawyers in society and their power to effect change.
The Crime Writers Association (CWA) Dagger shortlists were announced last evening. It was already announced in March that Michael Connelly was to receive the 2018 CWA Diamond Dagger, the highest honor in British crime writing. The Gold Dagger for best crime novel of the year finalists include The Liar, by Steve Cavanagh; London Rules, by Mick Herron; Since We Fell, by Dennis Lehane; Bluebird, Bluebird, by Attica Locke; A Necessary Evil, by Abir Mukherjee; and Resurrection Bay, by Emma Viskic. For all the other categories, head over to the CWA Dagger information page.
The winners of the 2018 RITA Awards included The Fixer by HelenKay Dimon in the Romantic Suspense category. For the list of all of the finalists in that category (as well as the other romance categories), follow this link to the official Romantic Writers Association website.
The Vermont Historical Society will present Claire Meldrum with the Weston A. Cate Fellowship award for her research project Anna Katharine Green: A Biography. Meldrum’s book is a biography about nineteenth century American detective fiction author, Anna Katharine Green, a seminal figure in American crime fiction, whose books helped give shape to the genre during its formative decades.
The Naoki Prize for popular fiction in Japan has been awarded to writer Rio Shimamoto for First Love, a mystery novel centering on a female university student arrested for allegedly killing her father.
A panel on "Crime Science versus Crime Fiction: exploding the myths" is scheduled for August 30 at the Royal Society in London. The event will explore how closely crime fiction mirrors the realities of police investigation and how far modern science is able to help in the fight to reduce and prevent crime. Jointly organized by one of the world's top crime research departments, UCL Jill Dando Institute, and one of the world's foremost crime writers' organizations, the Crime Writers Association, the panel will include authors Val McDermid, Elly Griffiths, Barry Forshaw, Vaseem Khan (who also works at works at UCL's Department of Security and Crime Science), Imran Mahmood (who is also a barrister), and professors Ruth Morgan and Richard Wortley.
The noir comic book series Lodger is set to debut in October as IDW Publishing’s Black Crown imprint — created and headed by former DC Vertigo executive editor Shelly Bond — is expanding with the brand-new series from the creators of the critically acclaimed crime comic Stray Bullet.
Although I missed National and International Private Investigator Day on July 24, the Writing PIs blog (headed up by Colleen Collins and Shaun Kaufman), offered a brief "History of the Private Eye."
More news from the world of forensics: Could brain scans determine guilt or innocence in court? Lie detection using a functional MRI machine, which measures and creates an image of brain activity, is a topic of controversy among legal and neuroscience experts and has yet to land on the courtroom floor.
In honor of the recent 130th anniversary of Raymond Chandler’s birth, Anthony Dean Rizzuto tells us about "Eight Things You Didn’t Know About Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep."
If you're still searching for a book that's as gripping as Gone Girl, Cosmopolitan tapped Catriona Harvey-Jenner and Dusty Baxter-Wright to choose 26 of the best psychological thriller books to add to your reading list.
An oak tree in Devon that provided shade for the crime writer Agatha Christie when she watched and scored cricket matches has collapsed in the heatwave there. Known locally as the Agatha Christie Oak, the tree had become a site of pilgrimage for the author’s fans and was used by the Barton Cricket Club as its badge logo.
Atlas Obscura solicited readers to send in some of the best marginalia from used books they'd ever found. The results were fun and surprising, such as the note written next to "The Greek Interpreter" from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle that said simply, "difficult and boring."
The latest poem at the 5-2 crime poetry weekly is "1956 Packard (Nebraska)" by Ken Meisel.
In the Q&A roundup, Crimespree interviewed Linda Castillo about the tenth book in her series featuring Painter Mills police chief Kate Buckholder; Karin Slaughter, whose thriller Pieces of Her will be published in August, took the "By the Book" interview challenge for the New York Times; and the Mystery People chatted with Rob Hart about the latest in his series featuring unlicensed private detective Ash McKenna, Potter's Field.
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