Tonight at 7pm PT (10pm ET), the Mysterious Galaxy bookstore will host a virtual panel featuring Callie Browning, Vera Chan, Tracy Clark, Christopher Chambers, and Faye Snowden, celebrating the new publication, Midnight Hour: A Chilling Anthology of Crime Fiction from 20 Authors of Color. Click here to register for this free event.
Simon Bewick and Victoria Watson, the team behind Virtual Noir at the Bar, have released tickets for their first physical event in Whitley Bay. Bay Tales Live, a one-day crime fiction festival for readers and writers, will be held at Whitley Bay Playhouse on Saturday, February 12, 2022 and will feature several successful UK crime writers, as well as introducing audience members to the brightest rising stars. The program will feature six panels with award-winning authors Louise Candlish, Vaseem Khan, Ann Cleeves, Trevor Wood, and Dr. Richard Shepherd, forensic pathologist and author of the Sunday Times bestseller, Unnatural Causes.
Award-winning crime writer, Martin Edwards, has partnered with editorial consultancy Fiction Feedback to offer a different kind of crime-writing course. Crafting Crime is aimed at serious writers who wish to study independently yet also receive a critique of their work, and will be accessed online with modules mainly drawn from Martin’s extensive experience of conducting writing workshops. The modules will also include podcasts with Dea Parkin, Editor-in-chief at Fiction Feedback and Secretary of the Crime Writers’ Association, as well as tips from crime writers such as Elly Griffiths, Michael Robotham, Steve Cavanagh, Hank Phillippi Ryan, and Soji Shimada.
The Writers’ Police Academy announced that the 2022 Guest of Honor is to be bestselling author Robert Dugoni, creator of the Tracy Crosswhite police series set in Seattle. He is also the author of The Charles Jenkins espionage series, the David Sloane legal thriller series, and several stand-alone novels. The Special Guest Speaker for next year's event will be Steven Spingola, known to his colleagues as "the sleuth with the proof" and an investigator for Cold Justice, a popular Oxygen Channel true crime program.
News from The Rap Sheet alerts us to a change in the Spencer "universe." Spencer is the wisecracking Boston private eye introduced in 1973’s The Godwulf Manuscript by Robert B. Parker, a series continued after the author's death by Ace Atkins. Atkins announced recently that he's putting aside his Spencer pen to work on his own works, including his series about Mississippi sheriff Quinn Colson. The Spencer books will continue via sportswriter and novelist Mike Lupica, who has already written books featuring one of Parker's other protagonists, the small-town police chief Jesse Stone, as well as another of Parker's characters, the gumshoe Sunny Randall. However, the Sunny Randall series is also getting a change: author Alison Gaylin has been tapped to write a new installment, becoming the first woman to take over a Robert Parker series.
CrimeReads featured an online African Crime Fiction Round Table with authors chatting about their books, what it means to be an "African" crime writer, and indeed whether such a thing should bear a label. The participants also discussed cultural influences and who they write for, and offered some reading recommendations.
The UK's Richard & Judy Book Club announced their picks for this winter, with all the choices written by women. Among those included are Lisa Jewell's psychological thriller, The Night She Disappeared; Karin Slaughter's False Witness; Tana French's The Searcher; and Laura Dave’s The Last Thing He Told Me. WH Smith stores will also make exclusive special editions of the book club titles with bonus content available for purchase.
Writing for The Guardian, S.J. Bennett compiled a listing of Top 10 cozy crime novels. From Agatha Christie to Richard Osman, "these books are not without seriousness but they are all set in warm and human worlds we might prefer to our own."
Bookstores help save the world (again): A bookstore is helping Mosul recover from three years under ISIS. The Mosul Book Forum, which offers concerts and events along with books, opened three months after the city was liberated. Said cofounder Fahad Sabah, "If we have to rebuild our city, we need to rebuild our minds as well as our buildings and streets."
After being sidetracked for 46 years, the famed Orient Express railway, featured in the iconic Agatha Christie novel and subsequent movie adaptations, will return to Italy in 2023 with 6 luxurious new routes.
This week's crime poem at the 5-2 is "Thankful to Survive" by Joseph B. Haggery, Sr.
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