More Mystery Award Nominations!

Call for Nominations. Mystery Readers Journal subscribers and members of Mystery Readers International can nominate for the Macavity Award in five categories for works that were published in 2008. Best Mystery, Best First Mystery, Best Mystery Short Story, Best Critical/Biographical/Reference, Best Historical Mystery. Deadline for nominations is April 10. To nominate, send an email with subject line Macavity Nominations. You can nominate in as many categories, as you'd like. Be sure and put your full name in the body of the email. You must have been entered in MRI for '08 or '09 to nominate. Ballot will go out to member/subscribers by May 1.

• Hat tip to Declan Burke for posting the Irish Book Awards crime fiction shortlist. Sadly John Connolly, Ken Bruen and Declan Hughes are not on the list. However, Alex Barclay (Blood Runs Cold), Arlene Hunt (Undertow), Tana French (The Likeness) and Brian McGilloway (Gallows Lane) made the cut. The Irish issue of Mystery Readers Journal is still available in hardcopy. It was one of our best ever largely due to the support of Declan Burke.

• The Strand Magazine announced the nominees for its 2008 Critics Award for Best Mystery Novel and Best First Mystery Novel. Intended to recognize excellence in the field of mystery fiction, the Critics Awards are judged by “a select group of book reviewers from the nation’s top daily newspapers.”

In a press release, The Strand explained its award methodology:

“All judges sent to me, as committee chairman, a list of their 10 favorite books. I made a list that included all of these books--and a disparate selection it was--and the five with the most votes were to be the finalists,” said Otto Penzler, the world famous publisher and proprietor of the Mysterious Bookshop. “As it happened, there were three books that made it onto the short list, with five others tied for fourth, so we had a runoff with an extra round of voting to determine the top five nominees. Judges were then asked to list these top five in order of preference, with a first-place vote awarded five points, a second-place vote four points, and so on.”

“I couldn't have been more pleased with this selection of nominees,” said Andrew F. Gulli, the managing editor of The Strand. “When I read several of these books last year, I had a feeling they would be nominated for the Critics Award.”

The awards will be presented at an invitation-only cocktail party on July 8 in New York City. A lifetime achievement award will be given posthumously to English author John Mortimer.

Best Novel:
When Will There Be Good News?, by Kate Atkinson (Little, Brown)
Master of the Delta, by Thomas H. Cook (Houghton Mifflin)
The Brass Verdict, by Michael Connelly (Little, Brown)
Lush Life, by Richard Price (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)
Hollywood Crows, by Joseph Wambaugh (Little, Brown)

Best First Novel:
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson (Knopf)
City of the Sun, by David Levien (Doubleday)
A Cure for Night, by Justin Peacock (Doubleday)
Child 44, by Tom Rob Smith (Grand Central Publishing)
A Carrion Death, by Michael Stanley (Harper)