2023 Anthony Award Winners

Announced At Bouchercon

The winners of the 2023 Anthony Awards – for the best mystery books published in 2022 – were announced Saturday Night (Sept. 2) at Bouchercon in San Diego. The winners are:

• Best Hardcover: Like A Sister by Kellye Garrett (Mulholland Books)

• Best First Novel: The Maid by Nita Prose (Ballantine Books) 

• Best Humorous Novel: Scot in a Trap by Catriona McPherson (Severn House)

• Best Historical Novel: Anywhere You Run by Wanda M. Morris (William Morrow & Company)

• Best Paperback/eBook/Audiobook: The Quarry Girls by Jess Lourey (Thomas & Mercer)

• Best Children’s/YA Novel: Enola Holmes and the Elegant Escapade by Nancy Springer (Wednesday Books)

• Best Short Story: “Beauty and the Beyotch” by Barb Goffman (Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine)

• Best Critical/Non-Fiction: The Life of Crime: Detecting the History of Mysteries and their Creators by Martin Edwards (Collins Crime Club)

• Best Anthology: Crime Hits Home: A Collection of Stories from Crime Fiction’s Top Authors edited by S.J. Rozan (Hanover Square Press)

Congratulation to all the winners and finalists!

Michael Koryta: If You’re Not From

Maine, You’ll Always Be “From Away”

I moved to Maine when I was 15, and lived there for eight years. For those who have never visited, it's a marvelous place with a coastline like no other, craggy granite outcroppings, foghorns, lighthouses, lobster boats hauling in the day’s catch, and some of the nicest people you’d ever want to meet. The thing is, no matter how long you’ve lived there, if you weren’t born there you will forever be known as “from away” until the day you die. As novelist Michael Koryta recently wrote in Crime Reads, “It was in Maine that I became aware of the acronym PFA, which stands for 'People From Away.' This is one of the great terms for outsiders I’ve ever heard. There is Maine, and there is ‘Away.’ My latest novel, An Honest Man, is set in Maine and was written in Maine. This might make one think it qualifies as Maine fiction – and I respect your confusion. I’ve lived part-time in Maine for eight years now, and there are two disqualifiers in there. You can’t be a Mainer if you live in the state for “part” of a year (waivers may be considered for natives) and if the word following the number 8 is years rather than generations, don’t even think about it. There’s a Mafia sensibility to it, and I think of Al Pacino as Lefty, explaining things to Johnny Depp in Donnie Brasco: ‘When I introduce you, I’m gonna say, ‘This is a friend of mine.’ That means you’re a connected guy. Now if I said instead, ‘this is a friend of ours,’ that would mean you’re a made guy.’ Replace ‘made’ with “Maine” and I think you’ve about got it. I’m a connected guy. Closest I’ll ever get.” [Note: If it weren’t for the winters I’d still be living in Maine, and I’d still be “from away.”]

UNSOLVED COLD CASE

Two SC Women And A Toddler Went

To A Gospel Concert, Then Vanished

Sometime around 10:30 on the evening of April 3, 1987, Sarah Boyd, her toddler, Kimberly Janis Boyd, and a friend named Linda McCord attended a gospel concert in Walterboro, South Carolina. After it wrapped up they got into McCord’s blue Lincoln to make their way back to Orangeburg County where both women lived, but they never made it home. An eyewitness later recalled seeing the Lincoln traveling through Dorchester County with another vehicle—which the witness couldn’t describe—following behind. Around midnight, Sarah’s husband, Phillip J. Boyd, returned from his job to an empty home. He initially wasn’t concerned, believing Sarah and Kimberly could be with relatives or McCord, and he went to sleep. The following morning around 6:00 he contacted police and reported his wife and daughter missing. The following day, Phillip located the abandoned broken-down vehicle, but there was no trace of Sarah, their daughter, or McCord. According to authorities, the car had overheated after a freeze plug blew. Three years later, in 1990, the missing mother’s credit card was used at a shopping mall in the area. Detectives noted the signature on the receipt wasn’t a match with Sarah’s handwriting and barely legible. Investigators were never able to determine who may have used the card or if the person had anything to do with the missing persons case. The Dorchester Sheriff’s Office believes foul play was involved in the disappearances, but no trace of the three has ever been discovered.

From Paris To Montreal: Five Of The

Most Daring Museum Heists In History

As you probably know by now, I love heist movies and books. When the genre comes up, most of us think of such films as The Thomas Crown Affair, Ocean’s 8, or Audrey Hepburn’s How To Steal a Million. While these movies are fun and capture the imagination, they also exhibit a certain Hollywood style that doesn’t always occur in real life. Case in point: just last week, London’s Metropolitan Police confirmed the opening of an investigation into treasures—including semi-precious stones and gold jewelry dating from the 15th century BC to the 19th century AD—that the museum says have been “missing, stolen or damaged” over a number of years. An employee at the museum has been dismissed, with “legal action” pending, the statement added. While Hartwig Fischer, the outgoing museum director, said the incident was highly unusual and that the museum has tightened security arrangements, such crimes are nothing new. With that in mind, CNN compiled this list of five infamous heists that made headlines, from Vincenzo Peruggia’s theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre in Paris in 1911, to a heist straight out of an action flick, when three masked thieves entered the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in 1972 via a rooftop skylight

The 25 Greatest Cinematic Cat

Performances Of All Time (Ranked)

While a Venn diagram might show a sizable overlap between cozy mysteries and cats, not all stories that have cats are cozies (nor vice versa). To expand on that same theme, not all movies with cats in the cast are mysteries or thrillers at all…but an article on the subject by film critic Bilge Ebiri in Vulture was enough to catch my attention.  As he notes, “While the history of movies is filled with dog performers—there’s even an award at Cannes given out for canine actors—it’s often harder to find cats acting onscreen, given their unruliness, independence, and, well, small brains. (There are no actual cats in Cats, however, so maybe they’re smarter than we realize.) This also makes it that much more impressive when we do see cats onscreen—real cats, not CGI or animatronic ones—giving compelling performances. Admittedly, it often takes a multitude of cat actors to make one truly great movie cat, but still, it’s a joy to behold when it all comes together.” From Church in Stephen King’s Pet Sematary to Jonesy in Alien to Cat in The Long Goodbye, here are perhaps the 25 greatest cinematic cat performances of all time.

Coming Next Week!!

INDIGO ROAD

“Indigo Road is a beautifully wrought, hard-biting story with elements of classic noir presented through a prism of modern sensibilities. A fantastic read.” –S.A. Cosby, bestselling author of Razorblade Tears 

While still slinging drinks fulltime at The Sandbar in Folly Beach, Jack Connor works a side gig as a licensed bounty hunter. One afternoon, as he's transporting his latest bail skip named Willis Ronson back to jail, his SUV is ambushed by a team of gunmen, killing Ronson instantly and seriously injuring his court-appointed attorney, Alisha Dupree. Connor can’t help but poke around the edges of the deadly incident and quickly learns that Ronson was a man of many secrets, including a mysterious woman from his past who has caused him to be sucked into a domestic terrorist fringe group.