New Louise Penny!

I am so excited! Glass Houses is coming August 29th 2017.

From Louise’s Facebook post regarding the launch of the site:

“Today, leading up to the August 29^th publication of Glass Houses, we’re starting a new feature on Gamache and Three Pines. This was prompted by many of you mentioning that while the books are very much crime novels, the most important elements have little to do with the actual crime. There’s a whole lot more going on, beneath the surface. So we thought it would be interesting to explore that. We’re taking each book and examining the major cultural inspirations behind it. The art, the literature, the music. Things and themes that reverberate through that novel, and through the characters, through the series. And where else would we start but where it all began: ‘Still Life’.”

This feature is awesome! I do love the mysteries; however I think I love the characters, town, side stories even more. The first post is on Still Life and is entitled Surprised By Joy...be forewarned you may need a hanky.

Nature of the Feast

“They ate by candlelight, the candles of all shapes and sizes flickering around the kitchen. Their plates were piled high with turkey and chestnut stuffing, candied yams and potatoes, peas and gravy.”

I love food and I love mysteries and I especially love Louise Penny so how awesome is it to have all three at once! For the run up to the new Inspector Gamache (A Great Reckoning) Minotaur Books will be posting monthly a recipe that was featured in one of the books; the inaugural dish is from the first book Still Life: turkey and all the fixin's.
Food is such a delicious part that these books that it totally makes sense. You can find more about The Nature of the Feast here.

Chief Inspector Gamache is at it again!

"Another bravura performance from an author who has reinvented the village mystery as profoundly as Dashiell Hammett transformed the detective novel." — Booklist

How the Light Gets In, the ninth installment of the Chief Inspector Gamache series by Louise Penny, comes out at the end of August — just in time for Labour Day reading! It's been getting great reviews so far, including reviews from Publisher's Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, and Booklist.

Canadian Crime Authors Southwestern Ontario Crime Spree

Author Hilary Davidson

Four Canadian crime authors are joining forces this month to visit libraries in seven Southwestern Ontario towns — Woodstock,Orangeville, Cambridge, Guelph, Brantford, Thornbury, and Orillia — for a literary crime spree. The Crime Tour authors are Hilary Davidson, Ian Hamilton, Robert Rotenberg, and Robin Spano. All four are relatively fresh faces on the crime-fiction scene, though they have 15 novels (count them!) published amongst them over the past four years. This is the second time Davidson, Hamilton, and Spano have toured together. In June 2012, they visited a series of libraries in British Columbia’s Lower Mainland, from Vancouver to Squamish, with novelist Deryn Collier. Since Collier was unable to travel this year, the trio will bejoined by Toronto-based Rotenberg. “We are all writers who rage on the page,” says Robin Spano. “But we are really friendly in real life. Whether you're an aspiring writer looking for inspiration or you love books and are intrigued by what goes into their creation, we hope you'll come away having learned something.”
The Events: Thursday, May 9,2013, Woodstock, ON, 2pm Woodstock Art Gallery / sponsored by Woodstock Public Library 449 Dundas St., Woodstock, ON, N4S 1C2 519-539-6761 This event is free and open to the public.
Thursday, May 9,2013, Orangeville, ON, 7pm Centre Fellowship 375 Hansen Blvd., Orangeville, ON, L9W 0C2 519-942-9421 Tickets are $10 with proceeds going to the University Women Scholarship Fund.
Friday, May 10, 2013, Cambridge, ON, 9:30am Clemens Mill Library 50 Saginaw Parkway, Cambridge, ON, N1T 1W2 519-740-6294 This event is free and open to the public
Friday, May 10, 2013, Guelph, ON, 1pm Guelph Public Library 100 Norfolk Street, Guelph, ON, N1H 4J6 519-824-6220 This event is free and open to the public.
Friday, May 10, 2013, Brantford, ON, 4:30pm Brantford Public Library 173 Colborne Street, Brantford, ON, N3T 2G8 519-756-2220 This event is free and open to the public.
Saturday, May 11,2013, Thornbury, ON, 1pm L.E. Shore Memorial Library 173 Bruce Street South, Thornbury, ON, N0H 2P0 519-599-3681 This event is free and open to the public.
Sunday, May 12, 2013,Orillia, ON, 1pm “Murder and Mayhem on Mother’s Day at Manticore” Manticore Books 103 Mississauga Street,Orillia, ON, L3V 1V6 705-326-7776 This event is free and open to the public.

New Lousie Penny!

A couple of years ago I borrowed all of the Inspector Gamache books out of my library and spent the summer reading them. Her last book The Beautiful Mystery was, in my opinion, her best to date. I am very excited that her new book How the Light Gets In has been announced and will be releasing August 27th, 2013. A nice back story about the new book is that Louise approached Leonard Cohen to buy the rights to use the lyric from Anthem for her title. Cohen refused and said she could have it for free. At the time Cohen had started to tour again because his manager had absconded with all his wealth-he needed the money. He is thanked in the acknowledgements. Nice Karma.

The Other Woman by Hank Phillippi Ryan

There was alot of buzz about this book at sales conference. Forge have posted a neat author interview with award-winning TV journalist Hank Phillippi Ryan on YouTube. In it, she talks about crime fiction, her work as a journalist (and, yes, her bazillion emmys) and how it has influenced the new novel, THE OTHER WOMAN. It'll be coming out in September.

Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum Comes to the Big Screen

Trick of The Light

I have just come back from two weeks of glorious holidays. We went on a road trip to California and before we went, I visited my local library to pick up the first four books in Louise Penny's Inspector Gamache series. I like my murders with a cup of tea as they say or Agatha Christie style, so Louise Penny's books were just for me. Her latest book in the series: Trick of the Light is releasing today. In support of the book, Lousie is doing an extensive cross Canada tour: from PEI to Victoria. For a complete list of her tour dates click here.

Nanaimo's own Chevy Stevens follow up to Still Missing, Never Knowing , will be releasing on July 5th. In an interview with Author on-line she talks about where she go the idea for writing her first book...When she was a real estate agent, waiting between potential buyers at open houses, she spent hours scaring herself with thoughts of horrible things that could happen to her. She also talks about why she became a writer and gives some good tips for budding authors. Both are good thriller reads for the summer. Click here for the full interview.

Elementary, my dear reader. . .

BlogTO has a great peek into the Toronto Reference Library's Arthur Conan Doyle Room that houses one of the world's great collections of the author's works along with various other Sherlockian treats. And the room is decorated in the style of 221 Baker Street! Great photos accompany the piece, taken by Dennis Marciniak.  Read the article here.   I've never visited myself, but I am slowly working my way through The Complete Sherlock Holmes this year and will definitely go when I'm done.

2011 Edgar Award Shortlists Announced

The shortlists for the 2011 Edgar Awards were announced today.

Best Novel:

Caught by Harlan Coben (Penguin Group USA - Dutton)
Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin (HarperCollins - William Morrow)
Faithful Place by Tana French (Penguin Group USA, Hodder in Canada)
The Queen of Patpong by Timothy Hallinan (HarperCollins - William Morrow)
The Lock Artist by Steve Hamilton (Minotaur/Thomas Dunne Books)
I'd Know You Anywhere by Laura Lippman (HarperCollins - William Morrow)

Best First Novel:

Rogue Island by Bruce DeSilva (Tom Doherty Associates - Forge Books)
The Poacher's Son by Paul Doiron (Minotaur Books)
The Serialist: A Novel by David Gordon (Simon & Schuster)
Galveston by Nic Pizzolatto (Simon & Schuster - Scribner)
Snow Angels by James Thompson (Penguin Group USA - G.P. Putnam's Sons)

Best Paperback Original:

Long Time Coming by Robert Goddard (Random House - Bantam)
The News Where You Are by Catherine O'Flynn (Henry Holt in U.S./ Random House Canada)
Expiration Date by Duane Swierczynski (Minotaur Books)
Vienna Secrets by Frank Tallis (Random House Trade Paperbacks in U.S.- published as 'Darkness Rising' in the U.K., #4 in the Liebermann series)
Ten Little Herrings by L.C. Tyler (Felony & Mayhem Press in U.S. Macmillan UK in Canada)

Best Fact Crime:

Scoreboard, Baby: A Story of College Football, Crime and Complicity by Ken Armstrong and Nick Perry (University of Nebraska Press - Bison Original)
The Eyes of Willie McGee: A Tragedy of Race, Sex, and Secrets in Jim Crow South by Alex Heard (HarperCollins)
Finding Chandra: A True Washington Murder Mystery by Sari Horwitz and Scott Higham (Simon & Schuster - Scribner)
Hellhound on his Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr and the International Hunt for his Assassin by Hampton Sides (Random House - Doubleday)
The Killer of Little Shepherds: A True Crime Story and the Birth of Forensic Science by Douglas Starr (Alfred A. Knopf)

Best Critical Biography:

The Wire: Truth Be Told by Rafael Alvarez (Grove Atlantic - Grove Press)
Agatha Christie's Secret Notebooks: Fifty Years of Mysteries in the Making by John Curran (HarperCollins)
Sherlock Holmes for Dummies by Steven Doyle and David A. Crowder (Wiley)
Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and his Rendezvouz with American History by Yunte Huang (W.W. Norton)
Thrillers: 100 Must Reads edited by David Morrell and Hank Wagner (Oceanview Publishing)

Mary Higgins Clark Award Shortlist:

Wild Penance by Sandi Ault (Penguin Group - Berkley Prime Crime)
Blood Harvest by S.J. Bolton (Minotaur Books in US/Bantam in Canada)
Down River by Karen Harper (MIRA Books)
The Crossing Places by Elly Griffiths (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in U.S./McClelland & Stewart in Canad)
Live to Tell by Wendy Corsi Staub (HarperCollins - Avon)

Best Juvenile:

Zora and Me by Victoria Bond and T.R. Simon (Candlewick Press)
The Buddy Files: The Case of the Lost Boy by Dori Hillestad Butler (Albert Whitman & Co.)
The Haunting of Charles Dickens by Lewis Buzbee (Feiwel & Friends)
Griff Carver: Hallway Patrol by Jiim Krieg (Penguin Young Readers Group - Razorbill)
The Secret Life of Ms. Finkleman by Ben H. Winters (HarperCollins Children's Books)

Best Young Adult:

The River by Mary Jane Beaufrand (Little Brown Books for Young Readers)
Please Ignore Vera Dietz by A.S. King (Random House Children's Books - Alfred A. Knopf)
7 Souls by Barnabas Miller and Jordan Orlando (Random House Children's Books - Delacorte Press)
The Interrogation of Gabriel James by Charlie Price (Farrar, Straus, Giroux Books for Young Readers)
Dust City by Robert Paul Weston (Penguin Young Readers Group - Razorbill)

For the shortlisted authors in the remaining categories, visit this website. The winners will be announced April 28th 2011.

NYRB Challenge #39: To Each His Own. . .

Regardless of whether you want to read Leonardo Sciascia's To Each His Own, translated by Adrienne Foulk, as a detective story, or as an astute and entertaining portrait of a small Sicilian village reacting to two murders, DO NOT read the introduction by W.S. Piero ahead of time.  Darn it all - not only did it reveal the murderer, but also (more unforgivably), gave away the ending of the book.

Manna, the town pharmacist receives an anonymous letter announcing that he is going to die as revenge for something he has done in the past. As he can't think how he's offended anyone, he nervously treats the matter as a joke. Shortly afterwards he's found shot, along with Dr. Roscio, his friend and frequent hunting companion. The murders are the talk of the town - everyone has an opinion, especially about the victims, and - as is slowly revealed - knows more than they are willing to publicly admit.  The police have no clues save a cigar end found at the scene of the crime. But our curious "sleuth" Laurana, a professor of Italian and history at the local high school, can't help investigating, more for his own intellectual enjoyment than to bring the culprits to justice. Common sense, the odd question and above all chance, are what lead him to the truth.  Sort of. As Sciascia writes:

One corrollary of all the detective novels to which a goodly share of mankind repairs for  refreshment specifies that a crime present its investigators with a picture, the material and, so to speak, stylistic elements of which, if meticulously assembled and analyzed, permit a sure solution. In actuality, however, the situation is different. The coefficients of impunity and error are high not because, or not only or not always because, the investigators are men of small intelligence but because the clues a crime offers are usually utterly inadequate. A crime, that is to say, which is planned or committed by people who have interest in working to keep the impunity coefficient high.

This is not one of those mysteries where figuring out the identity of the murderer is the prime joy, or even the point; there are few suspects and it's soon fairly obvious whodunnit. Instead, the pleasure comes in the breezy, cynical style that accepts the town's apathy towards political corruption and religious hyprocrisy as a societal given. Murder is not that shocking after all; daily life continues with a shrug.  Even Laurana comes to see the case as, "detached and distant, in style, form, and also somewhat in content delineated rather in the manner of a Graham Greene novel."  In short, the narrative has a rather cool, crafted sophistication to it, enlivened by an endearing - if naive - main character and the odd, unexpected literary reference.

NYRB has fortunately published a number of Sciascia's works; I enjoyed this novel very much and am lookng forward to reading more from this author.

Summertime and the Reading is Easy!

I find when it is really hot outside, it is good to go back to some old favourites; they are not very taxing on the brain. This past week I picked up Arthur Conan Doyle's Sign of Four. This edition comes from Broadview Press. I forgot what a drug addict Holmes was...the opening and closing of the book feature his cocaine habit. What i really liked about this edition (and the others in the series) are the great footnotes, introduction and appendices. They give a fabulous opportunity to look beyond the traditional text and look at the context. Two thumbs up!

2010 Miles Franklin Award Winner. . .

Australia's Miles Franklin Award is an annual literary award very similar to Canada's Giller (and if you've never read Franklin's own novel My Brilliant Career or seen the movie adaptation with Judy Davis, you should rectify that immediately!) and this year, the award went unexpectedly to a crime novel - Peter Temple's Truth. Read more about the award here.

2010 Edgar Awards

Happy News! Marc Strange's Body Blows has been awarded Best Paperback Original by the Mystery Writers of America. For a complete list of the award winners check out The Edgars. I was at my local Book City where they had the local hero's book prominently displayed on the counter.

The Man From Sweden. . .

Yesterday afternoon I went to a terrific event at the Toronto Public Reference Library where Swedish crime writer Henning Mankell was being interviewed by the CBC's Michael Enright, reading and talking about his new book The Man From Beijing, translated by Laurie Thompson. The event was part of the Appel Salon - an extensive program of lectures and readings being hosted in the library's great new space. They have some really prestigious events coming up - Margaret Atwood, Alistair MacLeod, Austin Clarke, a series of Shakespeare lectures, and the Open House Festival in April and May which has a full roster of great Canadian and international authors. All the details can be found here.

You have to love an author who begins his talk by congratulating Toronto on having such a wonderful library. Mankell is a very elegant speaker - thoughtful, intelligent, honest and with a droll sense of humour. He revealed that the two things he must do every single day are to laugh and to learn something new - a great mantra to live by. He also talked about his work in Africa, where he lives for half of the year, and his involvement in the Memory Book project which tries to create mementos for the many children orphaned at a young age, so they can remember something about their parents. A very moved Mankell recalled how he was initially skeptical about how the Memory Books would work given that so many of the children can't read. And then he met a ten year old girl who showed him her book. It was just a piece of cardboard folded in half with a blue butterfly pressed between the covers. She told him her mother was a woman who loved blue butterflies. Another fact to make one pause; the money needed to eradicate illiteracy in Africa and other developing nations, roughly equals the amount that Europeans spend annually on food for their pets.

I'm about a third of the way through The Man From Bejiing and like some of his other stand-alone novels - Kennedy's Brain, The Eye of the Leopard - this one is global in scope and in its political issues. It opens with the gripping but gruesome discovery of nineteen bodies in the small, northern Swedish town of Hesjövallen, then goes back into the past following two brothers as they are kidnapped from China and forced to work on the national railroads in 1864 Nevada. That state is the site of another recent brutal murder whose victims share the same last name as some of the murdered Swedes. What's the connection? Our "sleuth" this time is Birgitta Roslin, an unhappily married judge who discovers that her mother's foster parents are among the dead found in Hesjövallen and decides to investigate further. I'm intrigued as to how Mankell will pull all the threads together but have no doubts it will be done magnificently.

And there's great news for Kurt Wallander fans - there will be a new book out in 2011 and the BBC is doing six more episodes with Kenneth Branagh in the title role. And yes, Mankell admitted that he very much likes the series.

Two Mysteries to Thaw Out With. . .

The mild weather this January (relatively) has allowed my roving bookshelf eye to rest more kindly on these frigid-sounding titles from last fall. Last weekend I was in the perfect mood for reading some good mysteries and these two certainly didn't disappoint.


I'm hooked on the Erlendur novels from Icelandic author Arnaldur Indridason and his latest, Hypothermia (such a great title), translated by Victoria Cribb, is a masterfully crafted read. Inspector Erlendur, out of all the gloomy, unhappy detectives in the Nordic crime world, seems the most obsessed with the ghosts of his past. When he was a child he lost his younger brother in a blizzard and the body was never found. As a result, Erlendur is tenacious in never giving up on missing persons' cases. A depressed woman named Maria has hanged herself in a small cabin by Lake Thingvellir, the site of her father's accidental death many years ago. It seems like a simple case of suicide but Maria's friend Karen isn't convinced and as Erlendur starts unofficially poking around, he not only has his suspicions, but manages to stumble on a few clues that might also reveal what happened to two young people who disappeared thirty years ago. The intricate plotting cleverly parallels the continuing story of Erlendur's personal life - his attempts to reconnect with his estranged children and even thaw out the chilly relations between himself and his ex-wife. Guilt, despair and forgiveness are at the core of both narrative strands. It's a riveting and touching read.


Snow Job by William Deverell is something completely different. I have no idea why it has taken me this long to finally read one of Deverell's books especially since he was the creator of Street Legal which, in its time, was one of my favourite television shows. It was a smart, witty series and Snow Job shares all of those characteristics. Retired lawyer Arthur Beauchamp just wants to retreat in peace to his goat farm on a West Coast island, but he's stuck in an ugly, noisy, Ottawa apartment during a cold winter because his wife Margaret has won a seat as the Green Party's first MP. Arthur gets further drawn into politics when a delegation of visiting ministers from the oil-rich country of Bhashyistan are killed when a bomb detonates in their car, and he is entrusted with defending the prime suspect - if he can find him first. Meanwhile the Conservative government is facing a crisis because Bhashyistan has just declared war on Canada and is holding five employees of an Albertan oil company hostage. Three Canadian tourists have gone missing in the country as well. An election is looming, ministers are squabbling and defecting, the interests of several oil conglomerations are suspect, and there's a scheme to deflect blame for the killings onto eco-terrorists - two of whom are employed by Arthur and Margaret as caretakers on their farm. When one of them sleepwalks into Arthur's bed and is spied by the island's notorious gossip, he's also burdened with the stress of having to explain "The Episode" to his wife.
Whew! There is a lot going on in this book which mixes contemporary political satire with a mad espionnage caper, but it's a terrific and entertaining ride. The paranoid machinations of spin and ego going on behind closed doors on Parliament Hill are hilarious. As is Arthur's ongoing relationship with a CSIS spy who may or may not be a double agent. Beauchamp may not be much help on his wife's political campaign trail, but he certainly gets my vote of approval.

Literary laughter with a bit of murder thrown in. . .

If you are looking for some light, literary murder and mayhem to get you through the long, January nights then you need to immediately start reading the mysteries of Edmund Crispin. Just try not to laugh! Vintage U.K. has been bringing his marvellous books - originally written in the 1940s and early 1950s - back into print (three more came out last November). They feature eccentric (is there any other kind?) Oxford professor Gervase Fen and though the plots are completely crazy and improbable, you forgive him everything because the wonderful, frequently literary, repartee that dazzles the pages is just so enjoyable. These books are quite simply scrumptious. I blogged a while ago here about his most famous mystery The Moving Toyshop, and now I've just read the very first Gervase Fen book The Case of the Gilded Fly.

It's an absolute delight. The first chapter starts by introducing all our main characters and suspects who are all en route to Oxford to take part in the production of an important new play, but are currently stuck on a slow moving train from London. The chapter ends omniously: "And within the week that followed three of these eleven died by violence." The first victim is Yseult Haskell a beautiful but bitchy actress, the former lover of the playwright, and hated by almost the entire cast. When she is found shot not very far from Fen's own college rooms, he is inevitably - and gleefully - on the spot to start investigating. Part of the fun is the constant banter between Fen and his friend Sir Richard Freeman, Chief Constable of Oxford. The latter fancies himself as much of a literary critic (and has actually published three books) as the former believes himself to be a detective. The two love to tell each other how to do their jobs.

P.D. James is a huge fan and highlights Crispin in her recent book Talking About Detective Fiction. She calls the character of Gervase Fen a "true original" who "romps through his cases with infectious joie de vivre in books which are genuinely very funny" and notes that the books, "are always elegantly written with a cast of engaging, witty characters. . . Crispin is a farceur, and the ability successfully to combine this less-than-subtle humour with murder is very rare in detective fiction."

I couldn't agree with her more. Six of the nine Crispin books are now available. In addition to the two mentioned above, there is Holy Disorders, Swan Song, Love Lies Bleeding, and Buried for Pleasure. P.G. Wodehouse meets Dorothy Sayers -just the comic tonic to take us through to spring.

A Profile of One Half of the Great Swedish Crime Duo. . .

I've only read the first three in the ten book Martin Beck crime series, written in the 1960s by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, but I will definitely tackle them all some day. Vintage is bringing them all back into print - book #7 The Abominable Man, and #8 The Locked Room came out last month and the final two, Cop Killer and The Terrorists will be out next summer. These are best read chronologically so start with Roseanna. You'll be hooked, I promise, especially if you like the crime novels of Henning Mankell. There's a fascinating interview with Maj Sjöwall in the Guardian in which she talks about the writing collaboration with Per and their love affair (Wahlöö died 44 years ago). You can read the interview here.

2009 CWA Dagger Shortlists

'Tis the season for award announcements it would seem! On September 7th, the Crime Writers’ Association (CWA) announced the shortlists for their 2009 Awards. The CWA Dagger Awards are the longest established literary awards in the UK and are internationally recognised as a mark of excellence and achievement. I'm a voracious mystery reader and I always find that these shortlists make a great a shopping list to take along to the bookstore when I'm on the lookout for a new author. It's particularly nice to see a Canadian on the list for the New Blood Dagger- Robert Rotenberg (Old City Hall). NB- I've noted the Canadian publishers below if they differ from the UK publisher.

The shortlist for this year’s CWA Gold Dagger, for the top crime novel of the year are as follows:

• Kate Atkinson: When Will There Be Good News? (Anchor Canada)
• Mark Billingham: In the Dark (McArthur & Company)
• Lawrence Block: Hit and Run (Harper Collins)
• William Brodrick: A Whispered Name (Little, Brown)
• MR Hall: The Coroner (Pan Macmillan)
• Gene Kerrigan: Dark Times In The City (Harvill Secker)

I'm so happy to see The Coroner by M.R. Hall on the list! This was one of my Dewey Diva picks from the Spring list (a must read if you are a Lynda LaPlante fan). The sequel The Disappeared is coming on our Winter 2010 list.

The shortlist for the CWA John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger for first books by previously unpublished writers is:

• David Fuller Sweetsmoke (Hyperion)
• James Green Bad Catholics (Luath Press)
• Rod Madocks No Way To Say Goodbye (Five Leaves)
• Robert Rotenberg Old City Hall (Touchstone/Simon & Schuster)
• Johan Theorin Echoes from The Dead (Doubleday UK)
• Dan Waddell The Blood Detective (Penguin)

The shortlisted titles for this year’s CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger (thriller novel) are:

• Michael Connelly: The Brass Verdict (Little Brown)
• Gillian Flynn: Dark Places (Shaye Areheart Books)
• John Hart: The Last Child (St. Martin's Press)
• Charlie Newton: Calumet City (Touchstone/Simon & Schuster)
• Daniel Silva: Moscow Rules (Signet)
• Olen Steinhauer: The Tourist (St. Martin's Press)* One of my picks from Winter 2009, hurrah!
• Andrew Williams: The Interrogator (John Murray)

The awards above will presented on Wednesday, 21st October, 2009. Already presented (in July) were the following awards:

• 2009 Debut Dagger for best unpublished work (Catherine O’Keefe, The Pathologist)
• 2009 International Dagger for best mystery in translation (won for the THIRD time in four years by a favourite of Maylin's- Fred Vargas and translator Sîan Reynolds for The Chalk Circle Man)
• 2009 CWA Dagger in the Library to "the author of crime fiction whose work is currently giving the greatest enjoyment to library users"- awarded to Colin Cotterill Quercus