Crime Fiction, Mystery, Thrillers, and Suspense Blog

Sunday, 20 January 2013 04:19

TALKING WITH BRAD MELTZER

A killer re-creates the crimes of presidential assassins in The Fifth Assassin, the latest thriller from Brad Meltzer.

True to form, Meltzer peppers myriad historical facts in this novel. Meltzer’s work includes the novels The Inner Circle and The Book of Lies; five comic books, including the Eisner Award-winning Justice League of America; two nonfiction books; and is the host of Brad Meltzer’s Decoded on the History Channel.

We caught up with Meltzer just before he launched his book tour. For other questions, visit the interview we did for the Sun Sentinel.

The Fifth Assassin is your second novel featuring young archivist Beecher White; will there be more?
That's certainly the goal.

An archivist hardly seems like the stuff of heroes; what makes Beecher a hero?
It's funny you say that. Someone else just said that. And I'm so nerdy, I didn't even realize that archivists are considered nerdy. I just wanted a hero I hadn't seen before. A real person. From that, Beecher was born.

In addition to your thrillers, you¹ve written 5 comic books and two nonfiction books. You also are a co-creators of the TV show, Jack & Bobby and host Brad Meltzer¹s Decoded on the History Channel. When do you sleep?
What is this 'sleep' you speak of?

What¹s the best thing about being an author?
Talking to my imaginary friends.

What¹s the worst thing?
When they answer back.

On your web site, you also have two very funny videos that are self-deprecating about the book business: Everyone Hates Brad Meltzer and Books Vs. McDonalds Happy Meals. Why?
You kidding? Y'know how much therapy those things saved me from? Maybe the best video we've ever put out there [is Everyone Hates Brad Meltzer].

Wednesday, 16 January 2013 09:25

2013 EDGAR NOMINATIONS

Once again the awards season for mystery fiction officially begins with the Mystery Writers of America's nominations for the 2013 Edgar Allan Poe Awards, honoring the best in mystery fiction, nonfiction and television published or produced in 2012.

All the awards will be presented during the 67th Edgar Awards banquet, which will be held at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in New York City on Thursday, May 2, 2013.

Mystery Scene offers its congratulations to all the nominees.

2012 was a terrific year for mystery fiction and we are sure the judges had a difficult time narrowing down the lists to these nominees.

BEST NOVEL
The Lost Ones by Ace Atkins (Penguin Group USA – G.P. Putnam’s Sons)
The Gods of Gotham by Lyndsay Faye (Penguin Group USA – G.P. Putnam’s Sons)
Gone Girl: A Novel by Gillian Flynn (Crown Publishers)
Potboiler by Jesse Kellerman (Penguin Group USA – G.P. Putnam’s Sons)
Sunset by Al Lamanda (Gale Cengage Learning – Five Star)
Live by Night by Dennis Lehane (HarperCollins Publishers – William Morrow)
All I Did Was Shoot My Man by Walter Mosley (Penguin Group USA – Riverhead Books)


BEST FIRST NOVEL BY AN AMERICAN AUTHOR
The Map of Lost Memories by Kim Fay (Random House Publishing– Ballantine)
Don’t Ever Get Old by Daniel Friedman (Minotaur Books - Thomas Dunne Books)
Mr. Churchill’s Secretary by Susan Elia MacNeal (Random House Publishing– Bantam Books)
The Expats by Chris Pavone (Crown Publishers)
The 500 by Matthew Quirk (Hachette Book Group – Little, Brown and Company – Reagan Arthur)
Black Fridays by Michael Sears (Penguin Group USA – G.P. Putnam’s Sons)


BEST PAPERBACK ORIGINAL
Complication by Isaac Adamson (Soft Skull Press)
Whiplash River by Lou Berney (HarperCollins Publishers – William Morrow Paperbacks)
Bloodland by Alan Glynn (Picador)
Blessed are the Dead by Malla Nunn (Simon & Schuster – Atria Books - Emily Bestler Books)
The Last Policeman: A Novel by Ben H. Winters (Quirk Books)


BEST FACT CRIME
Midnight in Peking: How the Murder of a Young Englishwoman Haunted the Last Days of Old China by Paul French (Penguin Group USA - Penguin Books)
Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America by Gilbert King (HarperCollins Publishers – Harper)
More Forensics and Fiction: Crime Writers' Morbidly Curious Questions Expertly Answered by D.P. Lyle, MD (Medallion Press)
Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies by Ben Macintyre (Crown Publishers)
The People Who Eat Darkness: The True Story of a Young Woman Who Vanished from the Streets of Tokyo – and the Evil that Swallowed Her Up by Richard Lloyd Parry (Farrar Straus & Giroux Originals)


BEST CRITICAL/BIOGRAPHICAL
Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe: The Hard-Boiled Detective Transformed by John Paul Athanasourelis (McFarland and Company)
Books to Die For: The World's Greatest Mystery Writers on the World's Greatest Mystery Novels edited by John Connolly and Declan Burke (Simon & Schuster – Atria Books – Emily Bestler Books)
The Scientific Sherlock Holmes: Cracking the Case with Science and Forensics by James O’Brien (Oxford University Press)
In Pursuit of Spenser: Mystery Writers on Robert B. Parker and the Creation of an American Hero edited by Otto Penzler (Smart Pop)


BEST SHORT STORY
"Iphigenia in Aulis" – An Apple for the Creature by Mike Carey (Penguin Group USA – Ace Books)
"Hot Sugar Blues" – Mystery Writers of America Presents: Vengeance by Steve Liskow (Hachette Book Group – Little, Brown and Company – Mulholland Books)
"The Void it Often Brings With It” – Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine by Tom Piccirilli (Dell Magazines)
"The Unremarkable Heart" – Mystery Writers of America Presents:  Vengeance by Karin Slaughter (Hachette Book Group – Little, Brown and Company – Mulholland Books)
"Still Life No. 41" – Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine by Teresa Solana (Dell Magazines)


BEST JUVENILE
Fake Mustache: Or, How Jodie O’Rodeo and Her Wonder Horse (and Some Nerdy Kid) Saved the U.S. Presidential Election from a Mad Genius Criminal Mastermind by Tom Angleberger (Abrams – Amulet Books)
13 Hangmen by Art Corriveau (Abrams – Amulet Books)
The Quick Fix by Jack D. Ferraiolo (Abrams – Amulet Books)
Spy School by Stuart Gibbs (Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers)
Three Times Lucky by Sheila Turnage (Penguin Young Readers Group – Dial Books for Young Readers)


BEST YOUNG ADULT
Emily’s Dress and Other Missing Things by Kathryn Burak (Macmillan Children’s Publishing Group – Roaring Brook Press)
The Edge of Nowhere by Elizabeth George (Penguin Young Readers Group – Viking)
Crusher by Niall Leonard (Random House Children’s Books – Delacorte BFYR)
Amelia Anne is Dead and Gone by Kat Rosenfield (Penguin Young Readers Group – Dutton Children’s Books)
Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein (Disney Publishing Worldwide - Hyperion)


BEST TELEVISION EPISODE TELEPLAY
“Pilot” – Longmire, Teleplay by Hunt Baldwin & John Coveny (A&E/Warner Horizon Television)
“Child Predator” – elemeNtarY, Teleplay by Peter Blake (CBS Productions)
“Slaughterhouse” – Justified, Teleplay by Fred Golan (Sony Pictures Television/FX Productions)
“A Scandal in Belgravia” – Sherlock, Teleplay by Steven Moffat (BBC/Masterpiece)
“New Car Smell” – Homeland, Teleplay by Meredith Stiehm (Showtime/Fox21)

ROBERT L. FISH MEMORIAL AWARD
"When They Are Done With Us" – Staten Island Noir by Patricia Smith (Akashic Books)

THE SIMON & SCHUSTER - MARY HIGGINS CLARK AWARD
(Presented at MWA’s Agents & Editors Party on Wednesday, May 1, 2013)
Dead Scared by S.J. Bolton (Minotaur Books)
A City of Broken Glass by Rebecca Cantrell (Forge Books)
The Reckoning by Jane Casey (Minotaur Books)
The Other Woman by Hank Phillippi Ryan (Forge Books)
Sleepwalker by Wendy Corsi Staub (HarperCollins Publishers - Harper)

It has been previously annouced that Ken Follett, top left, and Margaret Maron, right, are both named the Grand Master.

The 2013 Ellery Queen Award will be given to Johnny Temple, founder and editor of Akashic Books. The Ellery Queen award is given to editors or publishers who have distinguished themselves by their generous and wide-ranging support of the genre.

The 2013 Raven Award has two honorees.

The Mysterious Galaxy Bookstore in San Diego and Redondo Beach, California, will receive the Raven, which was established in 1953 to recognize outstanding achievement in the mystery field outside the realm of creative writing.

The other Raven honoree is journalist Oline Cogdill. Yes, that’s right. Me. My reviews, blogs and author profiles appear, obviously in Mystery Scene. I also review for the Sun Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale and those reviews are syndicated around the world.

Tuesday, 08 January 2013 23:37

GETTING JUSTIFIED FOR THE 4TH TIME

Timothy Olyphant’s intriguing portrayal of Deputy U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens, above, is one of the main draws that keep us riveted to Justified.  But the comely actor isn’t the only reason.

 Justified is just so darn well written that it doesn’t fall into any predictable rut.

Each season of Justified takes a different angle than the last while delving deeper into the psyches and souls of the core cast of characters. That’s a lot to ask from a TV series, but Justified, which started its fourth season Jan. 8 on FX, does that each year.

The villains may vary—and we hope they continue to rotate new bad guys each time—but the central characters bring us back to the rough and tumble area of Harlan County, Ky.

Raylan is that rare mix of super tough guy, confident in his skills as a gunman, a lawman who often takes liberties with the law and, yet the same time, a man with integrity. His complicated personal life includes his criminal father Arlo (Raymond J. Barry) who is in jail after killing a man he thought was his son, and his on-again, off-again relationship with Winona Hawkins (Natalie Zea) who is pregnant with his child.

Boyd Crowder (Walton Goggins) is the man we love to hate, or hate to love. A drug dealer, a killer and a preacher, Boyd grew up with Raylan and they continue to be both enemies and friends.

During previous seasons, Raylan has chased one villain and been involved with one story arc. Season four’s primary plot is a 30-year-old case that involved a man falling from the sky with a parachute and a bag of cocaine. The case involved Arlo and will force Raylan to look at his own fractured childhood. But there will be more subplots, so many that Raylan and Boyd don’t even meet until the fifth episode.

Raylan will start moonlighting as a bounty hunter to earn extra money because he will become a father. No matter what Raylan does, it is unlikely he will be as bad a father as Arlo was. Boyd’s Oxy revenue is threatened by a preacher, and this will not end well, I predict.

New faces this season will include Patton Oswalt as a constable Raylan hires to watch Arlo’s house; Joe Mazzello as a snake-handling preacher who wants to muscle in on Boyd’s Oxy revenue, and Ron Eldard as an old friend and new partner of Boyd.

Justified is based on Elmore Leonard’s 2001 novella Fire in the Hole published in his collection When the Women Come Out to Dance. Leonard returned to Raylan Givens in his novel Raylan, released last year. In Raylan, the marshal tackles a pair of dope-dealing brothers, a nurse who sells kidneys on the black market and a ruthless coal executive; several of these subplots have showed up in Justified.

Justified airs at 10 p.m. Tuesdays on the FX Channel with frequent encores.

Sunday, 06 January 2013 04:48

DENNIS LEHANE’S BEAGLE STILL MISSING

This is a blog I was hoping not to write.

More than a week ago, Dennis Lehane appealed via Facebook, Twitter, the media, posters, such as the one at left, and just about any other method to find his lost dog, Tessa. The beagle went missing on Dec. 24 after she escaped from the yard of Lehane’s home in Brookline, Mass.

Lehane has even offered a reward: In his next novel, he’ll name a character after the person who brings back Tessa. (Lehane’s latest novel is Live by Night.)

The search for Tessa has been shared and posted and tweeted and reshared and reposted and retweeted myriad times. Stories have appeared in the New York Times, the Associated Press and in the Boston media. In addition to his own Facebook page, a Finding Tessa page has been set up.

Still no Tessa.

So if anyone who has not heard of Tessa’s plight finds a stray beagle roaming the Boston area, please take her to the nearest veterinarian. Tessa was not wearing her collar but she does have a microchip.

In an Associated Press story a couple of days ago, Lehane was quoted as saying “No dog since Lassie ever got this attention.” In the same AP story Lehane added that finding Tessa was “a no-questions-asked issue.” “Bring the dog to a shelter or call me and I will pick up the dog.”

As a dog lover, I know how Lehane feels. I would be devastated if any of our dogs went missing.

Tessa is a rescue dog. What often doesn’t show up in profiles on Lehane is that he and his wife support several causes, including Beagle Rescue. Many successful authors, such as Lehane, quietly contribute to a number of causes.

I am hoping that within an hour of this blog being posted that it will be old news, that Tessa will be reunited with Lehane and his family.