ROGUE MALES NOMINATED FOR MACAVITY AWARD

Thanks to all who've written, Tweeted or posted to Facebook congratulations on ROGUE MALES being a Macavity Award finalist.

The complete list of nominees follows:



Macavity Award Nominations 2010

The Macavity Awards are nominated and voted on by members of Mystery Readers International. The 2010 Macavity Nominations are for books and stories published in 2009. Mystery Readers Journal is MRI's publication. The winners will be announced at Bouchercon, the World Mystery Convention, in October. Bouchercon will be held in San Francisco in 2010. This award is named for the "mystery cat" of T.S. Eliot (Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats).

Best Mystery Novel
• Bury Me Deep by Megan Abbott (Simon & Schuster)
• Tower by Ken Bruen and Reed Farrel Coleman (Busted Flush Press)
• Necessary as Blood by Deborah Crombie (Wm. Morrow)
• Nemesis by Jo Nesbo, translated by Don Bartlett (HarperCollins)
• The Brutal Telling by Louise Penny (Minotaur)
• The Shanghai Moon by S.J. Rozan (Minotaur)

Best First Mystery Novel
• The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley (Delacorte)
• Running from the Devil by Jamie Freveletti (Wm. Morrow)
• A Bad Day for Sorry by Sophie Littlefield (Minotaur)
• The Ghosts of Belfast by Stuart Neville (Soho Crime)
• A Beautiful Place to Die by Malla Nunn (Picador)

Best Mystery Nonfiction
• L.A. Noir: The Struggle for the Soul of America's Most Seductive City by John Buntin (Random House: Harmony Books)
• Talking about Detective Fiction by P.D. James (Alfred A. Knopf)
• Rogue Males: Conversations & Confrontations About the Writing Life by Craig McDonald (Bleak House Books)
• The Line Up: The World's Greatest Crime Writers Tell the Inside Story of Their Greatest Detectives, edited by Otto Penzler (Little, Brown & Co)
• Provenance: How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art by Laney Salisbury and Aly Sujo (Penguin Press)
• Dame Agatha’s Shorts: An Agatha Christie Short Story Companion by Elena Santangelo (Bella Rosa Books)

Best Mystery Short Story
• “Last Fair Deal Gone Down” by Ace Atkins in Crossroad Blues (Busted Flush Press)
• “Femme Sole” by Dana Cameron in Boston Noir (Akashic Books)
• “Digby, Attorney at Law” by Jim Fusilli, (AHMM, May 2009)
• “Your Turn” by Carolyn Hart in Two of the Deadliest (Harper)
• “On the House” by Hank Phillippi Ryan in Quarry: Crime Stories by New England Writers (Level Best Books)
• “The Desert Here and the Desert Far Away” by Marcus Sakey in Thriller 2: Stories You Just Can’t Put Down (Mira)
• “Amapola” by Luis Alberto Urrea in Phoenix Noir (Akashic Books)

Sue Feder Historical Mystery
• A Trace of Smoke by Rebecca Cantrell (Forge)
• In the Shadow of Gotham by Stefanie Pintoff (Minotaur)
• A Duty to the Dead by Charles Todd (Wm. Morrow)
• Serpent in the Thorns by Jeri Westerson (Minotaur)
• Among the Mad by Jacqueline Winspear (Henry Holt)

PRINT THE LEGEND ON UNABRIDGED AUDIO

This weekend, I completed a listen to the newly released, unabridged audio version of PRINT THE LEGEND by Recorded Books and featuring Tom Stechschulte as reader.



PRINT THE LEGEND is the third of the Hector Lassiter novels and the third to be read by Tom. Tom was my first choice to serve as the voice of Hector Lassiter and all those who people Hector's world including Ernest Hemingway, Orson Welles, John Dos Passos, Rita Hayworth, Marlene Dietrich and a host of other historical figures.




Tom earlier read my debut novel, HEAD GAMES — one in which Hector narrates the tale — eerily bringing to life the voice and attitude of the man I'd been hearing in my head as I composed the eight novels in the Hector Lassiter series. (Yes, all eight are already written; number four, ONE TRUE SENTENCE, will be released by Minotaur Books in April 2011). You can hear a sample of Tom reading from HEAD GAMES here.



Next came TOROS & TORSOS, which is presented in third-person POV, and required Tom to embody not only a younger Hector Lassiter than the 57-year-old man of the first novel, but also to portray Ernest Hemingway; a young, obsessed Orson Welles and a woman I envisioned as the kind of ultimate femme fatale. A sample of Tom reading TOROS can be found here.

And now we come to PRINT THE LEGEND. Hector Lassiter is 65-years-old throughout most of this book, and Tom gives Hector the charisma and bearing appropriate to a legendary writer who has been dubbed "The man who writes what he lives and lives what he writes," as well as, "The Last Man Standing of the Lost Generation."



PRINT is Tom's best peformance yet, giving us not only a convincing old and ailing Ernest Hemingway, but also the writer's formidable, alcoholic and dangerous widow, Mary...a passel of Hemingway scholars, the deadly FBI agent Donovan Creedy and the book's heroine, young, Scottish and very pregnant fiction writer Hannah Paulson.

You can read an interview I conducted with Tom earlier this year here.

PRINT THE LEGEND, the recording, is available from Audible here, where you can also sample the opening passages of the recording. The audiobook is also available at your local library.