Friends of Mystery, a non-profit mystery organization based in Portland, Oregon, announced at their meeting on March 28 that Breakneck, by Marc Cameron (Kensington Books) is the 2024 Spotted Owl Awrd winner as the best mystery book written by the Pacific Northwest writer published in the previous year. The winning novel is the fifth one featuring Arliss Cutter, a U.S. marshal. (HT to The Gumshoe Site) Previous winners of the award include Robert Dugoni, Mike Lawson, Chelsea Cain, and more.
Left Coast Crime heads to Seattle beginning today and running through Sunday. Toastmaster Wanda M. Morris will be joined by Special Guests Megan Abbott and Robert Dugoni, along with a full lineup of panels, interviews, book signings, a silent auction, and the Lefty Awards banquet. There will also be a launch party and signing of this year's conference short story anthology, The Killing Rain.
Coming up Saturday, Apr 20 from 11am to 12pm, The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books will include the panel, "Welcome to the Underworld: Crime, Gangsters, and Hitmen." Authors scheduled to participate include Susan Straight, Gary Phillips, Lou Berney, Joe Ide, and Tod Goldberg. Later that day at 1:30, a panel on "Small Towns, Big Crimes in Noir and Crime Fiction," will include Jeffrey Fleishman, Brian Panowich, Jahmal Mayfield, and S. A. Cosby, and at 3:30, "Hell Hath No Fury: Powerful Women in Crime Fiction" will feature Amina Akhtar, Jessica Knoll, K.T. Nguyen, Karin Slaughter, and Natashia Deón. On Sunday, Barbara DeMarco-Barrett, Jordan Harper, Rachel Howzell Hall, Ivy Pochoda, and David L. Ulin will participate in "City of Fallen Angels: L.A. Noir" at 2pm, and "Crime Fiction: Series Sleuths" at 3:30 will feature Gregg Hurwitz, Eriq La Salle, Daniel Weizmann, Tracy Clark, Lee Goldberg, Seeley G. Mudd. For more details and ticket information, follow this link.
The Capital Crime conference in London coming up later this spring has a fun event scheduled for May 30th. "The Anatomy of a Crime: From Crime to Conviction" is a factual but entertainment-driven account of the timeline from crime to conviction presented by specialists in their field live on stage. Participants can experience crime scene briefings leading to a bite-size trial and have their say in whether the accused is guilty or should walk free. Participating author-actors will get to execute their real-life "day jobs" of Senior Investigating Officer, Detective, Crime Scene Investigator, Judge and Barristers. (HT to Shots Magazine)
Harrogate International Festivals has announced that Peter James will join the roster of Special Guests for the 2024 Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival taking place July 18-21. He joins authors Chris Carter, Jane Casey, Elly Griffiths, Erin Kelly, Vaseem Khan, Dorothy Koomson, Shari Lapena, Abir Mukherjee, Liz Nugent and Richard Osman in an all-star lineup curated by 2024 Festival Chair Ruth Ware. James is a globally bestselling author and the creator of the Detective Superintendent Roy Grace series, now a smash-hit ITV drama starring John Simm. James will be celebrating his milestone twentieth Roy Grace book at the Festival with an exclusive preview of One Of Us Is Dead, published by Pan Macmillan in September 2024.
Sisters in Crime New York is presenting a "License to Thrill" panel on April 17 from 6:30-8:00 pm via Zoom. Moderator (and SinC-NY Co-President) Lori Robbins will be joined by authors T. M. Dunn (Her Father's Daughter), television sports reporter turned crime fiction writer Elise Hart Kipness (Lights Out), Tim Maleeny (Cape Weathers series of mysteries), and Jodé Millman (Queen City Crimes Series). You can register in advance via the following link.
The latest adaptation (a TV series starring Sherlock's Andrew Scott) of Patricia Highsmith's Ripley books is once again generating interest in the crime author's works. The Guardian has a survey of where new readers to the author's work should begin, noting Highsmith’s skills "as an expert writer of guilt, ambivalence and moral dilemmas at odds with reality."
From the department of real-life horror and mysteries reflected in the annals of publication, Harvard announced it will remove binding made of human skin from 1800s book. The first owner of the book—a 19th-century French treatise on the human soul—took the skin from a deceased female patient without consent. After years of criticism and debate, the university announced that it had removed the binding and would be exploring options for "a final respectful disposition of these human remains." Although using human skin for book binding used to be less rare, especially among "gentlemen doctors," the practice fell out of favor in the early 20th century.
In the Q&A roundup, The Guardian spoke with Garry Disher about his sixty crime novels, surviving decades of "cultural cringe" and genre snobbery to make finally a decent sort of living, and also finding fame in his 70s; and Patricia Dunn, who writes under the pen name T.M. Dunn, chatted with Jill Amadio about her debut psychological thriller, Her Father’s Daughter.
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