Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year 2026 Announced

Fan favourite Elly Griffiths' The Frozen People wins

THEAKSTON OLD PECULIER CRIME NOVEL OF THE YEAR 2026

With US legend David Baldacci honoured for outstanding contribution to crime fiction

Festival Dates: 23 – 26 July 2026

www.harrogatetheakstoncrimeaward.com

#TheakstonsAwards #TheakstonsCrime

The Frozen People by Elly Griffiths has been announced as the winner of Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year 2026, the UK and Ireland’s most prestigious crime fiction award, presented by Harrogate International Festivals at a special ceremony compèred by writer and broadcaster, Steph McGovern, on the opening night of the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival.

The Frozen People is the first book in a new series with a time-travelling spin, as an unsolved mystery takes cold cases investigator Ali Dawson back to the frozen Victorian London of January 1850 to explore a series of killings that have twenty-first century consequences for politicians and Ali's own family. The judges described The Frozen People as 'bold,' 'superbly plotted' and 'highly original'.

Crime fiction phenomenon Elly Griffiths, from Sussex, has been shortlisted for the Award eight times and was Highly Commended in 2023 for The Locked Room. She received the Theakston Old Peculier Outstanding Contribution Award in 2025. Griffiths is the author of the Dr Ruth Galloway Mysteries; the Brighton Mysteries and the Detective Harbinder Kaur series. Her intricately plotted novels told with wry humour and featuring engaging characters have sold over 5 million copies worldwide, winning her fans across the globe. 

Elly Griffiths receives a £3,000 prize, as well as an engraved beer cask handcrafted by one of Britain’s last coopers from Theakston’s Brewery.

On winning the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year, Elly Griffiths said:

‘I’m so excited and just so grateful to everybody. I’ve been honoured to be shortlisted eight times but to win is just incredible. A bigger twist than I’ve ever dreamed up in my books.’

The Frozen People was selected by a judging panel made up of journalists, broadcasters and representatives from the Award’s sponsors, with the public vote counting as the eighth judge. This incredibly strong shortlist also included The Midnight King by Tariq Ashkanani, The Death of Us by Abigail Dean, Beautiful Ugly by Alice Feeney, Clown Town by Mick Herron and Quantum of Menace by Vaseem Khan.

The McDermid Debut Award, named in recognition of world-famous crime writer Val McDermid, was won by Frances Crawford for A Bad, Bad Place, it was also announced. 

A gritty and atmospheric thriller set in 1970s Glasgow, A Bad, Bad Place centres around 12-year-old Janey Devine who discovers the body of a murdered woman - the daughter of a local gangster – while walking her dog on a disused railway track and becomes irrevocably tangled up in the police investigation. Scottish writer Frances Crawford graduated from Glasgow University aged sixty, before becoming a writer. She receives a £600 cash prize and an engraved beer casket. The award was presented by Chair of Judges, Val McDermid, and Simon Theakston, Chairman of T&R Theakston.

Playwright Mel Pennant was awarded ‘Highly Commended’ for A Murder for Miss Hortense, a mystery novel featuring a formidable, retired nurse turned amateur detective, whose sharp eyes and sharper wit uncover truths buried deep within her quiet Birmingham suburban community.

Val McDermid, Chair of Judges, said:

“The 2026 shortlist for the McDermid Debut Award was exceptional, and the judges struggled to say goodbye to any of the contenders. But we couldn’t resist Frances Crawford’s ‘A Bad Bad Place’, a moving and engaging thriller set in Glasgow’s Possilpark in the 1970s. It’s an engrossing read, and a remarkable debut from a first-time author in her 60s. The judges also wanted to give a Highly Commended nod to ‘A Murder for Miss Hortense’ by Mel Pennant.  Miss Hortense is a stalwart of her Jamaican community who refuses to accept the obvious solution when her nemesis is murdered, and Mel Pennant takes us deep into her world with wit, intelligence and irresistible storytelling.”

On winning the McDermid Debut Award, Frances Crawford said:

‘I am incredibly proud to have been on such a diverse and inclusive shortlist. Every one of the writers could have won. And the fact that it’s named after Val McDermid makes me extra proud to have won the Award.’

Globally bestselling US novelist, David Baldacci, received the Theakston Old Peculier Outstanding Contribution Award in recognition for his exceptional contribution to the crime thriller genre, honouring a remarkable career that has captivated millions of readers worldwide and helped shape modern suspense fiction.

Former trial lawyer David Baldacci is a renowned global no.1 bestselling thriller writer, with over 150 million books sold worldwide. His first book, Absolute Power, became an instant international hit, with the movie starring Clint Eastwood a major box office success. He has since written more than fifty novels featuring a variety of characters including Walter Nash, Travis Devine, Amos Decker and Aloysius Archer. His most recent novel is Hope Rises, the sequel to Nash Falls, featuring anti-hero Walter Nash who is out for revenge against the ruthless FBI leader responsible for his daughter’s death.

David Baldacci said:

“Having cut my youthful teeth on British crime fiction, this award has special significance for me. Having read and loved The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle, I recall hoping at the time that this Conan Doyle person had written more stories. A lot more. To join a group of some of the finest writers of any genre is humbling but also immensely thrilling. And it’s also a reminder that we need to continue our collective mentorship and inspiration of new voices in our writing community. Indeed, we need storytellers from across the human spectrum perhaps now more than ever, for reasons that are all too apparent for anyone who has lifted a pen or turned a page. Thank you again for such an honour."

Baldacci is the latest in a line of acclaimed authors to have received the coveted award, with previous winners including Sir Ian Rankin, Lynda La Plante, James Patterson, John Grisham, Lee Child, Val McDermid, P.D. James, Michael Connelly, Martina Cole and last year’s recipient, Elly Griffiths.

2026 AWARD WINNERS:

WINNER of the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year 2026: The Frozen People by Elly Griffiths (Quercus Books) 

WINNER of the McDermid Debut Award: A Bad, Bad Place by Frances Crawford (Transworld, Penguin Random House)  

HIGHLY COMMENDED for the McDermid Debut Award: A Murder for Miss Hortense by Mel Pennant (Baskerville, John Murray)  

Theakston Old Peculier Outstanding Contribution Award: David Baldacci (Pan Macmillan)

Simon Theakston, Chairman of T&R Theakston, said: 

“Congratulations to all of our brilliant winners. This was another outstanding year for crime fiction, and we judges faced a difficult task selecting winners from phenomenal shortlists, which truly showcased the depth, breadth and originality of the genre. Our Novel of the Year winner, ‘The Frozen People’ by Elly Griffiths, an enthralling and endlessly entertaining high-stakes mystery by one of our very best storytellers, had me gripped right from the start. We are delighted that global crime fiction icon, David Baldacci has been awarded the Theakston Old Peculier Outstanding Contribution Award in recognition of his stellar writing career, and we’re honoured that he has travelled to Harrogate to receive the award in person and take part in the Festival.”

The award winners were revealed at the Old Swan Hotel in Harrogate, during the opening ceremony for the world’s largest celebration of crime writing, Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival (23-26 July), which this year features a stellar line up of bestselling authors including Ardal O’Hanlon, Andi Osho, Denise Mina, Adam Kay, Abir Mukherjee, Elly Griffiths, Anthony Horowitz, Holly Jackson, Jane Harper, Nadine Matheson, Alice Feeney, Ann Cleeves and Brenda Blethyn.

The Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year 2026 is presented by Harrogate International Festivals and sponsored by T&R Theakston Ltd, in partnership with Waterstones, and is open to full-length crime novels published in paperback between 1 May 2025 and 30 April 2026.  The winner receives £3,000 and a handmade, engraved beer barrel provided by T&R Theakston Ltd.

2021 Petrona Award Winner Announced

 

Winner of 2021 Petrona Award announced – a first win for historical crime

 The winner of the 2021 Petrona Award for the Best Scandinavian Crime Novel of the Year is:

TO COOK A BEAR by Mikael Niemi, translated from the Swedish by Deborah Bragan-Turner and published by MacLehose Press.

As well as a trophy, Mikael Niemi receives a pass to and a guaranteed panel at CrimeFest 2022. Mikael Niemi and Deborah Bragan-Turner will also receive a cash prize.

 The judges’ statement on TO COOK A BEAR:

The judges adored TO COOK A BEAR, a historical crime novel set in northernmost Sweden in 1852, and were unanimous in our decision to select it as the Petrona Award winner for 2021. We were particularly impressed with the novel’s use of historical detail, its fascinating reimagining of a figure from history, the sense of location and atmosphere, the rumination on religion versus the natural world, and the depiction of early forensics. TO COOK A BEAR’s superb characterisation of the main protagonists Læstadius and Jussi, which is tinged with sadness yet hope, also allows the author to explore the issues of literacy and class with sensitivity and compassion. The beautiful translation by Deborah Bragan-Turner lets the novel shine for English-language readers around the world.

TO COOK A BEAR is the first historical crime novel to win the Petrona Award.

Comments from the winning author, translator and publisher:

 Mikael Niemi (author):

I am very proud and happy to have received the Petrona Award and would like to thank my editor, Katharina Bielenberg, my translator Deborah Bragan-Turner, and my agency, Hedlund Literary Agency, who have made it possible for this novel to reach British readers. This happy news has brightened the growing winter darkness here in the very north of Scandinavia. I am sending my warmest thanks to all my British readers.

 Deborah Bragan-Turner (translator):

I am absolutely thrilled and very honoured to receive the Petrona Award. It’s a great privilege to be in the company of such accomplished authors and translators on the shortlist. Many congratulations to you all. Thank you to MacLehose Press for your support and editorial advice, and to the panel of judges for your championing of and enthusiasm for Scandinavian fiction in translation. And of course thank you most of all, Mikael Niemi, for bringing the story of Jussi and the pastor to us in TO COOK A BEAR, an inspired novel and a joy to translate.

 MacLehose Press: "We are delighted that Mikael Niemi’s novel has been recognised with the Petrona Award. TO COOK A BEAR is immersive and transporting, historical crime fiction at its best, and it has been thrilling to watch it find its readers in English. Powerfully vivid and lush in its descriptions of Sweden’s very far north, and brilliant on literacy and the power of language, it has been beautifully and imaginatively rendered in Deborah Bragan-Turner’s translation. Congratulations to them both!"

The Petrona team would like to thank our sponsor, David Hicks, for his generous and continued support of the 2021 Petrona Award.

The Maidens by Alex Michaelides - Reviewed by Adam Colclough

 

W&N (10 Jun. 2021) £14.99 Hbk

 

Still grief stricken over the loss of her husband Mariana Andros is drawn back to Cambridge, where they met as undergraduates, when a friend of her niece is murdered. 

This is the first in a series of killings, the victims are all members of ‘the Maidens’, a group of students drawn into the orbit of charismatic academic Edward Fosca. As the murders continue and the police run out of leads Mariana becomes ever more convinced that Fosca is a killer and that her niece could be his next victim.

 

There is something pleasingly old school, possibly even golden age, about this second novel from the author of the hugely successful The Silent Patient. For all its location among the bicycles and dreaming spires of Cambridge and use of clues hidden in quotes from Greek tragedies Michaelides has delivered a very modern tale of suspense and psychological torment.

 

He is all too aware that the most dangerous secrets are the ones we keep from ourselves. A truth that the golden age writers towards whom Michaelides makes a discreet nod would have been either unaware of or would have thought wasn’t really cricket.

 

In line with this he gives Mariana a back story that might be nudging her perceptions of events towards paranoia and makes for an abundance of suspenseful situations. He is aided in this by the atmosphere of a Cambridge college, with its arcane ceremonies and endless dimly lit passages, the latter all the better for someone to, maybe, stalk his protagonist along.

 

This is a solid follow up to a successful debut from a writer who knows how to twist the piano wires of his readers nerves.

Alex Michaelides was born and raised in Cyprus. He has a MA in English Literature from Trinity College, Cambridge University, and a MA in Screenwriting from the American Film Institute in Los Angeles. The Silent Patient was his first novel. It spent over a year on the New York Times bestseller list and sold in a record-breaking 49 countries. He lives in London.

Adam Colclough lives and works in the West Midlands, he writes regularly for a number of websites, one day he will get round to writing a book for someone else to review. 

D B John on writing Star of the North

Most foreign visitors to North Korea are obliged to make the pilgrimage to Mangyongdae. It was in this village, just outside Pyongyang, that Kim Il-sung, the Great Leader, was born in 1912. On a wooded hill nearby our guide led us to a view of the Taedong River. A starry look came into his eyes as he recounted yet another legend from Kim’s life. ‘It was in this spot,’ he said, gazing into the distance, ‘that our Great Leader, as a young boy, would sit thinking so deeply upon the suffering of his people that the ox he was minding would find its own way home…’

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That did it. After a week in the country I had contracted propaganda sickness. It was 2012, the centenary of Kim Il-sung’s birth, and the regime had been pulling out all the stops. I could listen to no more. I may have groaned. 

North Koreans grow up with these stories in the way that we in the West grow up with the Nativity and Easter – with one crucial difference. In North Korea the stories may never be doubted, by anyone. The cult of Kim is central to the regime’s power structures. It tolerates no heresy.

For a writer setting a thriller in North Korea, this was not without irony.

Such a rogue state has, over the years, behaved in ways that many people would find hard to understand, let alone believe. So just as we tourists were expected to accept cooked-up myths as historical truth, I would be drawing from genuine facts that were so much stranger than fiction that they risked straining all credulity.

Would anyone accept at face value the regime’s secret program of sending attractive female

agents abroad to have sex with men of other races? It happened. The aim was to breed children who looked foreign but who would be trained as North Korean spies. Or that the country’s diplomats overseas have doubled as crime bosses, raising funds by selling state-produced crystal meth? Some of the North’s criminal enterprises have never been fully explained. Why did it abduct random people from beaches across Asia and hold them in secluded compounds for decades? Weaving these elements into a cogent narrative without rendering the plot far fetched certainly had its challenges.

North Korea, sealed shut from the world, maintains its own reality. The rules of human behaviour are different there. Finding a path into that dark place and allowing the reader to see it and believe it was my goal in Star of the North.

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STAR OF THE NORTH by D.B. John is published by Harvill Secker on 10 May.

North Korea and the USA are on the brink of war A young American woman disappears without trace from a South Korean island. The CIA recruits her twin sister to uncover the truth. Now, she must go undercover in the world's most deadly state. Only by infiltrating the dark heart of the terrifying regime will she be able to save her sister...and herself. 

The trailer can be seen below

Hans Olave Lahlum on Trying to Explain my Christie Fascination

Today’s guest blog is by author Hans Olav Lahlum.  He is also a historian, a World Champion chess player and a biographer.  His series of crime novels are set in 1960s Norway and inspired by the Golden Age. His most recent novel is Satellite People  and is dedicated to Agatha Christie. Hans Olave Llahlum is a big fan of Agatha Christie and her influence shows throughout Satellite People.  Today he is trying to explain his Christie fascination.

“Lahlum is nothing but a reborn Agatha Christie”, was the conclusion in one of the Norwegian newspaper reviews about my third criminal novel.  It was actually one of the most critical reviews I had that year. The reviewer intensely disliked classical crime in the style of the Golden Age and considered it without any relevance for today’s literature.

Three years later I still disagree with him. 40 years after her death, Agatha Christie remains the empress above the many new “crime queens”. No other crime writer has yet been able to surpass the creative and logic plots from her best novels. True enough she wrote too many not very good novels. Still her top ten can qualify for an all time top 25 list of crime literature plots. Not for no reason they are still reprinted in notable numbers all over the world. Neither for no reason she has still sold better than any other novel writer in the history of literature worldwide – and more than any French novel writer in France.

Still, my on-going fascination for Agatha Christie hides somewhat mixed feelings. One might well argue that she remained a genius crime writer for five or six decenniums, without ever developing into a great novel writer. It seems somehow she, despite an obvious talent, never really tried to become one. Many well-qualified readers consider the characters in her novels too cardboard. Myself I too often find they work out more like chess pieces – just moving around the board to complete her master plans, living like stereotypes and not leaving much of a personal touch.

As much as I admire Christie and as much as I enjoy her best crime novels, I am still inspired by her work only about plots. Although having some principle similarities to Poirot and Captain Hastings, my two main characters are more inspired by Conan Doyle than Christie. Simeon remains my main inspiration regarding the characters minds and feelings as well as for the descriptions of their environment. Whether Agatha Christie is the greatest crime writer of all time depends much upon whether you consider characters or plots the most important thing in a criminal novel. But anyway she is one among the greatest also seen in the retrospect mirror from our time. I am still fascinated by her books – and still feel proud every time my own crime novels are compared with them.          

Satellite People

Oslo, 1969. When a wealthy man collapses and dies during a dinner party, Norwegian Police Inspector Kolbjørn Kristiansen, known as K2, is left shaken. For the victim, Magdalon Schelderup, a multimillionaire businessman and former resistance fighter, had contacted him only the day before, fearing for his life.  It soon becomes clear that every one of Schelderup's ten dinner guests is a suspect in the case. The businessman was disliked, even despised, by many of those close to him; and his recently revised Will may have set events in motion. But which of the guests - from his current and former wives and three children to his attractive secretary and old cohorts in the resistance - had the greatest motive for murder?  With the inestimable help of Patricia - a brilliant, acerbic young woman who lives an isolated life at home, in her wheelchair - K2 begins to untangle the lies and deceit within each of the guests' testimonies. But as the investigators receive one mysterious letter after another warning of further deaths, K2 realises he must race to uncover the killer. Before they strike again . . .

      
You can follow him on Twitter at @HansOlavLahlum and you can also follow him on Facebook.