The Weekly Round-Up

Okay, so this is what we’ll try to do. Instead of having time-sapping daily-ish updates here at Crime Always Pays, we’ll run a weekly update of news, reviews, interviews and possibly – if the occasion demands – ewes.
  If you’re an Irish crime writer and you have a book / launch / ewe etc. forthcoming, please feel free to drop me a line at dbrodb[at]gmail.com.
  And so to the Weekly Update:

Via the good works of Mick Halpin over at the Irish Crime Writing Facebook page, we hear that Ken Bruen (right, as noirishly re-imagined by fellow Irish crime scribe KT McCaffrey) will read at the Irish Writers’ Centre as part of its ‘Lunchtime Readings’ programme. The reading will take place on Friday, February 22nd, and all the details are here.

Norn Iron-born author Seth Patrick will publish a debut title, REVIVER (Tor), in June, with the blurb elves wibbling thusly:

Revivers. Able to wake the recently dead, and let them bear witness to their own demise. Twelve years after the first reviver came to light, they have become accepted by an uneasy public. The testimony of the dead is permitted in courtrooms across the world. Forensic revival is a routine part of police investigation. In the United States, that responsibility falls to the Forensic Revival Service. Despite his troubled past, Jonah Miller is one of their best. But while reviving the victim of a brutal murder, he encounters a terrifying presence. Something is watching. Waiting. His superiors tell him it was only in his mind, a product of stress. Jonah is not so certain. Then Daniel Harker, the first journalist to bring revival to public attention, is murdered, and Jonah finds himself getting dragged into the hunt for answers. Working with Harker’s daughter Annabel, he’s determined to find those responsible and bring them to justice. Soon they uncover long-hidden truths that call into doubt everything Jonah stands for, and reveal a threat that if not stopped in time, will put all of humanity in danger . . .

There’s another crime fiction debut available right now, WHITE BONES (Head of Zeus), albeit a ‘debut’ from the bestselling horror author Graham Masterton. To wit:

One wet November morning, a field on Meagher’s Farm gives up the dismembered bones of eleven women. In this part of Ireland, unmarked graves are common. But these bones date to 1915, long before the Troubles. What’s more, these bones bear the marks of a meticulous executioner. These women were almost certainly skinned alive. Detective Katie Maguire, of the Cork Garda, is used to dead bodies. But this is wholesale butchery. Her team think these long-dead women are a waste of police time. Katie is determined to give them justice. And then a young American tourist goes missing, and her bones, carefully stripped of flesh, are discovered on the same farm. With the crimes of the past echoing in the present, Katie must solve a decades-old ritualistic murder before this terrifying killer strikes again.

Elsewhere, there was very good news for Stuart Neville when it was announced that the movie version of THE TWELVE will star Pierce Brosnan:

Presales on a big-screen adaptation of Stuart Neville’s (right) revenge thriller novel The Twelve, penned by CBS late-night talk show host Craig Ferguson and Ted Mulkerin and starring Pierce Brosnan, will begin at the European Film Market … It is to be directed by Terry Loan and produced by Ferguson, Steve Clark-Hall (Sherlock Holmes), Beau St. Clair (The Thomas Crown Affair), Rebecca Tucker and Jonathan Loughran and is scheduled to shoot at the end of 2013.

And while we’re talking good news, here’s a nice, insightful take on Gene Kerrigan’s THE RAGE by John Powers over at NPR.

Finally, I remain to be convinced by ‘book trailers’ as an effective method of promotion, but here’s a very neat and tidy example of same for Peter Wilben’s new Joe Grace series: