ITW Announces

Thriller Awards Nominees

Last week the International Thriller Writers announced the nominees for the 2022 Thriller Awards, which will be presented Saturday, June 4 during ThrillerFest in New York City.

Nominees for Best Hardcover Novel are:

• Megan Abbott, The Turnout (Penguin/Putnam)
• S. A. Cosby – Razorblade Tears (Flatiron Books)
• Alice Feeney – Rock Paper Scissors (Flatiron Books)
• Rachel Howzell Hall – These Toxic Things (Thomas & Mercer)
• Alma Katsu – Red Widow (Penguin/Putnam)
• Eric Rickstad – I Am Not Who You Think I Am (Blackstone Publishing)

Nominees for Best First Novel include:

• Abigail Dean – Girl A (HarperCollins)
• Eloísa Díaz – Repentance (Agora Books)
• Amanda Jayatissa – My Sweet Girl (Berkley)
• David McCloskey – Damascus Station (W.W. Norton & Company)
• Eric Redman – Bones Of Hilo (Crooked Lane Books)

Please click here to see the nominees in all other categories. Good luck to all, and see you at ThrillerFest!

How A Murderer Duped The

Legal System—And Two “Literati”

On the night of March 4, 1957, 23-year-old Edgar Smith drove 15-year-old Victoria Zielinski to a lovers’ lane in Bergen County, New Jersey, and "decerebrated" her (that’s the scientific term for bashing someone’s brains out). The police quickly arrested Smith, a former Marine who at the time was married with a child, for the murder. A jury took less than two hours to find him guilty, and he was sentenced to death. He was scheduled to die in August 1958, but appeals to various state and federal courts kept him alive, as did Knopf editor Sophie Wilkins and author William F. Buckley, both of whom argued that Smith had been framed. Fast forward a decade and the killer was re-sentenced to time served; in December 1971 he was released from prison, after spending almost 15 years waiting to be electrocuted. Having been divorced while in prison, in 1974 he married Paige Hiemier, whom he sexually abused and repeatedly assaulted. Two years later he pulled 33-year-old Lefteriya Ozbun into his car and stabbed her so savagely that “only the handle of knife stuck out” of her body. She managed to escape, and the following March he was convicted of attempted murder, kidnapping, and other serious crimes; as part of his complicated legal strategy, he took the stand and confessed to having a “desire to rape women.” How Smith managed to dupe the legal system—and two notable literati—is the subject of this Airmail article.

Why Does Berlin Continue To Be

The Mecca Of All Espionage Fiction?

While all eyes are on Ukraine and Keev at the moment, no city has been a deeper well for espionage fiction than Berlin. The fifty-one years bookended by Kristallnacht in 1938 and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 provide the rich historical dramas that continue to excite writers’ imaginations, and there’s a long and growing list of novels that contribute to the city’s image as a hotbed of spies and conspirators. Berlin has preserved the iconic symbols of those years in the Stasi museum and at Checkpoint Charlie’s hop-on, hop-off tourist bus stop, but it is the canon of Berlin spy fiction that excites the popular imagination. The city was the friction point between the communist bloc and the NATO Alliance, and both sides recruited sources, placed penetration agents and, when necessary, undertook legally sanctioned criminal activity against each other. Two novelists—Joseph Kanon and Paul Vidich—have written Cold War novels set in the German city that are set for publication this month, and Crime Reads tracked them down to learn why—more than 30 years after the wall crumbled—Berlin still resonates so firmly in the minds of spy writers (and readers).

How Anthony Broadwater Was

Exonerated  40 Years After

Conviction For Alice Sebold’s Rape

“I know that no apology can change what happened to you and never will. I deeply regret what you have been through [and] I am sorry most of all for the fact that the life you could have led was unjustly robbed from you.” Those are the words recently written by author Alice Sebold to Anthony Broadwater, the man whom she accused of raping her at the age of 18 in Syracuse, NY in May 1981. Police arrested Broadwater, who was 20 at the time and had recently returned home to Syracuse from serving in the Marine Corps in California because his father was ill. In 1982 he was found guilty of sexually assaulting Sebold, despite his repeated claims that he had anything to do with the crime. He spent the next 16 years in prison trying to clear his name, an effort that continued long after his release in 1998. His conviction finally was overturned last November, 41 years after the original crime and only after his attorneys successfully argued that the reliance on the analysis of microscopic hair evidence collected after Sebold’s rape was flawed and led examiners to give testimony that overwhelmingly favored prosecutors, who also were found to have engaged in misconduct. Sebold initially identified another man as her attacker, but prosecutors at the time falsely told her the person she indicated and Broadwater were friends and they deceived her by standing next to one another. 

Worst Roommate Ever: New Netflix

Show Exposes Roommates From Hell

With a title like Worst Roommate Ever, Netflix’s latest true-crime series promises a collection of wild residential horror stories. The vilest of the bunch—as noted by The Daily Beast’s Nick Schager—is a man named Jamison Bachman (pictured), a Philadelphia native who spent the better part of his life driving numerous women mad as a serial squatter. “Capping off his decades-long reign of terror by murdering the only person in the world who cared for him, Bachman truly was the most monstrous roommate ever, and his saga is a stark reminder that when it comes to welcoming strangers into your home, renters should always beware,” the story says. At the center of Bachman’s tale is a woman named Alex, who in 2017 posted a Craigslist ad looking for a roommate to share her apartment in Philadelphia. The series also details the torment suffered by two of Jamison’s previous targets: former girlfriend Arleen and single professional Sonia, both of whom lived in New York, and learned in short order that Bachman was nearly impossible to escape.

Seven-Thirty Thursday centers on the basic contradictions of life: the tales we are told as children and come to believe as gospel, vs. the painful truths that often remain fallow and undisturbed, until someone comes along and kicks them to the surface. The American South is littered with such abandoned truths, tangled up in the roots of bigotry and racism, and nourished with equal parts hypocrisy, duplicity, and betrayal. When former star athlete Rick Devlin returns home to Charleston after thirty years’ absence to address the sins of his dying father, he unearths one of these disturbing truths, a vicious incident from the past that a small cadre of folks have gone to great lengths to bury forever. Despite a chorus of warnings to let the past rest in peace, Devlin begins to dig, exposing the lies and deceit of an older generation, as well as a cruel legacy of power and greed threatened by the reversal of old fortunes.