The Lovey Awards 2014

Love is Murder conference recently took place between 7^th and 9th February 2014 in Chicago.  The Lovey Awards were given out over the weekend and they are as follows –

  

Best First Novel:
Bright and Yellow, Hard and Cold, by Tim Chapman (Allium Press)

The Butterfly Sister, by Amy Gail Hansen (Morrow)

Bad Policy, by James M. Jackson (Barking Rain Press)

Buried Truth, by Gunter Kaesdorf (Cambridge)

One Man’s Castle by J. Michael Major (Five Star)

Rim to Rim: Death in the Grand Canyon, by Jeanne Meeks (CreateSpace)  Deception, by Sue Myers (CreateSpace)

Best Traditional/Amateur Sleuth:

Death of a Garden Hoe, by Gale Borger (Echelon Press)

Dangerous Threads, by Dave Ciambrone (L & L Dreamspell)

Murder by the Seaside, by Julie Anne Lindsey (Carina Press)

Peak Season for Murder, by Gail Lukasik (Five Star)

Locked Within, by Helen Macie Osterman (Dark Oak Mysteries)

Best Suspense:

The Black Stiletto: Stars & Stripes by Raymond Benson (Oceanview)
Fear of Beauty, by Susan Froetschel (Seventh Street)

Havana Lost, by Libby Fischer Hellmann (Red Herrings Press)

Deceived by Julie Anne Lindsey (Merit Press)

Inconspicuous by M.E. May (CreateSpace);

Brilliance by Marcus Sakey (Thomas & Mercer)

The Fate of Mercy Alban, by Wendy Webb (Hyperion)

Best Paranormal/Sci-fi:
Blood Red, by Heather Graham (Mira)

How I Started the Apocalypse, Book Two, by Brian Pinkerton (Severed Press);

Girl Z: My Life as a Teenage Zombie by Christine Verstraete (Intrigue)

The Vanishing, by Wendy Webb (Hyperion)

Best Series:

Close-Up on Murder (Murder, She Wrote) by Donald Bain (NAL)
Totally Evil (The Miller Sisters Mysteries) by Gale Borger (Echelon Press)

The Ice Woman Assignment (The Stark & O’Brian Series) by Austin Camacho (Intrigue)

Emma Caldridge Series by Jamie Freveletti (Morrow)

Krewe of Hunters Series by Heather Graham (Mira)

Best Short Story:

“Once Upon a Time in the Woods” by Raymond Benson (from Kwik Krimes, edited by Otto Penzler; Thomas & Mercer)

“Harry’s Loss of Grace” by Luisa Buehler

“War Secrets” by Libby Fischer Hellmann (from Mystery Writers of America Presents The Mystery Box, edited by Brad Meltzer; Grand Central)  

“A Letter to My Ex” by J. Michael Major (in Splatterlands: Reawakening the Splatterpunk Revolution, edited by Anthony Rivera and Sharon Lawson; Grey Matter Press)

Winners in bold.

Congratulations to all the winners and nominated authors.

(H/T Mystery Fanfare)

Love is Murder

Best First Novel
Courting Murder, by Bill Hopkins
Souljourner, by D. L. Marriott
Perfidy, by Michele May
In her Shadow, by August McLaughlin
 
Best Traditional/Amateur Sleuth
Where Did You Die, by Patricia K. Batta
The Trashy Gourmet, by David Ciambrone
A Small Hill to Die On, by Elizabeth Duncan
The Lightkeeper’s  Legacy, by Kathleen Ernst
Dabblers, by Kathryn Flatt
The Lost Artist, by Gail Lukasik

Last Wool and Testament, by Molly MacRae
Emma Winberry and the Evil Eye, by Helen Osterman
Murder in the Round, by Patricia Rockwell (an Amelia Barnes Acoustic Mystery)
Crosscurrents, by Powell Smily, with Susan Smily and Honora Finkelstein

Best Thriller
Hitman: Damnation, by Raymond Benson
The Black Stiletto: Black & White, by Raymond Benson
The Ninth Day, by Jamie Freveletti
Company Orders, by David J. Walker

Best Police Procedural
Portrait of Murder, by Rob Riley
The Sons of Jude, by Brandt Dobson

Best Paranormal/Sci-Fi
Walk-In, by Honora Finkelstein and Susan Smily
When the Moon is Gibbous and Waxing, by Angela Myers

Best Historical
Archie Meets Nero Wolfe, by Robert Goldsborough
Death at Woods Hole, by Frances McNamara
The Bootleggers Nephew, by Sara Wisseman

Best Suspense
A Bitter Veil, by Libby Fischer Hellman
Moonlight for Maggie, by Karen L. Syed

Best Series
Get Fluffy, by Sparkle Abbey (the Pampered Pets mystery series)
Thy Will be Done, by Richard M. Davidson (the Lord's Prayer mystery series)
The Janus Reprisal, by Jamie Freveletti (Robert Ludlum's Covert One series)
Killerfind by Sharon Woods Hopkins (the Rhetta McCarter mysteries)
Trickster’s Point, by William Kent Krueger (the Cork O'Connor mystery series)
The Watch, by Jerry Peterson (the AJ Garrison crime novels)

Best Short Story
"Harry's Fall From Grace" by Luisa Buehler, prequel to the Grace Marsden mystery series
"The Love Nest", by Sharon I. Cook, in The Legend Of Judgment Rock & Other Mystery Stories
"Capital Partners", by Libby Fischer Hellman, in Writes of Spring
"Early's Christmas", by Jerry Peterson, in Stories of the Season anthology
"The Case of the Extra Ingredient", by Mary Welk, in Hot Crime, Cool Chicks

The Lovey Awards will be given out as part of the 14^th annual Love is Murder Conference that is due to take place between 1-3 February 2013 in Chicago.  The awards will be presented during the banquet on the Saturday evening. 

Congratulations to all the nominees!

Hat tip to Janet Rudolph and Mystery Fanfare for the information.

Forthcoming books to look forward to from Orion

Inspector Christian Tell and his team are called to the scene of a double murder. University lecturer Anne-Marie Karpov lies dead in her home, alongside her student and lover, Henrik. The crime appears straightforward: Henrik's girlfriend Rebecca, a woman in therapy for her violent jealousy, had been spotted outside Karpov's flat, and her fingerprints are found on the door. But shortly afterwards, when Rebecca's flat is burgled in a seemingly unconnected attack, Tell begins to wonder whether she might be the victim in a larger game. It emerges that items on the Red List - artefacts raided from Iraqi museums - were found among Henrik's possessions. As the truth behind Anne-Marie and Henrik's past begins to emerge, the dead woman's ex-husband, Danish gangsters and Turkish black marketeers all come into the frame. Tell must unravel a web of hidden motives that spans continents, all while trying to salvage his stormy relationship with Seja. Babylon is by Camilla Ceder and is due to be published in August 2012.

May 1992, and after four LAPD officers were acquitted after the savage beating of Rodney King, Los Angeles is ablaze. As looting and burning take over the city, law and order are swept away in a tidal wave of violence. But under threat of their lives, homicide detectives like Harry Bosch are still stubbornly trying to do their job. With no effective police presence on the streets, murder just got a whole lot easier - and investigating them got a whole lot harder. Escorted by national guard soldiers from murder scene to murder scene, Harry and his colleagues are only able to do the bare minimum in terms of collecting evidence. And for Harry that's not enough. When he finds the body of a female journalist executed in an alley, he cannot accept that he will never be able to bring her killer to justice, and her tragedy starts to eat into his soul. But then, twenty years later, Harry finds himself working in the Open Unsolved Unit, and suddenly the past comes back to haunt him once again, in a way he could never have imagined.  The Black Box is by Michael Connelly and is due to be published in November 2012.

  

Gone in Seconds is the debut novel by A J Cross and is due to be published in July 2012. When the skeleton of a young woman is found near a West Midlands motorway, evidence suggests that it is that of teenager Molly James, who went missing five years ago.  Forensic psychologist Dr Kate Hanson and the Unsolved Crime Unit are called in to re-investigate Molly's case. The deeper they dig the dirtier the clues get, and when a second set of remains is unearthed Kate suspects they're looking for a Repeater: a killer who will adapt, grow and not stop until they are caught. Will Dr Hanson manage to unravel the tangle of clues that the killer has left behind before he has a chance to take another innocent victim?

Disaster strikes when a group of vicious pirates attack and kidnap a pregnant American woman off the coast of Somalia. To get her back before more blood is spilled, Sigma Force enlist the services of former army ranger Captain Tucker Wayne and his war dog, Kane. But what starts out as a straightforward rescue mission rapidly escalates into a deadly hostage situation when the team discovers that the abducted woman is none other than the president's daughter. Meanwhile, a firebomb in the US lays bare a horrifying experiment at a fertility clinic where women from around the world are being enslaved and forced to bear children by artificial means, and where a baby is born with an impossible abnormality - a triple helix of DNA. Commander Gray Pierce and Tucker Wayne must combine forces to uncover an ancient conspiracy and expose a dark truth hidden within our own genetic code. The answer lies in their mission to save the president's daughter and her unborn child, a child whose very existence raises an age-old question of immortality: if you could live for ever, would you choose to?  Bloodline is by James Rollins and is due to be published in August 2012.

  

DI Andrew Hicks thinks he knows all about murder. For Hicks, however horrific the act, the reasons behind killing are ultimately all too explicable. So when a woman is found bludgeoned to death, he suspects a crime of passion and attention focuses on her possessive ex-husband. But when a second body is found, similarly beaten, Hicks is forced to think again about his suspect: the second victim is a homeless man with no links to the other woman. When more murders take place in quick succession, Hicks realises he is dealing with a type of killer he has never faced before, one who fits nowhere within his logic. Fear spreads, as the police search for patterns and reasons where none appear to exist. Then the letters begin to arrive...As the death toll rises, the threat gets closer to home. To survive, Hicks must face not only a killer obsessed with randomness and chaos, but also the secret in his own past. If he is to stop the killings, he must confront the truth about himself and the fact that some murders begin in much darker places than he ever imagined.  Dark Room is by Steve Mosby and is due to be published in July 2012.

Stephen Killigan has been cold since the day he came to Cambridge as a junior lecturer. Something about the seven hundred years of history staining the stones of the university has given him a chill he can't shake. When he stumbles across the body of a missing beauty queen, he thinks he's found the reason. But when the police go to retrieve the body and find no trace, Killigan has found a problem - and a killer - that is the very opposite of reason. Killigan's unwitting entry into Jackamore Grass's sinister world will lead him on a trail of tattooists, philosophers, cadavers and scholars of a deadly beauty. As Killigan traces a path between our age and seventeenth century Cambridge, he must work out how a corpse can be found before someone goes missing, and whether he's at the edge of madness or an astonishing discovery. A fast-paced page-turner The Beauty of Murder is a speculative crime thriller that travels to the heart of gruesome series of crime by way of a city and a person that have far too many secrets written in blood.  The Beauty of Murder is by A K Benedict and is due to be published in November 2012.

  

Strictly No Flowers is by Graham Hurley and is due to be published in August 2012 as an e.pub only.  When writer Scott Plenty heads to France to research French  civilians who died at the hands of Bomber Command in WWII, he is set up in a drugs bust and wakes in prison to find that the French dealers think he’s invading their patch.  Scott’s search for the truth becomes a quest for survival.  But who set him up and why? And does Scott really want to know the truth about the sort of man he is?  Also by Graham Hurley and due to be published in December 2012 is Western Approaches. D/S Jimmy Suttle has finally tired of the relentless struggle against the rising tide of urban crime in Portsmouth. Surely a job in Major Crimes in the West Country will offer some respite? He finds a remote cottage nestled in a fold of Dartmoor and, with his wife and two year old daughter, heads West for what he is sure will be a saner existence. How wrong could he be? Soon he is investigating the murder of a long-distance rower in the small town of Exmouth. The man rowed in the same 5-man boat as a man who, two years before, dodged a murder charge when his wife went missing during a cross atlantic rowing challange. There had been tensions between the two. Has a killer killed again? As the job takes over, Lizzie, Suttle's wife, is increasingly unhappy about the move. Trying to juggle family life with her own new job on a local paper, isolated in a lonely cottage with a demanding toddler and struggling to make new friends, Lizzie thought the whole point of the move was that she and Suttle could at least see more of each other. As his marriage frays at the edges and his first investigation becomes mired Suttle begins to feel the hills around their cottage crowding in, the wind over the moors above ever chillier, the waters ever greyer. He really has reached land's end….

Manchester, 1992: Lauren Cawley disappears days before her second birthday, triggering a massive police hunt. But she is never found, leaving her parents bereft and James Lomax, the lead investigator who searched tirelessly for her, broken. Twenty years on, Lomax has finally retired, and his son Tom is scraping a living as a private investigator. Then Tom gets a mysterious phone call: Sara Eaton, heir to a massive fortune, has just watched her mother pass away. Moments before her death, Sara's mother whispered something to her, but all that Sara hears is a name: Lomax. Two days before Sara turns twenty-one, Tom Lomax is flown out to her private yacht. Her mother's will is to be read on her birthday. But when a powerful explosion rips through the boat, Tom has 48 hours to get Sara back to London alive. As they struggle to evade a terrifying series of attempts on her life, the clues lead inexorably back to the case that destroyed Tom's father. He alone can unlock the terrible secret that Sara's mother hid from her - leading to a final, brutal confrontation with reality and a revelation as shocking as it is poignant.  The Vanishing is by Tom Winship and is due to be published in August 2012.

Jon Smith is attending a W.H.O. conference in The Hague on infectious diseases and wakes in his hotel room to find a man aiming a gun at him. Smith neutralizes the shooter, and finds three pictures in the assassin's pocket: one of an unknown woman, one of Peter Howell, his friend and a former agent with Britain's MI6, and one of him. When Smith tries to leave the hotel, he encounters a second group of terrorists in the process of attacking it. The hotel is not the only target in The Hague. Within minutes of Smith's narrow escape, bombs go off at the train station, airport and at the headquarters of the International Court of Justice, where a Pakistani warlord, Oman Dattar, is being held while he is tried for crimes against humanity. In the resulting chaos, Dattar escapes. Dattar has learned of a new strain of bioelectric bacteria that can grow electrical wires as a form of cilia. These cilia connect with another metallic source and can transmit and transport themselves via electric current. These bacteria are carried to the W.H.O. conference in preparation for an international consortium of biologists convened to study them, along with other strains of deadly bacteria. Dattar arranges for his men to steal the bacteria and use them to bring down the West once and for all. Can Jon Smith stop him? Robert Ludlum’s The Janus Reprisal is by the late Robert Ludlum and Jamie Freveletti and is due to be published in November 2012.

  

From Kate Mosse comes the third heart-stopping adventure exploring the incredible history, legends and hidden secrets of Carcassonne and the Languedoc. Set during World War II in the far south of France, Citadel is a powerful, action-packed mystery that reveals the secrets of the resistance under Nazi occupation. While war blazed in the trenches at the front, back at home a different battle is waged, full of clandestine bravery, treachery and secrets. And as a cell of Maquis resistance fighters, codenamed Citadel, fight for everything they hold dear, their struggle will reveal an older, darker combat being fought in the shadows. Citadel is a story of daring and courage, of lives risked for beliefs and of astonishing secrets buried in time.  It is due to be published in September 2012.  A preview can be found here.

A schizophrenic man spends his days and nights on a website called Whirl360, believing he's employed by the CIA to store the details of every town and city in the world in his head. Then one day, he sees something that shouldn't be there: a woman being murdered behind a window on a New York street. Suddenly Thomas has more to deal with than just his delusions, as he gets drawn into a deadly conspiracy.  Trust Your Eyes is by Linwood Barclay and is due to be published in September 2012.  Also due to be published in October 2012 by Linwood Barclay is Never Saw it Coming. Keisha Ceylon passes herself off as a psychic, but really she takes advantage of families who have recently lost a loved one.  Keisha’s latest mark is a man whose wife disappeared a week ago, so she goes to visit and tells him her vision.  The trouble is, her vision just happened to be close enough to the truth that it leaves the man rattled.  And it may very well leave Keisha dead…..

Jack Delton is a hard man to get hold of. There are maybe thirty people who know he exists. Not all of them believe he is still alive. And only one of them knows his real name. So when he gets the email he knows whatever it is, it's going to be bad. Marcus Fairlan and Jack used to work together. Until they had a falling out, after which Jack assumed the only reason Marcus would want to find him would be to kill him. It turns out it's worse than that. Marcus bankrolled a casino heist that has just gone spectacularly wrong, leaving a parking lot full of bodies and an armed and dangerous crackhead named Jerome Ribbons gone AWOL with a million dollars in cash. Marcus had the money earmarked for a major drug deal, and if he doesn't deliver, not only is the deal going down the tubes, but the man known as The Wolf is going to come looking for him. To make things right with Marcus, Jack needs to locate Ribbons, get the money and make the delivery. All in just 24 hours. Even for a man with Jack's resources, it's a tall order. Especially when he has a funny feeling the whole thing is a set-up..  The Ghostman is the debut novel by Roger Hobbs and is due to be published in January 2012.

 When her only sister suddenly dies, Dana Carlson is drawn back to the small Minnesota town she'd turned her back on years before. When she gets there, she discovers that Black Bear has changed, and so have the people in it. Julie's left behind a shattered teenaged daughter and a mystery--what killed her may be killing others, too. Why is no one talking about it? Dana soon finds herself struggling to uncover the truth, but no one wants to hear it, included Peyton, who can't forgive her aunt for her absence all these years. Dana had left to protect her own secrets, but Black Bear has a secret of its own--one that could tear Dana's life, her family, and the whole town apart. Invisible is a stunning novel of redemption, regret, and the complex ties of familial love, examining the truths people keep hidden, and those they fight to expose.  Invisible is by Carla Buckley and is due to be published in November 2012.

After his wife, Helen, is brazenly abducted before his eyes, Special Agent Pendergast furiously pursues the kidnappers, chasing them across the country and into Mexico. But then, things go terribly, tragically wrong; the kidnappers escape; and a shattered Pendergast retreats to his New York apartment and shuts out the world.  But when a string of bizarre murders erupts across several Manhattan hotels--perpetrated by a boy who seems to have an almost psychic ability to elude capture--NYPD Lieutenant D'Agosta asks his friend Pendergast for help. Reluctant at first, Pendergast soon discovers that the killings are a message from his wife's kidnappers. But why a message? And what does it mean?  When the kidnappers strike again at those closest to Pendergast, the FBI agent, filled anew with vengeful fury, sets out to track down and destroy those responsible. His journey takes him deep into the trackless forests of South America, where he ultimately finds himself face to face with an old evil that-rather than having been eradicated-is stirring anew... and with potentially world-altering consequences.  Confucius once said: "Before you embark on a journey of revenge, first dig two graves." Pendergast is about to learn the hard way just how true those words still ring.  Two Graves is by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child and is due to be published in December 2012.

Alyshia D'Cruz, daughter of Indian tycoon Francisco 'Frank' D'Cruz, has grown up in London and Mumbai wanting for nothing. But one night, after a boozy evening out, she gets in the wrong cab home...  Charles Boxer, ex-army, ex-police, has found his niche in private security. His speciality: kidnap and recovery. But it's a rootless life that doesn't impress his teenage daughter, Amy, or her mother, DS Mercy Danqah.  When D'Cruz hires Boxer to find Alyshia, Boxer knows Frank's crooked business empire has made him plenty of enemies. Despite the vast D'Cruz fortune, the kidnappers don't want cash - instead favouring a cruel and lethal game. But the UK government don't want their big new investor to lose his daughter in the heart of the capital. MI6 officers in India follow Boxer's leads and soon it seems more lives than Alyshia's are at stake, as the trail crosses paths with a terrorist plot on British soil.  To save Alyshia, Boxer must dodge religious fanatics, Indian mobsters and London's homegrown crimelords. Capital Punishment is a thrilling journey to the dark side of people and places that lie just out of view, waiting for the moment to tear a life apart.  Capital Punishment is by Robert Wilson and is due to be published in January 2013.

Other books to look forward later on this year are untitled books (so far) by Lawrence Block, Ian Rankin and Raymond Khoury