Publishers Weekly Picks

By Peg Brantley Writer at Work, Stumbling Toward Publication
These are PW's choices for the best crime fiction of the year. They are apparently simply chosen by staffers, and if they argue, I suppose the senior staffer wins.

The End of Everything
Megan Abbott (Little, Brown/Reagan Arthur)
This psychological thriller charts the friendship of two 13-year-old girls in pre-cellphone suburban America, one of whom disappears a few weeks before their eighth-grade graduation.

Started Early, Took My Dog
Kate Atkinson (Little, Brown/Reagan Arthur)
Semiretired PI Jackson Brody returns to his Yorkshire hometown to trace the biological parents of a woman adopted in the 1970s, but finds only questions in this intensely plotted, multilayered novel.

Revenger
Rory Clements (Bantam)
John Shakespeare, the playwright’s older brother and spy, seeks the truth behind the mysterious disappearance of the colonists of Roanoke, Va., in this first-rate Tudor historical full of intricate plots.

Hurt Machine
Reed Farrell Coleman (Tyrus)
Razor-edged contemporary whodunits don’t get much better than Coleman’s seventh Moe Prager mystery, in which the Brooklyn PI, recently diagnosed with cancer, looks into the stabbing murder of his ex-wife’s estranged sister.

A Simple Act of Violence
R.J. Ellory (Overlook)
A must-read for noir fans, this crime thriller charts the efforts of Det. Robert Miller to catch a serial killer strangling women in an upscale Washington, D.C., neighborhood.

Field Gray
Philip Kerr (Putnam/Marian Wood)
Set in 1954 with flashbacks to the 1930s and ’40s, Kerr’s outstanding seventh Bernie Gunther novel finds the tough, wisecracking Berlin cop under interrogation by the U.S. authorities for his role in saving the life of the future East German spy master, the real-life Erich Mielke.

The Most Dangerous Thing
Laura Lippman (Morrow)
Childhood friends, long since splintered off, uneasily reunite after the death of one of their own, in this unsettling stand-alone from Lippman, who sets the action in the Baltimore suburb where she grew up.

A Trick of the Light
Louise Penny (Minotaur)
Chief Inspector Gamache of the Québec Sûreté and his team look into the mysterious death of a woman ­found with a broken neck in the garden of artist Clara Morrow­in this subtle seventh entry in this acclaimed traditional series.

Two for Sorrow
Nicola Upson (Harper)
Upson upsets readers’ expectations with a surprise three-quarters into her psychologically rich third Josephine Tey mystery, in which the author of The Daughter of Time draws inspiration for her novel-in-progress from the 1903 execution of two women convicted for murdering babies.

Which of these have you read? I confess I have not read one of them. Not one.
Are you more (or less) compelled to read books that appear on lists such as this one?
What were your favorites for the year?

What I learned about print reviews

 By Judith Yates Borger, who never really lost faith in the power of newspapers

Because my emphasis is on epublishing, I hadn't paid a lot of attention to print reviews. That changed this week when my local newspaper, the StarTribune ran a Sunday review of my next book, Whose Hand? A Skeeter Hughes Mystery.

The reviewer, Steve Weinberg, a Columbus, Ohio journalist, said that Whose Hand? is "filled with places and events recognizable to Twin Cities residents."  He added that it's written by "a skilled stylist, and the plot unfolds without flaws of illogic. Far too many mysteries are bedeviled by illogical plot developments." Weinberg, who collects books about journalists, paired his review of Whose Hand? with a review of Killing Kate, by Julie Kramer, whose protagonist is also a reporter. It's unusual, he said, to have two books about two different female journalists released at the same time in the same city. He hailed both books as "first rate."

Whose Hand? is only available right now through Amazon Kindle and Barnes and Noble nook. It's in pre-order and will be published in paper in mid-August.  But apparently the review moved people who own ereaders to act. By Sunday late afternoon, Whose Hand?'s ranking on Amazon had zoomed up 175,000. My first book, Where's Billie? had gone up 200,000 ranks.  Both books were among the top 9,000 best sellers among Kindle's 750,000 ebooks. 

What's significant here is not so much the ranking but the huge swing in ranking caused by just one review. In a newspaper, no less.

By contrast, Publishers Weekly called Whose Hand?  a "diverting regional mystery with appeal to readers beyond the Twin Cities." I could not see any significant change in my Kindle sales after the Publisher's Weekly review.

I think there are two lessons here. It doesn't take a lot of sales to move an ebook way up the sales list. But more important, we have to pay attention to good, old newspaper coverage. It matters. 

Have you had a similar experience?  Tell us about it.