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

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.

The Crime Writers’ Association (CWA) recently announced the shortlists for the prestigious annual Dagger awards for crime writing. The Crime Writers’ Association had announced earlier that Michael Connelly is to receive the 2018 CWA Diamond Dagger, the highest honor in British crime writing. The Dagger award recognizes authors whose crime writing careers have been marked by sustained excellence, and who have made a significant contribution to the genre.

Here are the shortlists for the other Dagger awards. The winners of the CWA Daggers will be announced at the Dagger Awards dinner in London on October 25. This gives you plenty of time to read nominated books. Don’t forget to look for these titles in the Web Store!  https://store.poisonedpen.com/

THE GOLD DAGGER

The Gold Dagger is awarded to the best crime novel of the year.

The CWA Gold Dagger 2018 Shortlist

Author                                                       Title

Steve Cavanagh                                        The Liar

Mick Herron                                              London Rules

Dennis Lehane                                          Since We Fell

Attica Locke                                               Bluebird, Bluebird

Abir Mukherjee                                        A Necessary Evil

Emma Viskic                                             Resurrection Bay

THE CWA IAN FLEMING STEEL DAGGER

Emily Koch                                                If I Die Before I Wake

Attica Locke                                              Bluebird, Bluebird

Colette McBeth                                         An Act of Silence

CJ Tudor                                                    The Chalk Man

Don Winslow                                           The Force

THE CWA JOHN CREASEY (NEW BLOOD) DAGGER

William Boyle                                          Gravesend

Joe Ide                                                        I.Q.

Danya Kukafka                                        Girl in Snow

Melissa Scrivner Love                            Lola

Khurrum Rahman                                  East of Hounslow

Emma Viskic                                            Resurrection Bay

THE CWA ALCS GOLD DAGGER FOR NON-FICTION

Piu Eatwell                                               Black Dahlia Red Rose

David Grann                                            Killers of the Flower Moon

Thomas Harding                                     Blood on the Page

Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich          The Fact of a Body

Christian Miller & Ken Armstrong      A False Report

Laura Thompson                                    Rex V Edith Thompson

THE CWA HISTORICAL DAGGER

Abir Mukherjee                                      A Necessary Evil

L. C. Tyler                                                 Fire

Thomas Mullen                                      Lightning Men

Ngaio Marsh & Stella Duffy                 Money in the Morgue

Nicola Upson                                          Nine Lessons

Rory Clements                                        Nucleus

THE CWA INTERNATIONAL DAGGER

Author, Translator                             Title

Oliver Bottini, tr Jamie Bulloch          Zen and the Art of Murder

Pierre Lemaitre, tr France Wynne     Three Days and a Life

Henning Mankell, tr Marlaine Delargy       After the Fire

Jon Michelet, tr Don Bartlett                The Frozen Woman

Dolores Redondo, tr Nick Caistor & Lorenza Garzia         Offering to the Storm

Fred Vargas, tr Sian Reynolds              The Accordionist

THE CWA SHORT STORY DAGGER

“The Last Siege of Bothwell Castle” by Chris Brookmyre      Bloody Scotland

“Second Son” by Lee Child                                                           No Middle Name: The Complete Collected Jack Reacher Stories

“Smoking Kills” by Erin Kelly                                                      “The Body” Killer Women Crime Club Anthology 2

“Nemo Me Impune Lacessit” by Denise Mina                          Bloody Scotland

“Accounting for Murder” by Christine Poulson                       Mystery Tour: CWA Anthology of Short Stories

THE CWA DAGGER IN THE LIBRARY

Nominated by libraries.

Martin Edwards

Nicci French

Edward Marston

Peter May

Rebecca Tope

Simon Kernick

THE CWA DEBUT DAGGER

 For the opening of a crime novel from a writer without a traditional publishing contract.

The Eternal Life of Ezra Ben Simeon by Bill Crotty

Riverine Blood by Joseph James

Original Sins by Linda McLaughlin

Trust Me, I’m Dead by Sherryl Clark

Flynn Berry’s novel, A Double Life, is the current Hot Book of the Week at the Poisoned Pen. Berry appears at the Poisoned Pen on Tuesday, July 31 at 7 PM, but, if you can’t make it, you can still order a signed copy of A Double Life through the Web Store. https://bit.ly/2v2409L

If you’d like to read a review of the book, Karen Valby wrote one for The New York Times. https://nyti.ms/2mwXWkA

Here’s the summary of A Double Life, as it appears in the Web Store.

“A thrilling page-turner.” —Paula Hawkins, author of The Girl on the Train

A gripping, intense, stunningly written novel of psychological suspense from the award-winning author of Under the Harrow

Claire is a hardworking doctor leading a simple, quiet life in London. She is also the daughter of the most notorious murder suspect in the country, though no one knows it.

Nearly thirty years ago, while Claire and her brother slept upstairs, a brutal crime was committed in her family’s townhouse. The next morning, her father’s car was found abandoned near the English Channel, with bloodstains on the front seat. Her mother insisted she’d seen him in the house that night, but his powerful, privileged friends maintained his innocence. The first lord accused of murder in more than a century, he has been missing ever since.

When the police tell Claire they’ve found him, her carefully calibrated existence begins to fracture. She doesn’t know if she’s the daughter of a murderer or a wronged man, but Claire will soon learn how far she’ll go to finally find the truth.

Loosely inspired by one of the most notorious unsolved crimes of the 20th century ““ the Lord Lucan case ““ A Double Life is at once a riveting page-turner and a moving reflection on women and violence, trauma and memory, and class and privilege.

Named a Must-Read Book of the Summer by O Magazine, BBC, CrimeReads, and PureWow

It’s a special ticketed Pop Up Event at the Poisoned Pen on Friday, August 10 at 7 PM. Susanna Kearsley signs Bellewether, while Diana Gabaldon will host and sign her Introduction to The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta, The Celebrated California Bandit, as well as her collection of Outlander short fiction, Seven Stones to Stand or Fall.

Here are the details.

Friday, August 10, 7:00 PM

Location: The Poisoned Pen

Tickets Required ($20 each)

Purchase them by calling the store ““ 480 947 2974 or 888 560 9919 

Are you familiar with the Miss Fisher mysteries written by Kerry Greenwood? The books, set in Australia in the 1920s, are published by Poisoned Pen Press. You can order them through the Web Store. https://bit.ly/2JfL7W5 Of course, the books have also been made into an Australian television series. Here’s just a little information about the first book in the series, Cocaine Blues.

This is where it all started! The first classic Phryne Fisher mystery, featuring our delectable heroine, cocaine, communism and adventure. Phryne leaves the tedium of English high society for Melbourne, Australia, and never looks back. The London season is in full fling at the end of the 1920s, but the Honorable Phryne Fisher—she of the green-gray eyes, diamant garters and outfits that should not be sprung suddenly on those of nervous dispositions—is rapidly tiring of the tedium of arranging flowers, making polite conversations with retired colonels, and dancing with weak-chinned men. Instead, Phryne decides it might be rather amusing to try her hand at being a lady detective in Melbourne, Australia. Almost immediately from the time she books into the Windsor Hotel, Phryne is embroiled in mystery: poisoned wives, cocaine smuggling rings, corrupt cops and communism—not to mention erotic encounters with the beautiful Russian dancer, Sasha de Lisse—until her adventure reaches its steamy end in the Turkish baths of Little Lonsdale Street.

*****

Now, we have news of a spin-off. According to TV Tonight,

“Seven has announced a spin-off of Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries to centre around the niece of Phryne Fisher (Essie Davis).

Ms. Fisher’s MODern Murder Mysteries will be 4 telemovies set in Melbourne in the 1960s with “˜Peregrine Fisher’ in the title role, created by Every Cloud Productions’ Deb Cox and Fiona Eagger.

Set in 1964, audiences will meet the gorgeously reckless Peregrine Fisher who inherits a windfall when the famous aunt she never knew goes missing over the highlands of New Guinea. Peregrine must prove herself brilliant enough to become a world class private detective in her own right.”

Here’s the link to TV Tonight‘s article. https://bit.ly/2AgGOcL

It’s Friday! Let’s have a little fun with Lisa Scottoline’s soon-to-be-released novel, Feared.

Scottoline will be at the Poisoned Pen on Monday, Aug. 13 at 17 PM to discuss and sign her books. She’s always entertaining, so you won’t want to miss the program. If you have to miss it, though, you can pre-order a signed copy of Feared through the Web Store. https://bit.ly/2qOXXCb

Here’s the summary of Feared.

In the new thriller from New York Times bestselling author Lisa Scottoline, Mary DiNunzio’s ruthless nemesis Nick Machiavelli is back…with a vengeance. 

When three men announce that they are suing the Rosato & DiNunzio law firm for reverse sex discrimination—claiming that they were not hired because they were men—Mary DiNunzio and Bennie Rosato are outraged. To make matters worse, their one male employee, John Foxman, intends to resign, claiming that there is some truth to this case.

The plaintiffs’ lawyer is Nick Machiavelli, who has already lost to Mary once and is now back with a vengeance —determined not to not only win, but destroy the firm. It soon becomes clear that Machiavelli will do anything in his power to achieve his end…even after the case turns deadly. The stakes have never been higher for Mary and her associates as they try to keep Machiavelli at bay, solve a murder, and save the law firm they love…or they could lose everything they’ve worked for. Told with Scottoline’s trademark gift for twists, turns, heart, and humanity, this latest thriller asks the question: Is it better to be loved, or feared…

Feared, the sixth entry in the acclaimed Rosato & DiNunzio series, expertly explores what happens when we are tempted to give in to our own inner darkness.

Praise for the Rosato & DiNunzio series:

“Fast paced, heart-tugging…readers will enjoy seeing how it all plays out.” —Publishers Weekly on Exposed

“The final curtain will find you cheering, and Scottoline will have earned every hurrah.” —Kirkus (starred review) on Exposed

“[The Rosato and DiNunzio stories] are always her best works and this newest is the best of the best in this series.” —Huffington Post on Exposed

*****

Now, what about the fun, besides Scottoline’s appearance here? It’s been a while since we shared one of Adam Wagner’s Gifnotes. Wagner regularly appears on CriminalElement.com with his amusing summaries of books. This time, he addresses Feared. https://bit.ly/2LNtE8p

Peng Shepherd was at the Poisoned Pen a month ago, hosted by Laurie R. King. Her new title, The Book of M, had just been released. You can still order signed copies of The Book of M through the Web Store.  https://bit.ly/2Lq98yr

Shepherd will be back at the Poisoned Pen on Sunday, July 29 at 2 PM, in conversation with Linwood Barclay, author of A Noise Downstairs. If you’re going to miss the program, you can still watch the Livestream event with Laurie R. King. https://livestream.com/poisonedpen/events/8241342

Here’s the summary of The Book of M.

Brad Thor’s Summer 2018 Fiction Pick for THE TODAY SHOW! 

“Eerie, dark, and compelling, [The Book of M] will not disappoint lovers of The Passage and Station Eleven.” –Booklist

WHAT WOULD YOU GIVE UP TO REMEMBER?

Set in a dangerous near future world, The Book of M tells the captivating story of a group of ordinary people caught in an extraordinary catastrophe who risk everything to save the ones they love. It is a sweeping debut that illuminates the power that memories have not only on the heart, but on the world itself.

One afternoon at an outdoor market in India, a man’s shadow disappears—an occurrence science cannot explain. He is only the first. The phenomenon spreads like a plague, and while those afflicted gain a strange new power, it comes at a horrible price: the loss of all their memories.

Ory and his wife Max have escaped the Forgetting so far by hiding in an abandoned hotel deep in the woods. Their new life feels almost normal, until one day Max’s shadow disappears too.

Knowing that the more she forgets, the more dangerous she will become to Ory, Max runs away. But Ory refuses to give up the time they have left together. Desperate to find Max before her memory disappears completely, he follows her trail across a perilous, unrecognizable world, braving the threat of roaming bandits, the call to a new war being waged on the ruins of the capital, and the rise of a sinister cult that worships the shadowless.

As they journey, each searches for answers: for Ory, about love, about survival, about hope; and for Max, about a new force growing in the south that may hold the cure.

Like The Passage and Station Eleven, this haunting, thought-provoking, and beautiful novel explores fundamental questions of memory, connection, and what it means to be human in a world turned upside down.

*****

If you’d like to learn more, Fran Wilde on Tor.com recently interviewed five science fiction/fantasy authors in an article called “Building a SciFi Future That Matters: Five Authors Share Their Worldbuilding Strategies.” Peng Shepherd is one of the authors included in this article. https://bit.ly/2NLR4M5

Linwood Barclay’s A Noise Downstairs is the current Hot Book of the Week at the Poisoned Pen. It’s perfect timing. Barclay will be at the bookstore on Sunday, July 29 from 2-3 PM. You can hear him talk about the book, and have your copy signed. If you can’t make it, you can order a signed copy of A Noise Downstairs through the Web Store. https://bit.ly/2Ohv2BY

Here’s the summary of A Noise Downstairs.

The New York Times bestselling author of No Time for Goodbye returns with a haunting psychological thriller that blends the twists and turns of Gillian Flynn with the driving suspense of Harlan Coben, in which a man is troubled by odd sounds for which there is no rational explanation.

College professor Paul Davis is a normal guy with a normal life. Until, driving along a deserted road late one night, he surprises a murderer disposing of a couple of bodies. That’s when Paul’s “normal” existence is turned upside down. After nearly losing his own life in that encounter, he finds himself battling PTSD, depression, and severe problems at work. His wife, Charlotte, desperate to cheer him up, brings home a vintage typewriter—complete with ink ribbons and heavy round keys—to encourage him to get started on that novel he’s always intended to write.

However, the typewriter itself is a problem. Paul swears it’s possessed and types by itself at night. But only Paul can hear the noise coming from downstairs; Charlotte doesn’t hear a thing. And she worries he’s going off the rails.

Paul believes the typewriter is somehow connected to the murderer he discovered nearly a year ago. The killer had made his victims type apologies to him before ending their lives. Has another sick twist of fate entwined his life with the killer—could this be the same machine? Increasingly tormented but determined to discover the truth and confront his nightmare, Paul begins investigating the deaths himself.

But that may not be the best thing to do. Maybe Paul should just take the typewriter back to where his wife found it. Maybe he should stop asking questions and simply walk away while he can. . . .

It’s hard to resist linking to articles in The New York Times when they feature bestselling thriller authors. Karin Slaughter was recently profiled in “By the Book”. https://nyti.ms/2O26k8A

Slaughter’s forthcoming August release is Pieces of Her. You can pre-order copies of that title, and Slaughter’s other books, through the Web Store. https://bit.ly/2A5kDpY

Here’s the summary of Pieces of Her.

The #1 internationally bestselling author returns with a new novel in the vein of her New York Times bestsellers Pretty Girls and The Good Daughter—a story even more electrifying, provocative, and suspenseful than anything she’s written before.

What if the person you thought you knew best turns out to be someone you never knew at all . . . ?

Andrea knows everything about her mother, Laura. She knows she’s spent her whole life in the small beachside town of Belle Isle; she knows she’s never wanted anything more than to live a quiet life as a pillar of the community; she knows she’s never kept a secret in her life. Because we all know our mothers, don’t we?

But all that changes when a trip to the mall explodes into violence and Andrea suddenly sees a completely different side to Laura. Because it turns out that before Laura was Laura, she was someone completely different. For nearly thirty years she’s been hiding from her previous identity, lying low in the hope that no one would ever find her. But now she’s been exposed, and nothing will ever be the same again.

The police want answers and Laura’s innocence is on the line, but she won’t speak to anyone, including her own daughter. Andrea is on a desperate journey following the breadcrumb trail of her mother’s past. And if she can’t uncover the secrets hidden there, there may be no future for either one of them. . . .