Sisters in Crime (SinC) announced the winner of the 2022 Pride Award for emerging LGBTQIA+ writers is Sarah St. Asaph of London, England. Her winning novel-in-progress is a contemporary medical-legal crime mystery where a young lawyer is given the chance to re-examine the evidence against a former hospital doctor that has been convicted as Britain’s worst ever female serial killer. The novel explores how women are treated within the criminal justice system and plays with the prejudices and preconceptions they face as perpetrators of crimes. The five runners-up, who will also be paired with an established Sisters in Crime member author to receive a manuscript critique, include C. Jean Downer, Diane Carmony, Roy Udeh-Ubaka, Marle Redfern, and Elaine Westnott-O’Brien.
Southern Independent Booksellers (SIBA) have selected the finalists for the 2023 Southern Book Prize, representing bookseller favorites from 2022 that are about the South or by a Southern writer. One of the titles included on that list is The Violin Conspiracy by Brendan Slocumb, a conspiracy thriller about a Black classical musician on the rise—undeterred by the pressure and prejudice of the classical music world—when a shocking theft sends him on a desperate quest to recover his great-great-grandfather’s heirloom violin on the eve of the most prestigious musical competition in the world. Winners will announced on February 14, Valentine’s Day after popular vote (participating bookstores promote the ballot to their customers, and submitted ballots are entered into a raffle to win a set of the finalist titles).
The 2022 Petrona Award Best Scandinavian Crime Novel of the Year celebrates crime fiction from Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden translated into English and published in the UK in the previous calendar year. Due to the increased number of qualifying entries, the award, which is now in its tenth year, is for the first time releasing a longlist of twelve titles that will be whittled down to a shortlist announced on November 16. The longlist contains a number of new faces as well as Petrona Award-winning authors, Jørn Lier Horst and Antti Tuomanen, and the previously shortlisted Kjell Ola Dahl and Thomas Enger. You can see all the 2022 longlisted titles via this link.
The Crime Fiction Lover website polled readers to help choose nominations for their second annual Crime Fiction Lover Awards and have posted the finalists in the categories of Best Crime Novel, Best Debut Crime Novel, Best Indie Crime Novel, Best Crime Novel in Translation, Best Crime Show, and Best Crime Author. Readers can vote for their favorites via this link through November 30.
After launching a successful writers conference in May, Maple Leaf Mystery is back with a virtual mini-event on December 3, headlined by authors Brenda Chapman, Ron Corbett, Vicki Delany, Mary Jane Mafini, Mike Martin, and Rick Mofina, along with other Canadian mystery authors. Panel topics will include Short Stories, Police Procedurals, Suspense, Light-Mysteries, and more. You can register here and look for teasers, author bios, and updates on Facebook.
Many aspects of in-person literary conferences benefit authors and fans alike, but virtual events have the edge when it comes to inclusivity and cost. I have to admit, I'm much more likely to attend a virtual than in-person event these days, something many of us got used to during the Zoom-Covid era. Washington Post Book Club editor, Ron Charles, noted there's a new app called Booky Call (that presents books with saucy profiles you can swipe left or right to make discovering your next book as fun as finding your next Tinder hookup). To celebrate their one-year anniversary, Booky Call is launching BookyCon, a virtual book festival on November 12 where 3,000+ participants can login and be taken to a 3D art deco auditorium to join author presentations including the Mystery/Thriller stage. As Charles added, the software platform "looks infinitely adaptable and could radically improve any online event that involves multiple speakers and could be useful for other virtual book events."
Fans of spy thrillers and everything "spy," take note: until recently, the CIA Museum was one of the most mysterious collections of artifacts in the world, with access restricted to CIA officers and approved officials. But that's about to change, sort of, as curators begin to digitize the 3,500 objects in the museum collection and offer up digital access for the public in a virtual museum marking the agency’s 75th anniversary.
This week's crime poem at the 5-2 weekly is "Aldebaron: Widows" by S.B. Watson.
In the Q&A roundup, Author Interviews chatted with Lisa Unger, an internationally bestselling author and Edgar Award nominee, about her latest novel, Secluded Cabin Sleeps Six; Crime Fiction Lover spoke with Icelandic author, Jónína Leosdóttir, about her crime novel, Deceit, her 20th book but the first to be translated into English; Deborah Kalb interviewed D.M. Rowell, who hails from a family of Kiowa storytellers, about her new mystery novel, Never Name the Dead; Writers Who Kill snagged Christin Brecher to discuss Photo Finished, the first book in the new Snapshot of NYC Mystery series; and CrimeReads got a jump on the holidays by putting together a roundtable of authors to discuss Christmas mysteries.
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