2024 Anthony Award Winners

Announced At Nashville Boucheron

The winners of the 2024 Anthony Awards were announced at Bouchercon in Nashville this past Saturday evening. They are:

Best Novel: All the Sinners Bleed, by S.A. Cosby

Best First Novel: Mother-Daughter Murder Night, by Nina Simon

Best Paperback/eBook/Audiobook: Hide, by Tracy Clark

Best Children’s/Young Adult: Enola Holmes and the Mark of the Mongoose, by Nancy Springer

Best Critical/Nonfiction: A Fever in the Heartland, by Timothy Egan

Best Anthology/Collection: Killin’ Time in San Diego, edited by Holly West

Best Short Story: “Ticket to Ride,” by Dru Ann Love & Kristopher Zgorski

Congratulations to all the winners and nominees.

Eight Retellings Of Classic Literature

For Avid Crime Fiction Fans

     Nineteenth century writer Georges Polti proposed that there are only thirty-six dramatic situations for a story. As Erica Wright recently wrote in Crime Reads, he came to this conclusion by studying classic Greek plays as well as the contemporary literature of his time. “This notion might relieve some pressure for authors,” she says. “It asserts that a good story doesn’t need a shocking premise. Any idea can be original in the hands of new writers with their own unique perspectives. There’s also a distinct pleasure in encountering a familiar tale.”

      In fact, retellings are about possibilities. “What if Sherlock Holmes was a precocious teenage girl?” Wright asks. “What if Elizabeth Bennet used her keen wit to solve crimes? What if Richard III wasn’t really a hunchback? Retellings are all those what-ifs tumbling through space and time, finding infinite variations. And when authors rewrite classic tales, they’re tapping into a primal delight. Even if the source material is somewhat obscure, there’s an acknowledgement that this story has persisted for a reason.”

     With that in mind, she compiled this list of eight books that incorporate established narratives, but approach them from unexpected angles, often violent ones. “I wouldn’t necessarily say the stakes are higher; the marriage market in Pride and Prejudice is serious business,” she says. “But throw in a dead body or two, and there’s a new, appealing layer of suspense.”

Fraud, Abuse, And A Contested

$500 Million Will On The French Riviera

     The Hotel Negresco—considered the crown jewel of Nice, France—is shrouded in controversy. The question on everyone’s mind: Did its late owner, Jeanne Augier, leave her $500 million fortune to an alleged scammer? As John von Sothen last week reported in Air Mail, this autumn, the Cour de Cassation—France’s highest court—will decide whether former Negresco employee Pierre Couette committed abus de faiblesse (abuse of weakness), a legal grab-bag term levied in fraud cases against someone who has exploited the elderly or disabled in hopes of financial gain.

     “Although Couette has been acquitted twice, in 2022 and 2023, prosecutors want one more bite at the apple,” von Sothen says. “They claim that Couette profited from Augier’s clouded mind to obtain an inflated salary and stock options in the Negresco and positions on crucial boards. All the while, Augier was isolated from friends and family, not leaving her apartment on the sixth floor of the hotel.”

     The Negresco case is not dissimilar to the Bettencourt Affair, when Liliane Bettencourt, the heiress to the L’Oréal fortune, gave a fair amount of her $100 billion fortune to a friend, François-Marie Banier, who was ultimately convicted of abus de faiblesse. It’s also reminiscent of the case, reported previously in Air Mail, of Nicole Tapié de Celeyran, the late great-grandniece of painter Henry de Toulouse-Lautrec. At the age of 91, she bequeathed the family château to a couple who claimed to be acting on her behalf.

     “The whole thing is something out of an Agatha Christie novel,” says Pierre Bord, the former director of the Negresco.

DNA COLD CASE

Texas Police Solve Nursing Student's

Kidnapping And Murder After Decades

     A 78-year-old man has now been charged with a murder committed over 40 years ago after a genealogy profile helped investigators identify him as a suspect. Deck Brewer Jr., a man already imprisoned in Massachusetts, has been charged with the 1980 murder of 25-year-old Susan Leigh Wolfe, according to the Austin, Texas, Police Department. As reported by ABC News, Wolfe had just enrolled as a nursing student at the University of Texas at Austin when she was kidnapped one block from her home while walking to a friend's house at around 10 p.m. A witness saw a car stop before the driver exited and grabbed her in a bear hug, then forced her into the back of the vehicle. During an autopsy, a pathologist found evidence of a sexual assault by one of two unknown suspects seen in the car, police said.

     For a year after the murder, investigators followed numerous leads and tracked down dozens of cars that fit the witness's description. Police said over the years they had over 40 persons of interest and conducted interviews with at least six suspects. In April 2023, detectives submitted evidence related to Wolfe's sexual assault to the Texas Department of Public Safety Crime Laboratory, where forensic experts evaluated it and determined it was suitable for testing, police said.

     This past February, the test identified a male suspect and eliminated six others who were not a genetic match. Police then entered the profile into the Combined DNA Index System [CODIS], and found a match with Brewer. Detectives conducted a short interview with Brewer in which he said he had been in Austin and San Antonio, Texas, and an Austin court found probable cause to charge Brewer in the murder of Wolfe.

The 10 Best Mystery Movies In

Which Nobody Can Be Trusted

     It's typical of a mystery movie to include multiple suspects, any one of whom may be the culprit. They're often made this way in order to keep audiences guessing, or sometimes to throw them for a loop as the real culprit is revealed to be someone entirely different. But at the same time, there are usually a handful of characters on the other side, who the audience can feel safe with, and can easily guess that their intentions are good.

     As Dawson Nyffenegger recently pointed out in Collider, however, this this isn't always the case. “Some movies are crafted in such a way that the evidence could implicate everyone, or even no one,” he says. “This makes the viewer guess even more, desperate to figure out who could be responsible for the nefarious deeds pictured in the film. These are the movies where the vast majority of characters, if any at all, cannot be trusted, because there is no telling what motivations the characters have.”

     From Christopher Nolan’s Memento to Jonathan Lynn’s Clue to Rian Johnson’s Knives Out, here’s a list of ten mysteries where you never know whom you can trust.

Coming Tuesday, September 10

The Fall Of Vivaldi

On a rainy night across Europe, several seemingly unrelated

incidents unfold in quick order:

• In the City of Light, a beautiful young Parisian newscaster

named Gabrielle Lamoines is brutally murdered in her bed,

just as…

• A disgraced British billionaire takes a dive from the top floor

terrace of a luxury resort on the island of Cyprus, at the same time that…

• Reporter Carter Logan causes the death of a former lieutenant

of the Italian mafia in a narrow street in Rome, not far from…

• The Tuscan farmhouse where Alessandro Bortolotti, the head

of a hard-right neofascist movement, is plotting a deadly

attack on the G20 global summit, while…

• A notorious Russian oligarch named Georgy Sokolov plans to

auction off a kidnapped American teen named Abby Evans in

an online event streamed from his villa on the island of Ibiza.

Each of these random events has one thing in common: Retired assassin Ronin Phythian, once known as “the most dangerous man alive”...

Beyond All Doubt

[Reed Bunzel writing as Hilton Reed]

“Beyond All Doubt is an edge-of-your-seat fast-moving thrill-ride, kicked off by the reappearance of a dead man and propelling the reader along to the final bullet—and beyond.”— S.J. Rozan, best-selling author of The Mayors of New York

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“Beyond All Doubt is a taut, smart, and emotionally rich thriller. Reed has a sharp eye for character and a screenwriter's feel for action. This tale is sleek as a mink and fast as a bullet.”— T. Jefferson Parker, author of The Rescue and Desperation Reef

“Beyond All Doubt is not a 'who done it,' but a twisty, compelling 'who did what.' Cameron Kane is a sympathetic, yet unrelenting bulldog in his pursuit of the truth about his wife's death. Intriguing and intense, Beyond All Doubt is a winner!”—Matt Coyle, bestselling author of the Rick Cahill crime novels