SHOTSMAG CONFIDENTIAL

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• Crime Writers of Canada announces the 2022 Awards of Excellence
• Second Wife Syndrome by Julia Crouch
• Anna Smith - from investigative journalist to crime writer
• Kathy Wang on Imposter Syndrome
• 2022 Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize shortlist

Crime Writers of Canada announces the 2022 Awards of Excellence Posted: 27 May 2022 03:58 PM PDT   Crime Writers of Canada (CWC) have announced the winners for the 2022 Crime Writers of Canada Awards of Excellence in Canadian Crime Writing. Started in 1984, the annual Crime Writers of Canada Awards of Excellence, then known as the Arthur Ellis Awards, recognizes the best in mystery, crime, and suspense fiction, and crime nonfiction by Canadian authors. The presentation of the winners can be viewed on CWC's YouTube channel:  Best Crime Novel sponsored by Rakuten Kobo, with a $1000 prize Under an Outlaw Moon by Dietrich Kalteis ECW Press Best Crime First Novel sponsored by Writers First, with a $500 prize The Push by Ashley Audrain Viking Canada The Whodunit Award for Best Traditional Mystery sponsored by Jane Doe, with a $500 prize What's the Matter with Mary Jane? By Candas Jane Dorsey ECW Press The Howard Engel Award for Best Crime Novel Set in Canada sponsored by The Engel Family, with a $500 prize Beneath Her Skin by C. S. Porter, Vagrant Press / Nimbus Publishing Inc. Best Crime Novella sponsored by Mystery Magazine, with a $200 prize Letters From Johnny by Wayne Ng Guernica Editions Best Crime Short Story sponsored by Mystery Magazine, with a $300 prize Number 10 Marlborough Place by Elizabeth Elwood Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine Best French Crime Book (Fiction and Nonfiction)  Flots by Patrick Senécal, Editions Alire Best Juvenile or YA Crime Book (Fiction and Nonfiction) sponsored by Shaftesbury, with a $500 prize The Traitor's Blade by Kevin Sands Aladdin (Simon & Schuster) The Brass Knuckles Award for Best Nonfiction Crime Book sponsored by Simpson & Wellenreiter LLP, Hamilton, with a $300 prize The Beatle Bandit by Nate Hendley Dundurn Press The Award for Best Unpublished Manuscript sponsored by ECW Press, with a $500 prize Elmington by Renee Lehnen About Crime Writers of Canada Crime Writers of Canadawas founded in 1982 as a professional organization designed to raise the profile of Canadian crime writers. Members include authors, publishers, editors, booksellers, librarians, reviewers, and literary agents as well as many developing authors. Past winners of the Awards have included major names in Canadian crime writing such as Mario Bolduc, Gail Bowen, Stevie Cameron, Howard Engel, Barbara Fradkin, Louise Penny, Peter Robinson and Eric Wright.

Second Wife Syndrome by Julia Crouch Posted: 26 May 2022 10:00 PM PDT Like most (all?) crime writers, I love Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca.  When Du Maurier was working on the novel, she told her publisher Victor Gollancz that it was 'a sinister tale about a woman who marries a widower ...Psychological and rather macabre'. While I am in no way claiming parity with one of the great classics of twentieth century fiction, Rebecca was, in no small way, one of the inspirations for my new novel, The Daughters. I love Rebecca's nameless flawed narrator: the young second wife, an ingenue, who has no idea what she is getting herself into, the house of monsters she is entering. The pressure she feels to fill Rebecca's perfect shoes and her lack of insight into her own role for Maxim are at once infuriating and heartbreaking. She is, as Olivia Laing says in her Guardian article, Sex, jealousy and gender: Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca 80 years on, 'raw as an egg'.  In The Daughters, I take the young second wife out of Mandalay, place her in a contemporary Muswell Hill eco-house and give her a modern, feminist twist. My Carys, therefore, is a professional woman who has got where she is by hard work, not birth or chance. She is mixed-race, northern and working class and when she meets her much older future husband Bill she is starting out in a profession (architecture) where finding anyone with just one of those attributes is a rarity, let alone all three combined into one person. She is also living with a woman at this point, so her decision to have a relationship with Bill is a very active choice on her part.  Indeed, where the second Mrs de Winter's passivity is one of her driving forces, Carys is all about action. She cares. She works hard to help her younger stepdaughter Lucy through the trauma that still reverberates after her mother Alice's supposed suicide twelve years earlier.  So far, so likeable and perfect for Carys. But there are Alice's shoes to fill, both literally – Carys wears Alice's dog-walking boots to walk Alice's dog – and metaphorically. Like the first Mrs de Winter, Alice was on the surface a class act. A pioneering GP who set up a revolutionary health centre in Hackney combining NHS and complementary therapies for the local low-income families, she was also an accomplished artist and keen botanist. on top of all this, she was also a loving and caring mother to her daughters, Lucy and the older Sara (there was a lost baby boy in between the girls). Everybody loved Alice. She is a tough act to follow. To make things even harder for Carys, I also watch her through Sara's eyes. Sara is – if you squint and give me a long piece of rope – the Mrs Danvers of the plot. She is just a couple of years younger than her stepmother, which is an potentially incendiary situation in itself. But, when, at the beginning of the novel, we learn that Sara has discovered there are questions about Alice's supposed suicide, that the coffin she and her little sister wept over at the funeral was in fact empty, the existing cracks in the relationship between Carys and Sara expand into ravines.  So what did happen to Alice?  And what, Sara wonders, was the sequence of events leading up to Carys and Bill getting together? She has always thought that her stepmother moved into the family home with unseemly haste after Alice's death. But now she smells a big stinking rat about everything that happened back then. Is Carys the perfect being she presents to the world? While the questions about the circumstances around Alice's and Rebecca's deaths are raised at different narrative points, the idea that both of the dead first wives may have been too good to be true is at the heart of each novel. Also, both the second Mrs de Winter and Carys are seen by members of their new households as arrivistes – the first because of her utter lack of sophistication, the second because of her colour, class and accent. Indeed, Carys meets Bill when she is on student placement at the celebrated architecture practice he runs. Both women marry in and marry up.  I can't say any more, because – and this is one of the great drawbacks of discussing crime fiction – that would involve spoilers. But I hope that you will go some way to enjoying The Daughters just as much as I do Rebecca, and that you will find the ending just as unexpected and twisting. The Daughters by Julia Crouch (Bookouture) Out Now My father said my mother killed herself. My sister says he's lying. The day of our mother's funeral, my little sister Lucy and I clung to our father's side. He promised he'd get us through it, and we believed him. But then I discovered that the coffin we wept over was empty. Dad says he was trying to protect us – that he thought it would be easier to grieve if we didn't know our mother's body was never found. His new wife says she just wants to help us move on from the past. Then Lucy has a flash of memory that leaves her shaking. Our father. A woman she doesn't recognise. A knife… She insists she knows something about the day our mother died, but it's buried too deep to see clearly. What happened to our mother? I need to find the truth. But I have no idea who I can trust. And what if the answer puts my life in danger? More information about Julia Crouch and her work can be found on her website. You can also find her on Twitter @thatjuliacrouch and on Instagram @juliageek. She can also be found on Facebook.

Anna Smith - from investigative journalist to crime writer Posted: 25 May 2022 11:00 PM PDT As a frontline daily newspaper journalist for more than twenty years, I encountered at first hand dozens of characters that could have walked into any crime novel. From Glasgow hard men ruling their criminal empires, to Loyalist and Republican paramilitaries on the streets of Belfast; from gangsters living the champagne life on the Costa del Sol, to young female heroin addicts propped up in shop doorways selling their bodies for sex. Throw in a few dodgy cops and lawyers and you've got a raft of material that might make a novel.  I worked at the Daily Record for more than 20 years – ten of them as Chief Reporter, travelling the world to cover conflicts from Rwanda to Kosovo. So many of the stories and the harrowing cruelty I witnessed have stayed with me, so whenever I'm writing about the struggle of refugees fleeing their homeland, I can call up so many haunting images.  It was these images and memories of my days as a reporter that compelled me to embark on my first series of crime novels, featuring the Rosie Gilmour character, a gritty Glasgow journalist who tears down the walls of corruption to get her story in the newspaper.  When you write from your own experience like that, basing the character on many of your own traits, you are forced to expose yourself in ways you wouldn't have to when you are reporting for a newspaper. Although writing fiction was a departure from what I did as a reporter, I wasn't really fazed by having to create a character a bit like myself—though not exactly like myself, I should stress! I write as honestly as I can, and I hope it comes across in my novels.  The method of creating the Rosie Gilmour novels had to be different from a police procedural crime novel, where the objective of the story is to nail the criminal and put him/her behind bars. But for a journalist, the procedure is to investigate the story, follow the leads, gather the evidence, and finally expose the perpetrator on the front page of the newspaper. I approached each novel as I would a newspaper investigation, only the aim here was to create a work of fiction that would resonate with readers. I rested Rosie for a bit to shift into the gangland genre and created a reluctant woman gangland boss in the shape of Kerry Casey, who takes over the reins of her Glasgow crime family. I really enjoyed the characters who walked into these novels and have been delighted at how popular this genre is.  My latest series features Glasgow ex-female cop turned private eye, Billie Carlson, who's half Swedish, half Glasgow-Irish, with a haunted backstory that makes her a desolate kind of figure. The novel is told in the first person, so I hope it pulls the reader in from page one. I'm really enjoying exploring the characters Billie meets as she takes on a case, and she doesn't always use conventional practices. She has her own moral code that doesn't always match the police's. Billie is her own woman and if she thinks the end game is worth pursuing, she will always do it her way. Until I Find You by Anna Smith (Quercus Books) Out Now. When you've lost everything, you'll stop at nothing Billie Carlson left the police force under a cloud. Once a promising young officer she now works as a private investigator, rooting out insurance scams and spying on cheating spouses. One morning a distraught young woman comes into her office saying that her baby has been stolen. Her story seems unbelievable, yet something about her makes Billie want to help - Billie knows what it's like to lose someone too. To get to the bottom of the case Billie must rattle some dangerous cages and rely on old police friends for inside help. Soon she discovers a network of crime deeper and far more twisted than she ever could have imagined. But is she in way over her head? More information about Anna Smith and her work can be found on her website. You can also find her on Twitter @annasmithauthor You can also find her on Facebook.

Kathy Wang on Imposter Syndrome Posted: 25 May 2022 10:00 PM PDT   The concept for Impostor Syndrome is simple. It asks: what if one of the world's most powerful female technology executives was in fact a foreign spy? The spy in my novel is a woman named Julia Lerner. Julia's the COO of Tangerine, a social media and internet giant. When she was placed in the US, Julia's handlers thought she'd just have a sort of middle class life in the Bay Area. So her ascension to her current level is really a result of her own work and skill. What the book explores then, is what happens when Julia's asked to put her job and position in danger, in order to fulfil the requests from the motherland. As by this time, Julia has made for herself an incredible life in the United States: lots of money, an important job where she's fawned over, a very handsome new husband. Does she put that all at risk and obey orders? Or try and wrest back some control from her handlers? At the same time, there is a lower level employee at Tangerine, Alice Lu, who one day comes across some unusual activity with the servers. Alice starts to try and figure out who might be stealing data from the company, and that starts a cat and mouse chase between the two women. This book explores ideas around motherhood, career, money, internet privacy, and espionage - all topics I am interested in. However it is also a love letter to democracy. My parents were immigrants from Taiwan, and they always reminded me that regardless of the many flaws of the US, it was one of the greatest countries on earth. And I wanted to explore that in the novel, the idea that yes, we have these agencies like the CIA and the FBI but that in fact one of our most powerful tools for our national security is that we have democratic processes, we have freedom of speech, we have people from all over the world who come and live here. Alice is herself an immigrant from China, a country that in real life is having escalating tensions with the United States - but in this case, she is the one actually chasing Julia, who is the Russian agent. And Julia herself is conflicted, because deep down she really likes her life in California. She likes her beautiful house. She likes her husband. She likes living as an American as it were, with all its freedoms. Kathy Wang is the author of Impostor Syndrome (VERVE Books) Out Now Julia Lerner is one of the most powerful people in Silicon Valley and an icon to professional women across the country. She is the COO of Tangerine, one of America's biggest technology companies. She is also a Russian spy. Julia has been carefully groomed to reach the upper echelons of the company and use Tangerine's software to covertly funnel information back to Russia's largest intelligence agency. Alice Lu works as a low-level analyst within Tangerine, having never quite managed to climb the corporate ladder. One afternoon, when performing a server check, Alice discovers some unusual activity and is burdened with two powerful but distressing suspicions: Tangerine's privacy settings aren't as rigorous as the company claims they are and the person abusing this loophole might be Julia Lerner herself. Now, she must decide what to do with this information - before Julia finds out she has it. More information about Kathy Wang and her work can be found on her website. You can also follow her on Twitter @bykathywang.

2022 Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize shortlist Posted: 27 May 2022 04:30 PM PDT   The following six authors are all in the running for the £10,000 prize. Click on each of their names to find out more about the book and read an interview with the author: The Apollo Murders by Chris Hadfield (Quercus) Where Blood Runs Cold by Giles Kristian (Bantam Press, Transworld Publishers) The Vacation by John Marrs (Pan, Pan Macmillan) The Plant Hunter by T.L. Mogford (Welbeck Publishing Group) Sankofa by Chibundu Onuzo (Virago, Little, Brown Book Group) Moonlight and the Pearler's Daughter by Lizzie Pook (Mantle, Pan Macmillan) Submissions were open to writers of any nationality, writing in English. Authors from Nigeria, Canada, the UK and UK/Norway are represented on the shortlist, the six being selected from a total of 129 submissions. Niso Smith, Founder, commented: 'It's uplifting to see debut and established authors alike embracing their sense of adventure. Adventures are about growth and living in the moment, and these authors all transport us to a specific moment in time. Whether we're skiing in the bitter cold of northern Norway, or sailing up China's Yangtze River, our disbelief is magically suspended. The authors demonstrate determination, show us true jeopardy, pique our curiosity and allow us to form a human connection with their characters. Congratulations to all six for these riveting novels.' The Prize works with a panel of librarians and library staff from across the UK to select the shortlist which focuses on 'An Adventure for Everyone.' The Foundation encourages readers to select the one that appeals to them most, then read, share and recommend. Readers can download the shortlist poster here and share with their library, bookshop, or in their living room window. These six titles are now with this year's judging panel. As part of an online campaign over the summer months, you will be invited to participate in the Reader's Vote, which will see the readers' votes equate to one seat on the judging panel. The campaign will also include a series of online author events plus engagement opportunities for libraries and reading groups. Read what the idea of adventure means to the judges here. The winner of the Best Published Novel will be revealed on 21st September 2022 at an online awards ceremony. Keep up to date with all activity in the meantime via our twitter @Wilbur_Niso_Fdn.

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