The bidding for items in the Crime Writers for Trans Rights 2025 auction opened yesterday and continues through April 1. You can bid on a wonderful range of items, including from some of the most celebrated voices in crime and crime-adjacent fiction, with all proceeds given to the Transgender Law Center to help further their important work. Items include everything from a manuscript critique by William Kent Krueger, to various signed books and book club appearances by bestselling authors, to conference admissions, and much more.
CrimeFest has announced DG Coutinho as the recipient of its 2025 bursary for a crime-fiction writer of color. The bursary covers the cost of a full Weekend Pass to the convention and a night’s accommodation at the Mercure Bristol Grand Hotel, plus Coutinho will appear on a panel at the conference. Coutinho has also won the Bloody Scotland Harvill Secker Crime Writing Competition for under-represented writers, and is the author of The Light and Shade of Ellen Swithin (Harvill Secker), a darkly comic thriller exploring toxic work culture. Last year, the organizers announced that this year’s convention will be the last to be hosted in Bristol after 16 years, and will feature a lineup of authors including Lee and Andrew Child, Simon Brett, Lindsey Davis and Martin Edwards, among others.
To mark the end of Britain’s long-standing crime fiction convention, CrimeFest organizers have compiled a new anthology, with proceeds of its sale going the Royal National Institute of Blind (RNIB) library. CrimeFest: Leaving the Scene will feature short stories by authors who have had a close relationship with CrimeFest over the years, including Jeffrey Deaver, Lindsey Davis, Simon Brett, Martin Edwards, Cathy Ace, Vaseem Khan, Maxim Jakubowski, and Donna Moore. The foreword is by Lee Child, who attended the very first convention and was a Featured Guest at the fifth and tenth anniversaries of CrimeFest. The book will be available for general sale on August 28, 2025, with an early copy exclusively gifted to each of the first 450 registered Full Pass Holders at the final CrimeFest, which is hosted in Bristol from May 15 to 18.
The Broward, Florida Public Library Foundation is holding the LitLive! event in the Horvitz Auditorium at the NSU Art Museum on Friday, March 28 from 5:30-8:30 pm. A mystery panel will be moderated by Oline Cogdill and feature authors Jeffery Deaver (Fatal Intrusion), Wanda M. Morris (What You Leave Behind), Alex Segura (Alter Ego), and Lauren Willig (The Girl from Greenwich Street). The event is free and open to the public, with a percentage of all book sales benefiting the Library Foundation.
The Avon Public Library is hosting a "Murder, Mayhem, and Mystery" writers panel on Tuesday April 8th at 6:30 pm to celebrate National Library Week. Authors Sarah P Blanchard, Addison McKnight (Nicole Moleti and Krista Wells), Glen Ebisch, and Chris Knopf will discuss here their ideas come from, how they plot the twists and turns, and how they develop their characters.
Over at the Rap Sheet, Jeff Pierce has a handy list of some new crime fiction titles being released in March and April in the U.S. and UK.
In April 2015, B.K. Stevens debuted the blog series "The First Two Pages," hosting craft essays by short story writers and novelists analyzing the openings of their own work. Art Taylor has continued the series on his blog following the death of Stevens, with the latest essay featuring Fleur Bradley. The author, who has published several novels for younger readers, including Midnight at the Barclay Hotel and Daybreak on Raven Island, discusses her new story, "Sunday in the Park with George," for the anthology, Every Day A Little Death: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Songs of Stephen Sondheim, edited by Josh Pachter.
In the Q&A roundup, Andrew Welsh-Huggins, author of 10 mystery novels and two nonfiction books and editor of a short-story anthology, applied the Page 69 Test to his latest novel, The Mailman, a Library Journal pick of the month; and Crime Fiction Lover welcomed Fiona Forsyth to discuss historical crime fiction and her latest novel, Death and the Poet, in we slip back to 14AD to meet the Roman poet Ovid who is tasked with solving the murder of Dokimos, the vegetable seller.
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