Shortlist for the Ned Kelly Awards

Poisoned Pen Press author Sulari Gentill continues to appear on award lists in Australia. Her novel, Crossing the Lines, is still on the shortlist for the Ned Kelly Awards. You can order Crossing the Lines, and Gentill’s other novels through the Web Store.  https://bit.ly/2N5KsYB

Crossing the Lines

The Australian Crime Writers Association just announced the shortlists for the 21st Ned Kelly Awards for Crime Fiction. The Ned Kelly Awards celebrate the best in Australian crime fiction and true crime. The shortlists have been drawn from over seventy five entries across three award categories.

Six exceptional crime novels made it onto the shortlist of the the Best Crime Fiction Award. The list includes multiple Ned Kelly Award winners Garry Disher and Candice Fox as well as newcomers to the shortlist. The shortlist includes:

  • Marlborough Man by Alan Carter
  • Under Cold Bright Lights by Garry Disher
  • Redemption Point by Candice Fox
  • Crossing the Lines by Sulari Gentill
  • The Lone Child by Anna George
  • The Student by Iain Ryan

There are two other categories of Ned Kelly Awards.

The shortlist for the Best Debut Crime has four entries from writers who are already being widely recognized for their contribution to the genre:

  • Wimmera by Mark Brandi
  • The Dark Lake by Sarah Bailey
  • The Girl in Kellers Way by Megan Goldin
  • See What I Have Done by Sarah Schmidt

The Best True Crime shortlist is a mix of academic, adventure, historic and courtroom stories:

  • The Contractor by Mark Abernethy
  • Unmaking a Murder: The Mysterious Death of Anna-Jane Cheney by Graham Archer
  • The Suitcase Baby by Tanya Bretherton
  • The Fatalist by Campbell McConachie
  • Whiteley on Trial by Gabriella Coslovich

The winners will be announced during the Melbourne Writers Festival with the awards ceremony on August 26th.

*****

Congratulations to Sulari Gentill for making the shortlist for the Ned Kelly Awards. Here’s the description of Gentill’s Crossing the Lines.

“As one for whom certain story lines and characters have become as real as life itself, Crossing the Lines was a pure delight, a swift yet psychologically complex read, cleverly conceived and brilliantly executed.” –Dean Koontz, New York Times Bestselling author

Sulari Gentill, author of the 1930s Rowland Sinclair Mysteries, jumps to the post-modern in Crossing the Lines.

A successful writer, Madeleine, creates a character, Edward, and begins to imagine his life. He, too, is an author. Edward is in love with a woman, Willow, who’s married to a man Edward loathes, and who loathes him, but he and Willow stay close friends. She’s an artist. As Madeleine develops the plot, Edward attends a gallery show where a scummy critic is flung down a flight of fire stairs…murdered. Madeleine, still stressed from her miscarriages and grieving her inability to have a child, grows more and more enamored of Edward, spending more and more time with him and the progress of the investigation and less with her physician husband, Hugh, who in turn may be developing secrets of his own.

As Madeline engages more with Edward, he begins to engage back. A crisis comes when Madeleine chooses the killer in Edward’s story and Hugh begins to question her immersion in her novel. Yet Crossing the Lines is not about collecting clues and solving crimes. Rather it’s about the process of creation, a gradual undermining of the authority of the author as the act of writing spirals away and merges with the story being told, a self-referring narrative crossing over boundaries leaving in question who to trust, and who and what is true.

For fans of Paul Auster, Jesse Kellerman, Vera Caspary’s Laura, Martin Amis, Haruki Murakami, Marisha Pessl.