Soho Crime's weekend newsletter shared the sad news that yet another great crime writer has died - this time the English writer Peter Lovesey
Their tribute does it best: https://mailchi.mp/sohopress/remembering-peter-lovesey
But the line:
In addition to the scope of his unparalleled crime fiction career, Peter Lovesey will be remembered by his many grieving friends as the paragon of decency, compassion, loyalty, self-discipline, and pride in good work—in short,
... Read Update
ENTRIES NOW OPEN FOR THE 2025 DANGER AWARDS
BAD Sydney Crime Writers Festival is pleased to announce that entries for the 2025 Danger Awards are now open.
Now in their eighth year, the Danger Awards continue to honour books featuring Australia as a setting for stories about crime and justice. At BAD Sydney Crime Writers Festival in September 2025 ... Read Update
Book lovers around the world are coming together from April 21-27 for the Global Book Crawl, and of course Australia’s local bookshops are in on the action! The Global Book Crawl is a worldwide celebration of local bookshops and those who love them. There’ll be seven different Aussie Book Crawls taking place, alongside crawls in Firenze, Nairobi, Kuala Lumpur, Malaga, Basel, Brooklyn NYC and many more (click ... Read Update
Vale to the wonderful, funny and very clever Kerry Greenwood.
Another way too young. Thoughts with David and the rest of her family, friends and cats.
Yesterday Andrew Nette, on BlueSky, posted a link out about the death of the Irish Author Ken Bruen. Only 74 years old, had led a life no two ways about that, and wrote some of the most wonderful, dry, noir styled works I've had the pleasure to read. As Andrew put it in his post "I loved his inspector Brant series, a terrifically lean & nasty series of novels in which it was often difficult to tell the difference between the cops and the criminals." For a start, 74 is too young to die, and for a ... Read Update
Fourth Status Report on the Project 'KEEP THE READING QUEUE UNDER CONTROL'.
As always - the last fortnight entries and The Next Up Reading List in full.
Third Status Report on the Project 'KEEP THE READING QUEUE UNDER CONTROL'.
Second Status Report on the Project 'KEEP THE READING QUEUE UNDER CONTROL'.
Think of this, if you will, as a Status Report on the Project 'KEEP THE READING QUEUE UNDER CONTROL' which is officially now a thing around here. You never know, reporting on it like a project might keep the targets clear, and the deliverables.. err ... delivered.
The reader of these updates might remember I went into Christmas 2024 intending to read as many as possible from a pile of books that I listed in my December 2024 newsletter. Surprisingly given the ... Read Update
All the books and reviews for 2024 are now over from the old site and relaid out. Will be worrying about blog posts / updates later on as they are less important. Now onto 2023....Read Update
Things are progressing in the catch up of books / reviews etc onto this new site. It's taking a while, I'd forgotten just how many reviews / books had been added in the last 18 years.
The plan was to pull in books as new ones from the same author came out. That has "sort of" worked, but I've also been working my way backwards through the most recent reviews posted, and sideways as somebody triggers a memory, or something pops up in a list somewhere.
Basically there is no plan, I'm getting there. Read Update
I realise this is ridiculously, embarrassingly late, but better late than never right. The longlists were announced ages ago, as were the winners so a summary:
Ritual of Fire, DV Bishop (WINNER)
The Caretaker, Gabriel Bergmoser
Pet, Cathering Chidgey
Devil's Breath, Jill Johnson
... Read Update
Along with the RSS Feeds, there is now a newsletter option on AustCrimeFiction - the link to subscribe is down the bottom of the site, there won't be a lot of newsletters, basically I'll send one when there's been a reasonable number of new posts gone live.
Also, in order to provide a regular update on activities, there's now a single page:
https://www.austcrimefiction.org/last-fortnight-on-austcrime
that lists the last fortnight's updates (blogs), books, ... Read Update
As you can tell from looking, AustCrimeFiction.org has had "yet another refresh". This time not because I was bored, but for a slight change in direction. For ages now I've been looking for a way to better manage the review queues - it's tricky keeping track of what books need to be read when (I know first world problems), but it does lead to some annoyed publishers, publicists and authors, and leaves me panic struck sometimes.
So to do something about the constant feelings of "where / what / oh god I've forgotten", I've added a lot of fields, lists and information to ... Read Update
History and humanity: 2023 Ngaio Marsh Awards finalists plunge readers into page-turning tales about who we are
The winners were announced in November, all of which are books WELL worth reading.
BEST NON-FICTION
WINNER: MISSING PERSONS by Steve Braunias (HarperCollins)
A NEW DAWN by Emeli Sione (Mila’s Books)
THE DEVIL YOU KNOW by Dr Gwen Adshead & Eileen Horne (Faber)
DOWNFALL: THE DESTRUCTION OF CHARLES MACKAY by Paul Diamond (Massey University Press) ... Read Update