2023 ITW Thriller Award nominations

 

Best Hardcover Novel

The Violence by Delilah S. Dawson (Del Rey)

Things We Do in The Dark by Jennifer Hillier (Minotaur)

The Fervor by Alma Katsu (Penguin/Putnam)

The Children on the Hill by Jennifer McMahon (Simon & Schuster)

Two Nights in Lisbon by Chris Pavone (MCD)

Sundial by Catriona Ward (Macmillan)

Best Audiobook

Young Rich Widows by Kimberly Belle, Fargo Layne, Cate Holahan, Vanessa Lillie (Audible) Narrated by Dina Pearlman, Karissa Vacker, Helen Laser, Ariel Blake

The Lies I Tell by Julie Clark (Audible) Narrated by Anna Caputo, Amanda Dolan

The Photo Thief by J. L. Delozier (CamCat Publishing) Narrated by Rachel L. Jacobs, Jeffrey Kafer

Things We Do in The Dark by Jennifer Hillier (Macmillan Audio) Narrated by Carla Vega

The Silent Woman by Minka Kent (Blackstone Publishing) Narrated by Christine Lakin, Kate Rudd

Best First Novel

The Resemblance by Lauren Nossett (Flatiron Books)

Blood Sugar by Sascha Rothchild (Penguin/Putnam)

Dirt Town by Hayley Scrivenor (Dirt Creek)

A Flicker in the Dark by Stacy Willingham (Minotaur)

The Fields by Erin Young (Flatiron Books)

Best Paperback Original Novel

The Lies I Told by Mary Burton (Montlake Romance)

No Place to Run by Mark Edwards (Thomas & Mercer)

Unmissing by Minka Kent (Thomas & Mercer)

The Housemaid by Freida McFadden (Grand Central Publishing)

Anywhere You Run by Wanda Morris (William Morrow)

The Couple Upstairs by Holly Wainwright (Pan Macmillan)

The Patient's Secret by Loreth Anne White –(Montlake Romance)

Best Short Story

Russian for Beginners by Dominique Bibeau (Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine)

The Gift by Barb Goffman (Down & Out Books)

Publish or Perish by Smita Harish Jain (Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine)

33 Clues into the Disappearnce of My Sister by Joyce Carol Oates (Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine)

Schrödinger, Cat by Anna Scotti (Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine)

Stockholm by Catherine Steadman (Amazon Original Stories)

Best Young Adult Novel

Our Crooked Hears by Melissa Albert (Flatiron Books)

Sugaring Off by Gillian French (Algonquin Young Readers)

Daughter by Kate McLaughlin (Wednesday Books)

What's Coming to Me by Francesca Padilla (Soho Teen)

I'm the Girl by Courtney Summers (Wednesday Books)

Best E-Book original

Evasive Species by Bill Byrnes (Self-published)

The Couple at Causeway Cottage by Diane Jeffrey (HarperCollins)

The Seven Truths of Hannah Baxter by Grant McKenzie (Self-published)

The Hollow Place by Rick Mofina (Self-published)

Fatal Rounds by Carrie Rubin (Self-published)

ITW will announce the winners at ThrillerFest XVIII on Saturday 3 June 2023 at the Sheraton New York Times Square Hotel, New York City.

Congratulations to all the finalists!

Sequelizing by Chris Pavone

If you glance quickly at any given bestseller chart, this may seem like a sure path to success: write a crime-fiction series featuring the same protagonist in one book after another, forever, then recline comfortably on your piles of money. But from inside the publishing business, it has always seemed to me that for every master like Lee Child or Janet Evanovich, there are thousands of novelists slogging out their series with flat (or worse) sales, while the novels perhaps become increasingly implausible and shoddy as the demands of the book-a-year-schedule take their toll—no time for substantive edits, no time to reconsider large choices, no time to hone themes or prose, no time for anything other than a quick pass with the broom to sweep up large pieces of obvious debris, never the thorough top-to-bottom cleaning that makes a home sparkle. I want my books to sparkle.

I’m now publishing my fourth thriller, and for each manuscript the revisions process has lasted more than a year—and that’s after the year or two I spent on first drafts. Of course there are some authors who are so adept at writing fiction that they don’t need all this revision for their books to sparkle. But how many such book-a-year prodigies truly exist? Is it a hundred people? A couple of dozen? Are you one of them?

I’m not, I know it for certain. Which is why I never wanted to be in the sequel business. So although my first novel The Expats ends with the possibility of a follow-up, I declined to write it. I didn’t want to set up my publishers’ expectations of any book-a-year plan. Nor readers’. Plus my imagination didn’t contain that next installment; I simply did not know what should happen. And I didn’t want to try to foist a second-rate follow-up onto those first-rate characters. I loved my debut novel; I didn’t want to sully it.

So my next couple of books were unrelated (mostly), and I was working on another when I found myself in Paris in the aftermath of their brutal terror attacks, reminiscent of my hometown of New York City after 9/11: a global capital besieged by terrorism, soldiers with assault weapons everywhere, everyone jumping at any loud sound, convinced that whatever was happening next was happening now. Paris in 2016 felt a lot like New York in 2001.

Out of this miasma of fear, the follow-up to The Expats presented itself to me wholesale and clearly. I put aside that other manuscript I was writing, and started afresh on a new page 1 of The Paris Diversion, and began trying to figure out how to do something I didn’t know how to do.

What did I know? That I didn’t want the new book to be a proper sequel—neither book should be a prerequisite to fully enjoying the other. I wanted this second installment to compel readers to go back to the first, not because it was necessary but because it would be fun. The same in the other direction.

How to construct this two-way street? I of course didn’t know then, and still don’t now. There might be loads of correct answers to this question; there might be none. 

But here’s what I did: I wrote my first draft, and my second, and during both I engaged separate beta readers tasked with answering only one question: does Paris provide enough recap of Expats, or too much? I eventually concluded that the new book should provide essentially no recap whatsoever; I should write this second book as if the first simply does not exist. The characters’ back stories should be just back stories—the things that readers ought to know to appreciate the contemporary action. Not because the action happened in a previous book, but because it happened in these characters’ lives.

So I deleted 90 percent of the recap I’d written; then I deleted half of what remained, down to practically nothing. I left readers asking questions, by providing some answers but withholding others.

This sequelizing was hard work; harder than I expected. I’d assumed that because I’d done so much of the world-building work for the first book, it would be easier to write the second. Not at all.

So I now have even more respect for those book-per-year authors. And even more conviction that I’m not one of them.

The Paris Diversion by Chris Pavone is out now (Faber & Faber, £14.99)

Kate Moore is back in a pulse-pounding thriller which takes place over the course of one nail-biting day. Kate Moore - a mother with an interesting past - is living the quiet life in another European city, or trying to. On her way to drop her children off at school in the city centre, the cafes and streets of Paris start to come alive around her. Kate's husband Dex, meanwhile, charged with finding a particular present for their son's birthday, is struggling to focus on the job in hand as a financial matter at work seems to be playing on his mind. As worrying reports begin to circulate from key locations around the city, and the sound of wailing sirens becomes increasingly hard to ignore, could their day and, indeed, their lives be about to change forever?

Books to Look Forward to from Faber and Faber

January 2019

The second book in the Rebekah Roberts series - a taut mystery and a brilliant exploration of the demons we inherit... Aviva Kagan was just a teenager when she left her Hasidic Jewish

life in Brooklyn for a fling with a smiling college boy from Florida. A few months later she was pregnant, engaged to be married and trapped in a life she never imagined. So, shortly after the birth of her daughter she disappeared. Twenty-three years later, the child she walked away from, NYC tabloid reporter Rebekah Roberts, wants nothing to do with her. But when a man from the ultra-Orthodox enclave of Roseville, NY contacts Rebekah about his young wife's mysterious death, she is drawn into Aviva's old world, and a hidden culture full of dangerous secrets and frustrations.   Run You Down is by Julia Dahl.

February 2019

In a hard-boiled city of crooks, grifts and rackets lurk a pair of toughs: Box and _____. They're the kind of men capable of extracting apologies and reparations, of teaching you a chilling lesson. They seldom think twice, and ask very few questions. Until one night over the poker table, they encounter a pulp writer with wild ideas and an unscrupulous private detective, leading them into what is either a classic mystery, a senseless maze of corpses, or an inextricable fever dream . . . Drunk on cinematic and literary influence, Muscle is a slice of noir fiction in collapse, a ceaselessly imaginative story of violence, boredom and madness.  Muscle is by Alan Trotter

The Elegant Lie is by Sam Eastland. The year is 1949. In the bombed-out ruins of Cologne, Hanno Dasch is king. Director of the most successful black market operation in post-war Germany, Dasch has kept his clients supplied with goods so extravagant and rare that they were almost impossible to find even at the height of Germany's conquests. Nobody but Dasch, his enigmatic daughter and the war criminal he keeps as his bodyguard know how he

does it. None of this has escaped the attention of Allied Intelligence, who face not only the systemic corruption of a country where everything is in short supply, but the growing threat of Stalin's KGB. Fearing that Dasch will soon expand his business to include dealings with Russia, and invite the further meddling of Russian agents in the west, the CIA sets in motion an undercover operation to infiltrate and, ultimately, destroy Dasch's empire. A disgraced American Army officer, Nathan Carter, is recruited to approach Dasch and to ingratiate himself with promises of stolen army supplies. As Carter moves further and further into the labyrinth of Dasch's world, it soon becomes clear that the black market ring has already been compromised, but by someone even more dangerous than the Russians. Carter stumbles upon a counterfeiting ring, with whom Dasch has unwittingly gone into business, which seems to have been created with the sole purpose of destroying the Soviet economy, something it could easily do with the superlative quality of the forged bills it is producing. With Carter caught in the middle, and facing the danger that his cover might be blown at any moment, a race begins between the Russian and American spy agencies to uncover who is responsible, before the situation escalates to war.

March 2019

'

They had a secret, the two of them, and there was no better way to start a friendship than with a secret.' When Hen and Lloyd move into their new house in West Dartford, Mass., they're relieved to meet, at their first block party, the only other seemingly-childless couple in their neighbourhood, Matthew and Mira Dolamore. Turns out they live in the Dutch Colonial immediately next door. When they're invited over for dinner, however, things take a sinister turn when Hen thinks she sees something suspicious in Matthew's study. Could this charming, mild-mannered College Professor really be hiding a dark secret, one that only Hen, whose been battling her own problems with depression and medication, could know about? Lloyd certainly doesn't seem to believe her, and so, forced together, Hen and Matthew start to form an unlikely bond. But who, if anyone, is really in danger?   Before She Knew Him is by Peter Swanson.

Former Broadway star Tommy Jump isn't getting the roles he once did; as his final run as Sancho Ponza draws to a close, Tommy is getting ready to give up the stage, find a steady paycheck, and settle down with his fiancee. Cue Special Agent Danny Ruiz. An old school friend of Tommy's, now with the FBI, Ruiz makes Tommy an offer that sounds too good to refuse. All Tommy has to do is spend six months in prison, acting as failed bank robber 'Pete Goodrich'. Inside, he must find and befriend Mitchell Dupree, who has hidden a secret cache of documents incriminating enough to take down New Colima, one of Mexico's largest drug cartels. If Tommy can get Dupree to reveal where the documents are hidden, the FBI will give him $300,000. More than enough to jumpstart a new life. But does he have what it takes to pull off this one final role?  The Last Act is by Brad Parks.

April 2019

A Good Enough Mother is by Bev Thomas.  The hardest lies to spot are the ones we tell ourselves. Dr Ruth Hartland rises to difficult tasks. She is the director of a highly respected trauma therapy unit. She is confident, capable and excellent at her job. Today she is preoccupied by her son Tom's disappearance. So when a new patient arrives at the unit - a young man who looks shockingly like Tom - she is floored. As a therapist, Ruth knows exactly what she should do in the best interests of her client, but as a mother she makes a very different choice - a decision that will have profound consequences.

The Better Sister is by Alafair Burke.  For a while, it seemed like both Taylor sisters had found happiness. Chloe landed a coveted publishing job in New York City. Nicky got married to a promising young attorney named Adam McIntosh and became a mother to a baby boy named Ethan. But now, fourteen years later, it is Chloe who is married to Adam. When he is murdered at the couple's beach house, she has no choice but to welcome her estranged sister - her teenage stepson's biological mother - back into her life. When the police begin to treat Ethan as a suspect, the sisters are forced to confront the truth behind family secrets they both tried to leave behind in order to protect the boy they love, whatever the cost.

Mercy River is by Glen Erik Hamilton. When Van Shaw receives a distress call from his fellow Afghan War veteran, Leo Pak, he has to leave the urban hazards of Seattle to head far south to a town called Broken Ridge, deep in the wild heart of rural Oregon. Leo faces charges of murdering a local gun dealer, and while Van doesn't doubt his friend's innocence, he knows he faces conviction. As Van starts his own covert investigations, the small town is suddenly awash with Army Ranger veterans, converging for a raucous annual Rally. Was it only this reunion that brought Leo to town? Or is someone at the Rally setting Leo up to cover for their own dark designs?

May 2019

Phoebe stands on Pulteney Bridge, tights gashed from toe to thigh. The shock of mangled metal and blood-stained walls flashes through her mind as she tries to cover her face so she won't be recognised. It wouldn't do to be spotted looking like this. She's missing a shoe. She feels sick. Phoebe thought murder and murder happened. Thoughts are just thoughts, they said. Now she knows they were wrong. At home, Phoebe arranges the scissors and knives so they point toward her mother's room. She is exhausted, making sure there's no trace of herself - not a single hair, not even her scent - left anywhere in the house. She must not let her thoughts unravel, because if they do, there's no telling who might be caught in the crossfire, and Phoebe will have to live with the consequences.  Crush is by Kate Hamer

The Paris Diversion is by Chris Pavone.  Kate Moore - a mother with an interesting past - is living the quiet life in another European city, or trying to. On her way to drop her children off at school in the city centre, the cafes and streets of Paris start to come alive around her. Kate's husband Dex, meanwhile, charged with finding a particular present for their son's birthday, is struggling to focus on the job in hand as a financial matter at work seems to be playing on his mind. As worrying reports begin to circulate from key locations around the city, and the sound of wailing sirens becomes increasingly hard to ignore, could their day and, indeed, their lives be about to change forever?

Chris Pavone on The Endless Pitch

Chris Pavone's first novel The Expats won both an Edgar Award and an Anthony Award for Best First Novel. 

I still remember the first time I saw Jacqueline Onassis pitching a book. We were in Doubleday’s conference room, in a newly constructed skyscraper whose architecture was meant to evoke the prow of a ship, with a glass triangle protruding from the façade, jutting out into Times Square. If you stood in the floor-to-ceiling-windowed corner of the prow, you could imagine you were flying. Like DiCaprio and Winslet, but this was a half-decade earlier, and in the real world.

Perhaps forty people were in this seasonal launch meeting, arrayed around a big table as well as chairs that lined the perimeter of the room, salespeople and marketers and publicists, production and design and me, a twenty-four-year-old copy editor.

Each acquiring editor took a turn to stand and present his or her books for the season’s list, the thirty new hardbacks that would be going on-sale a half-year or more in the future, books that had already been acquired, written, delivered, edited, accepted. This was the editor’s opportunity to convince the publishing house that each of her books was original, or notable, or unique, or beautiful, or whatever was special about the project, whatever was the reason the thing was going to exist in the world. Most importantly, it was the editor’s obligation to convince her colleagues that the book was saleable.

I don’t remember the titles that Mrs. Onassis pitched. What I do remember was how hard she tried, how impassioned she was, entreating about how some author had been working on the manuscript for years, how good the book had become, how much it deserved a place in the world. Some colleagues were skeptical; they challenged her with questions.

There were a few things about this episode that were revelatory to me. First was that this woman, arguably the most famous in the world, was in this circumstance just another editor, someone who came to work and did a job.

Second was that Jackie Onassis’s job, like many others, entailed asking other people for something, day in and day out. For book editors, it’s asking for attention for her books. It’s pitching.

Third was that the pitching never ends. I’d thought these books had already been pitched to death. An author had pitched an agent. Agent had pitched acquiring editor. Acquiring editor had pitched her colleagues, I’d like to take on this project, could you give it a read? Then editor maybe pitched an editorial board, a publisher, may I have permission to offer 10, 50, a million? Publisher may have pitched CEO.

Then the book was acquired, contract signed, advance paid. At this point, I sort of assumed the pitching was over.

Absolutely not. Then came the pitching for endorsements. Pitching inside the publishing house—for an aggressive marketing budget, for sales goals, for production bells-and-whistles. Pitching for the trade publications to review, for catalogs to carry, for book clubs to adopt. For newspaper reviews and magazine features, for TV-morning-show segments and radio interviews. For a mass-market-paperback subsidiary-rights sale, film adaptations or television, foreign translations, audio or large-print licensing agreements. Pitching to libraries and wholesalers, book chains and independents, newsstands and grocery stores, huge corporations and mom-and-pop businesses, pitching in hotel ballrooms with microphones and in small offices one-on-one.

All before a single copy is in the hands of a single reader.

Until, ultimately, after hundreds or even thousands of pitches, there she is, one reader is standing in one bookshop. She’s appraising the cover, running her fingers over the embossed spot-laminated type that the editor pitched to spend the money on, reading the endorsement from a famous author, one of dozens of luminaries whom the editor pitched, but only a few responded; these authors get pitched hundreds of times per year. This book landed on this particular display table because the sales rep pitched the bookstore buyer who pitched the merchandising director, who said, Okay, we’ll give it a couple of weeks, see how it sells.

The reader turns to the bookstore clerk. “What’s it about?”

The clerk knows this book’s pitch; he’s heard it before, more than once. “A travel writer,” he begins, “who becomes a spy . . .”

The Travelers by Chris Pavone is out on 10th March (Faber & Faber, £12.99)

The Travelers by Chris Pavone

Will Rhodes is an award-winning correspondent for The Travelers, on assignment at a luxury Argentinian resort - fine wines and gourmet food, polo fields and the looming Andes.  But Will's life is about to be turned upside down when a new flirtation turns into something far more dangerous, and he only realises too late.   Turns out he's been targeted, he just doesn't know why. He doesn't know what these people truly want and how far into his life they will reach, to his friends and his colleagues, to his boss and his wife. He doesn't know that they will stop at nothing in their pursuit, and he doesn't know about the secrets he has already been keeping...

More information about Chris Pavone and his books can be found on his website.