Adding to the wave of crime series on cable, such as True Detective, comes Quarry, Cinemax‘s dark and moody adaptation of Max Allan Collins’s noir 1970s era series about a hit man. The eight-episode run will premiere on September 9th and star Logan Marshall-Green (Prometheus) as a Marine who comes home to Memphis after the Vietnam War and gets caught in a world of violence and corruption.

Also scheduled for release is a tie-in, Quarry – TV Tie-In Edition, Max Allan Collins (RH/Hard Case Crime, Sept. 27; OverDrive Sample).

Publisher Hard Case Crime has recently re-issued the original Quarry novels with their signature retro covers. According to GraphicNovelReporter, the publisher revived the series in 2006 (after a 20-year gap) and Collins has written seven new titles thus far. The latest is Quarry in the Black (RH/Hard Case Crime; October 4, 2016).

Collins’s graphic novel Road to Perdition was adapted as the critically acclaimed 2002 film starring Tom Hanks and Paul Newman.

Librarians picked it first. The number one LibraryReads pick for May 2015, Uprooted, by Naomi Novik (PRH/Del Rey; RH Audio; OverDrive Sample) was announced as the winner of the 2016 Locus Award for Fantasy on Saturday, having also won the Nebula last month.

The winner in the Science Fiction category is Ancillary Mercy, by Ann Leckie (Hachette/Orbit; Blackstone Audio; OverDrive Sample) the final book in the series which began with Ancillary Justice  winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Arthur C. Clarke Awards. The middle novel, Ancillary Sword, also won the Locus award in 2015.

The late Terry Pratchett won the YA category for The Shepherd’s Crown (HarperCollins; HarperCollinsAudio and Blackstone Audio; OverDrive Sample).

Pratchett and his fellow nominees in the YA category are all male, a choice that has raised eyebrows even as the Locus awards have avoided much of the controversy that has plagued the Hugo awards.

The Guardian reports on the story, saying that “the Locus awards were broadly representative of a sci-fi field that is continuing to grow in diversity: 18 female to 17 male writers, with many upcoming writers of colour among the voters’ top picks. Placed in that context, the way the YA category has turned out seems less like myopic sexism, and more indicative of the older demographic of readers who read Locus magazine and see the YA genre from their own preferences.”

However, YA author Gwen Katz said:

“YA, including YA fantasy, is a vastly female-dominated age category, but there’s a history of male authors being picked out for awards or heralded as champions of the age category … Yet another all-male slate reinforces the message that an art form primarily practised by women and girls only becomes noteworthy when a man gets in on it.”

The Grace of Kings, Ken Liu (S&S/Saga; S&S Audio; OverDrive Sample) won best First Novel.

Neil Gaiman won twice: in the Novelette category for ‘Black Dog,’’ a piece in Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances (HC/William Morrow; HarperAudio; OverDrive Sample), which also netted Gaiman another trophy for best Collection.

Beyond the winners, readers’ advisors looking for suggestions in SFF will find a ready list of titles in the award’s short lists.

The SF nominees read like a who’s who of the genre:

• The Water Knife, Paolo Bacigalupi (PRH/Knopf; OverDrive Sample)

• Aurora, Kim Stanley Robinson (Hachette/Orbit; Blackstone Audio; OverDrive Sample)

• Seveneves, Neal Stephenson (HC/ William Morrow; OverDrive Sample)

• A Borrowed Man, Gene Wolfe (Macmillan/Tor; OverDrive Sample)

The Fantasy short list is equally impressive:

• Karen Memory, Elizabeth Bear (Macmillan/Tor; OverDrive Sample)

• The House of Shattered Wings, Aliette de Bodard (PRH/Roc; Blackstone Audio; OverDrive Sample)

• Wylding Hall, Elizabeth Hand (PS; Open Road; Blackstone Audio; OverDrive Sample)

• The Fifth Season, N.K. Jemisin (Hachette/Orbit; OverDrive Sample)

The First Novel Short list points to the breadth of these two genres, their international flavor, and the range of subjects being explored:

• Sorcerer to the Crown, Zen Cho (PRH/Ace; OverDrive Sample)

• Signal to Noise, Silvia Moreno-Garcia (Solaris; OverDrive Sample)

• The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, Natasha Pulley (Macmillan/Bloomsbury; OverDrive Sample)

• The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps, Kai Ashante Wilson (Macmillan/Tor; Macmillan Audio; OverDrive Sample)

The controversial YA category included:

• Half a War, Joe Abercrombie (PRH/Del Rey; OverDrive Sample)

• Half the World, Joe Abercrombie (PRH/Del Rey; OverDrive Sample)

• Harrison Squared, Daryl Gregory (Macmillan/Tor; OverDrive Sample)

• Shadowshaper, Daniel José Older (Scholastic/Arthur A. Levine; Scholastic Audio ; OverDrive Sample)

Also useful for readers advisors is the annual reading list created by Locus, a gold mine of titles and authors to know.

The full list of winners is online.

After nearly a decade of writing novels to steady but muted notice, Paul Tremblay may have broken through.

Tremblay won the Bram Stoker award this year for A Head Full of Ghosts (HC/William Morrow, June 2015; paperback, May 10, 2016; HarperAudio; OverDrive Sample),  a novel that earned him comparisons to Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House by io9, a rave in the NYT, and the attention of Stephen King.

Now Tremblay is back with Disappearance at Devil’s Rock (HC/William Morrow; HarperAudio; OverDrive Sample). NPR reviewer Jason Heller, a senior writer at The A.V. Club, says is “it’s even more head-spinning” than his Stoker winner.

Heller calls the book a “dizzying emotional vortex” full of “immediacy [and] immaculate storytelling” and says Tremblay’s “characters are rendered vividly and sensitively. The ambience is all shadows.”

Terrance Rafferty, in a round-up of new horror titles in the NYT, says that Tremblay (among others he highlights) is the heir to Joyce Carol Oates, Peter Straub, and Edgar Allan Poe and that his book “is never, at any point, exactly what you expect it to be.”

Tor.com offers a rave review, concluding: “Tremblay left me speechless, breathless, deeply unsettled and impossibly impressed. I love being genuinely scared by a book, so Disappearance at Devil’s Rock left me with a giant smile, too … In a summer of great horror releases, this one is among the very best.”

Holds are over a 3:1 ratio at several libraries we checked while others have yet to order or are showing circ. about equal to copies.

Driven by heavy media attention, The Girls by Emma Cline (PRH/Random House; RH Audio; BOT; OverDrive Sample),

debuts on the new USA Today best seller list, landing at the #9 spot. Since that list ranks all categories and formats of books together, we can expect to see it debut much higher on the upcoming NYT Hardcover Fiction list [UPDATE: Soon after we posted this, the new NYT list was released and The Girls is #3. That list shows sales through June 18, four days after the book was published. We’ll see in coming weeks if word of mouth works in its favor].

In libraries holds continue to be very strong, running at 5:1 ratios and higher. Many libraries have ordered additional copies  to keep up with demand.

Librarian Nancy Pearl interviews one of her favorite authors, Guy Gavriel Kay for Book Lust TV this month.

The pair, who have talked several times before, start by discussing Children of Earth and Sky (PRH/NAL; OverDrive Sample), Kay’s newest book, published in May and,set in the same general world as Sailing to Sarantium (a particular favorite of Nancy’s) and Lord of Emperors. It also falls within the general universe of The Last Light of the Sun and The Lions of Al-Rassan.

Kay explains that he likes to write stand-alones rather than series as endings are very important to him and he wants each book to have its own arc. He also wants readers to enjoy every book for itself, without feeling as if they are missing an insider joke but does offer long-time readers “grace notes, small, glancing allusions to the previous books.”

The two discuss Kay’s particular brand of fantasy, which he calls a “quarter turn to the fantastic” as well as the rise of popularity of the fantasy genre in pop culture. Kay believes the rush of fantasy novels rests in the fact that the “book industry is a copy-cat industry” and much “cloning” takes place. Of his own take on fantasy, he says he likes to compress time so that readers get an immediate sense of what happens over hundreds of years.

The interview concludes with Kay detailing what he is currently reading and recommending to others: Edith Grossman’s translation of Don Quixote, Anne Tyler’s A Spool of Blue Thread, and Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk.

The currently hyper-popular psychological suspense genre is examined in depth by film critic Terrence Rafferty in the new issue of The Atlantic, declaring in the headline, “Women Are Writing the Best Crime Novels,”  

Among upcoming titles, Rafferty is particularly keen on The Darkest Secret, Alex Marwood (PRH/Penguin, Aug. 30) and You Will Know Me, Megan Abbott (Hachette/Little, Brown, July 26), calling the first “brilliant” and the second “superb.”

The genre was created by women authors, amply proved he says by the Library of America’s two-volume collection, Women Crime Writers (2015) and it now has “many more daughters than sons,” running down a global roster:

America — Megan Abbott, Alison Gaylin, Laura Lippman

England — Alex Marwood, Paula Hawkins, Sophie Hannah

Scotland — Val McDermid, Denise Mina

Ireland — Tana French

Norway — Karin Fossum

Japan — Natsuo Kirino

These authors have ushered in a new order, that, says Rafferty, “is not a world Raymond Chandler would have recognized … The female writers, for whatever reason (men?), don’t much believe in heroes, which makes their kind of storytelling perhaps a better fit for these cynical times. Their books are light on gunplay, heavy on emotional violence … pure noir, velvety and pitiless.”

Retellings of well-known books make good reading club fare. This month, Slate Audio book club reconvened  to discuss Eligible (PRH/Random House; BOT; OverDrive Sample), Curtis Sittenfeld’s “modernization” of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, part of the ongoing Jane Austen Project (a similar project, that reimagines Shakespeare, recently launched with Anne Tyler’s Vinegar Girl).

Reviews for Eligible were mixed, but it was a #1 LibraryReads pick for April and it debuted on the NYT Hardcover Best Seller List at #5. The Slate panel calls it “pure pleasure” and “keenly observed half-satire/half-wish fulfillment” that provides a wonderful way to reconnect to Jane Austen and appreciate Sittenfeld’s earlier novels, American Wife and Prep.

They particularly appreciate the re-creation of Elizabeth Bennet as a modern character and the author’s  “feats of re-soulment” in translating an 18th century character to the modern age, cleverly incorporating reality TV as the modern equivalent of social climbing.

Dismissing critics who did not respond positively to the book, they say the NYT ‘s Michiko Kakutani  “missed the point” and was just “mean” (as we our reported, Kakutani’s NYT  Book Review colleague  presented a much different opinion).

The fourth in the Hallmark Murder She Baked series based on JoAnne Fluke’s novels, this one titled A Deadly Recipe, premieres this Sunday.

Series star Alison Sweeney appeared on the Ellen Show yesterday to talk about the movies, working with a difficult co-star, and her own novel, Opportunity Knocks (Hachette Books. 4/5/16).

Preview the Hallmark movie here.

Tie-in:

Fudge Cupcake Murder
Joanne Fluke
Kensington: May 31, 2016
9781496711526, 1496711521
Mass Market
$7.99 USD, $8.99 CAD

A boon for advisors looking for SFF (Science Fiction and Fantasy) titles that will be getting attention from fans is io9‘s newly released summer reading list.

Titles that have already been featured on general list include The Fireman by Joe Hill (HC/William Morrow; HarperAudio; OverDrive Sample), already a best seller, and Dark Matter by Blake Crouch (PRH/Crown; RH Audio; BOT). io9 says that they “really loved” Hill’s newest, calling it “a terrifying, exhilarating ride from beginning to end, … quite possibly Hill’s best novel to date.” Of Crouch’s buzzy new stand-alone, they say it is “a fast-paced thriller that deals with alternate worlds and paths not taken.”

Other favorites are Life Debt: Aftermath (Star Wars), Chuck Wendig (PRH/Del Rey; RH Audio) and The Obelisk Gate, N. K. Jemisin (Hachette/Orbit). Fans know Wendig for his bridge books filling in the story between the recent Star Wars film and the previous story line of the series. io9 says this newest “looks to be just as exciting as the originals.” Of The Obelisk Gate, the site offers, “The Fifth Season was a masterpiece of fantasy literature, rejecting long-held conventions and tropes, and we’re excited to see what Jemisin does next to upend genre.”

Authors and titles that might be new to SFF fans include:

False Hearts, Laura Lam (Macmillan/Tor; OverDrive Sample). io9 says it is “a debut novel that we’ve been getting excited about, an interesting cyberpunk mystery that meshes together the future of biotechnology and murder.”

Underground Airlines, Ben Winters (Hachette/Mulholland Books). A book about slavery set in the present day, the site says it shows every indication of being “a riveting alternate history thriller.”

Behind the Throne, K. B. Wagers (Hachette/Orbit). Saying it is “poised to be the next exciting space opera, one with plenty of action, intrigue, and adventure,” io9 points out that publishing imprint Orbit has a great track record with space adventures, publishing both James S.A. Corey and Ann Leckie.

There are more selections, including nonfiction. The full list is online.

Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express (HC/William Morrow; HarperAudio; OverDrive Sample) looks like it is preparing to leave the station once again. According to Deadline Hollywood, Angelina Jolie is in talks to join the Kenneth Branagh film production.

Branagh is reportedly gathering an all-star cast and plans to play detective Hercule Poirot himself. He will also serve as producer, along side Ridley Scott and others. Michael Green (Blade Runner 2) is on board as screenwriter.

The Guardian reports that Jolie will fill the role of Mrs. Hubbard, one of the novel’s many suspects, most famously played by Lauren Bacall in Sidney Lumet’s 1974 version of the mystery.

No further news on the rest of the cast. Currently plans are to release the film on Nov. 22, 2017, well timed for the award season as Deadline points out.

The classic mystery’s most recent adaptation is the PBS Masterpiece episode starring David Suchet, Hugh Bonneville, and Jessica Chastain.

The most acclaimed film adaptation is Lumet’s production for Paramount. Albert Finney starred as Poirot, alongside Ingrid Bergman, John Gielgud, Anthony Perkins, Vanessa Redgrave, Michael York, Lauren Bacall, and Sean Connery.

Ron Howard is set to direct an adaptation of Neal Stephenson’s SF bestseller Seveneves (HC/William Morrow)  says The Hollywood Reporter. Howard will team up once again with Bill Broyles (Apollo 13), who is writing the script.

The LibraryReads and Indie Next pick was just released in paperback. In hardback it drew attention from Bill Gates, who recommended it to readers, calling it “thought-provoking and thoroughly enjoyable” and crediting it with getting him back to reading SF.

In their laudatory but mixed review, NPR said “The experience of reading a modern Stephenson novel is like going out drinking with 20 or 30 of the smartest people on earth, and them all deciding to play that game where someone starts a story, tells one sentence of it, ends with a conjunction, and passes it along to the next person. Once upon a time, the moon blew up, and then …”

Others offered the same blend of praise and hesitation. Several critics called it uneven (Stephenson has a problem with endings says the LA Times) and the novel’s sheer density (NYT), concerns that could easily be cured in a film, especially in the hands of Howard, who proved in Apollo 13 that he can plot a tense moonshot ending.

No word yet on when the project will begin shooting.

Fed by a growing buzz from literary as well as foodie outlets, Stephanie Danler’s debut novel, Sweetbitter (PRH/Knopf; Random House Audio; BOT; OverDrive Sample), is developing an impressive holds list at many libraries we checked, topping a 6:1 ratio in some areas.

The New York Times has spotlighted the author, who lived in the city and worked in its restaurants and wine stores, in four separate pieces, most recently this week’s profile in the Style section, following Danler as she goes on tour, promoting her book at a local indie bookshop, in an  interview with Gabrielle Hamilton, the chef/author of Blood, Bones and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef.

Daily NYT‘s reviewer Dwight Garner offered his take in mid-May, calling it “an unpretentious, truth-dealing, summer-weight novel … [that] grows darker than you might expect.” In her NYT Sunday Book Review piece, Gabrielle Hamilton gave it a to-die-for anointment, calling it “brilliantly written” and the “Kitchen Confidential of our time.”

Entertainment Weekly gives the novel an A- and The Wall Street Journal offers an illustrated profile [may require subscription].

Bon Appétit magazine headlines it as “the Summer’s Hottest Beach Read” in their podcast interview and offers an excerpt in the print and online issue.

More interviews abound. The foodie site Grub Street offers one full of insider details. Vanity Fair has one too, talking poetry and sex. NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday, Vogue, Refinery29, and even The Paris Review, that bastion of literary taste, offer interviews, with The Paris Review calling the book “riveting.”

Sweetbitter landed on the USA Today best-seller list the first week of June, taking the #32 spot, which the paper calls “a strong showing for a new writer” and given that the list integrates all types and audiences of books (mixing paperback and hardback, fiction and nonfiction, adult, teen, and children’s) it is indeed a good opening number.

It also made the NYT Fiction Hardcover list on June 12, at #12 and is holding on to the #16 spot this week.

It is a summer reading pick by the Amazon Editors, Harper’s Bazaar, The Wall Street Journal, and Glamour. It is also a hit with GalleyChatters and a May LibraryReads selection.

If you’ve heard readers object that they don’t want to read yet another book about the problems of well-off New Yorkers, the Guardian verifies that it’s indeed a trend.

In a new twist, many of these NYC-centric novels are set in the recently trendy borough of Brooklyn. Tellingly, Emma Straub, the author of the Modern Lovers, (PRH/Riverhead), which just debuted at #14 on the NYT Hardcover Fiction list, recently told that paper that she set her book in the Ditmas Park section of Brooklyn, because she “wanted to stay as far away from the quote-unquote Brooklyn book as I could,” a fine distinction to those who are’t familiar with the differences of Brooklyn real estate.

The titles cited buy the Guardian as examples represent a range of genres, from Plum Sykes frothy Bergdorf Blondes (2004) to the multiple literary award nominee Hanya Yanagihara’s  A Little Life (2015).

A debut novel by an Irish writer wins the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction, given for the best novel by a woman writing in English. The Glorious Heresies by Lisa McInerney (PRH/Tim Duggan Books, Aug. 9; Random House Audio) topped several better known authors including the multiple awar- winning Anne Enright for The Green Road and the bestselling Hanya Yanagihara for A Little Life.

The Guardian reports that The Glorious Heresies “tells how an accidental murder … plays out in the lives of a cast that includes a 15-year-old drug dealer, his alcoholic father, a prostitute and a gangland boss.”

The chair of the judging panel said it is “a superbly original, compassionate novel that delivers insights into the very darkest of lives through humour and skilful storytelling.”

Calling it “big, gritty and compelling,” a spokeswoman for one of the UK’s most notable bookstores said the selection was a “brave choice … by the least conventional and edgiest writer on the list.”

The Glorious Heresies is scheduled for release in the US on Aug. 9.

McInerney’s debut was among 11 other first novels to make the long or short list for the award, which The Guardian notes is becoming “a showcase for new and emerging talent.”

One of those debut authors is Hannah Rothschild whose The Improbability of Love (RH/Knopf; OverDrive Sample) made it through to the final round. Rothschild, the first woman chair of London’s most prestigious art museum, The National Galley, can console herself with champagne. Her book recently won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic fiction (shared with Paul Murray for The Mark and the Void), which comes with a large bottle of Bollinger champagne, the complete Everyman Wodehouse Collection, and the honor of the having a Gloucestershire Old Spot pig named after the winning title, a nod to the Empress of Blandings, a fictional pig featured in P. G. Wodehouse’s Blandings Castle novels.

Previous winners of the pig, bubbly, and books include Terry Pratchett and Alexander McCall Smith. Photos of several past winners with their pigs are online.

Debuting at the #2 spot on this week’s NYT Hardcover Fiction Best Seller list is the very buzzy Before the Fall, Noah Hawley (Hachette/Grand Central; OverDrive Sample).

As we reported the breakout novel by the creator of the Fargo TV series is racking up impressive hold figures and is getting a great deal of attention as the media predicts a hit.

It’s not the only new entry. Nearly half of the top 10 titles ae new to the list this week.

As might have been expected The Emperor’s Revenge, Clive Cussler and Boyd Morrison (PRH/G.P. Putnam’s Sons; Penguin Audio; BOT; OverDrive Smaple) takes the #1 spot. All Summer Long, Dorothea Benton Frank (HC/William Morrow; HarperAudio; OverDrive Sample) debuts at #3, while, as we predicted, Alan Furst’s A Hero of France (PRH/Random House; S&S Audio; OverDrive Sample) hits the list at #7.

Just outside the top 10, debuting at #14 (tied with #13) is Modern Lovers, Emma Straub (PRH/Riverhead Books; Penguin Audio; BOT; OverDrive Sample), another very buzzy title which is high on the summer reading lists.

Falling out of the top ten to make room for the new arrivals are The City of Mirrors, which slipped from #1 last week to #11, The Fireman, All the Light We Cannot See, and Everybody’s Fool.