Bouchercon Cometh
As Bouchercon approaches next weekend the crime fiction world will descend on Chicago for a Labor Day Weekend confab of enormous proportions. Numerous awards are up for grabs including some of the most prestigious in the crime fiction world. The Anthony Award nominees for Best Novel include the following luminaries of the Biz: Ken Bruen, John Katzenbach, Laura Lippman, Julia Spencer-Fleming, TJ Parker, and William Kent Krueger. The question is, who is going to win?
Laura Lippman won last year for Every Secret Thing. Spencer-Fleming won two years in the best first novel category. I think Ken Bruen will win in 2006 for The Magdalen Martyrs, a far better novel than the Killing of the Tinkers. My hunch is that TJ Parker will win for California Girl. It’s an ambitious novel, one part mystery, one part family drama spanning decades along the jeweled shores of Orange County. Parker has been a fixture since Laguna Heat was released back in the late Eighties. He’s a fine writer and deserving of the recognition.
Lippman is another crime writer pushing the envelope, expanding the genre in the literary direction with her social awareness. She is walking a tricky road, risking an existing audience in search of more complex and powerful stories. Unlike Dennis Lehane, who announced the end of his PI series, Lippman is moving more gradually away from her Tess Monahan roots, alternating between standalones and Tess books. I admire her work and the guts it takes to do what she’s doing.