The Writers’ Police Academy announced the winners of the 2021 Golden Donut Short Story Contest. The contest rules were simple, write a complete story about a given photo using exactly 200 words. The top prize went to "Fortune Coveted" by Tiffany Seitz; Second Place to "The Homecoming" by Nana Herron; Third Place to "The Writ" by Michael Rigg; and Honorable Mention to "Farewell" by Bobbi Blake.
John Murray’s new literary crime and thriller imprint, Baskerville, is launching with a line-up of authors including Mick Herron, who will bring the Slough House series as well as his standalone writing under the genre-specific imprint. Comedian Frankie Boyle’s crime novel, Meantime, will also be published on the list in July, with other major notable 2022 titles to include Kaoru Takamura’s Japanese cult classic, Lady Joker, due in February. The imprint will also reissue American author Charlotte Carter’s 1990s mystery trilogy starring Nanette Hayes, a young Black American jazz musician with a lust for life and a talent for crime-solving, as well as international bestseller 1794: The City Between Bridges by Niklas Natt Och Dag, set in historic Stockholm.
The Dark City Mystery Magazine is out with its first edition of 2022, featuring a campus playboy who meets two attractive young women wanting to play a game of cutthroat; an ex-Marine on a final mission; a Vietnam Veteran who explores the ins and outs of the drug trade; a drunken former cop who tries to get out of being charged with murder; and a former criminal who explains why crime didn't pay well enough for him. These stories and more from Joseph S. Walker, Tom Hallman Jr., Tom Larsen, Bill Connor, and Edgar Souse.
A cold case team believes it has solved the mystery of who may have betrayed Anne Frank. The team combed through evidence for five years in a bid to unravel one of World War II's enduring mysteries, reaching what they call the "most likely scenario" of who betrayed Jewish teenage diarist Anne Frank and her family. However, some historians are not convinced.
Although one recent survey via Gallup showed that Americans are reading two or three fewer books per year than they did between 2001 and 2016, it's not all bad news. A new study by Pew Research shows that overall, 75% of U.S. adults say they have read a book in the past 12 months in any format, whether completely or part way through, a figure that has remained largely unchanged since 2011. Although 65% of adults saying that they have read a print book in the past year, there's been a rise in ebook and audiobook consumers in the past two years. Plus, across the Atlantic, UK book sales in 2021 reached their highest in a decade, driven by booming appetites for crime, sc-fi, and romance.
Wondering what the basic mystery plots are? Bookriot's Jamie Canaves spells it out for you.
This week's crime poem at the 5-2 weekly is is "Pre-cious" by Angela Griner.
In the Q&A roundup, CrimeReads posted a recent interview between Nancie Clare and author T. Jefferson Parker that included a discussion of his crime fiction writing in general and his latest novel, A Thousand Steps in particular; and the Kill Zone blog spoke with Blackstone Publishing’s Rick Bleiweiss about how the company lured heavy hitters Meg Gardiner, Steve Hamilton, and Reed Farrel Coleman away from Penguin Random House and also about Bleiweiss's own writing.
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