The Los Angeles Times has announced the nominations for its Book Prizes, honoring the best books published in 2010.
There are numerous categories; below are the nominees for Mystery/Thriller.
Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin (William Morrow)
Faithful Place by Tana French 
I'd Know You Anywhere by Laura Lippman (William Morrow)
Collusion by Stuart Neville (Soho Crime)
City of Dragons by Kelli Stanley (Minotaur Books)
Gideon's War by Howard Gordon. A Gideon Davis Mystery. Touchstone Hardcover, January 2011.
Fans of international/political thrillers will appreciate that this novel by the executive producer of the Fox television series 24 is more than just a simple action/adventure story, that Gideon Davis is an interesting, well-developed character and the nuanced plot offers surprising depth and complexity.
Read the full text of our review at Mysterious Reviews: Gideon's War by Howard Gordon.
Purchase Options: 
Read the first chapter(s) of Gideon's War below. Use the Aa settings button to adjust text size, line spacing, and word density.
Games of Mystery is pleased to announce the availability of a new mystery casual game from Big Fish Games released today and available to BFG Club members. You can find out more about these games by visiting our Mystery Games: Big Fish Download Games page or by clicking on the links provided below.
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Did the artist Christina Falk really kill herself? If so, why did she phone Carol Reed the day before her death, wanting to hire her? And was it really Christina that called Carol?
With a dead client, Carol hasn't even got a case. And with so little information, she hasn't got any clues either.
But the last thing that Christina did was to ask for Carol's help, so Carol figures that the least she could do is look into it.
And when she uncovers several curious circumstances leading up to Christina's death, Carol just can't let it go.
Solve a 600-year-old mystery in this gripping adventure game!
Blue Madonna is the 7th entry in this series; the previous games are Black Circle, Remedy, Hope Springs Eternal (not available at BFG), Time Stand Still, East Side Story, and The Color of Murder.
Blue Madonna: A Carol Reed Mystery may be downloaded and purchased for $6.99 with a Big Fish Game Club membership. A demonstration version (99.50 MB) may be downloaded and played for free for one hour; the full version is 452.40 MB.
Watch a preview video below:
Get any standard game for $6.99 with a Big Fish Game Club membership. Other benefits include the $2.99 Daily Deal, Tomorrow's Game Today, and special member rewards. And if you purchase any 6 games within a single month, you earn a free game with the Big Fish Game Club Monthly Punch Card! (Collector's Editions earn 3 punches each, half-way towards your free game!)
Read Ms. Terri's reviews of the adventure and casual mystery games featured on this site, including Midnight Mysteries: The Edgar Allan Poe Conspiracy, Nancy Drew Dossier: Lights, Camera, Curses!, Enlightenus, and many more!
Big Fish Games: Bestsellers
Big Fish Games: New releases
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Games of Mystery is your source for mystery-themed video, electronic, and board games, parties for kids and adults, and murder mystery weekends and mystery getaway vacations!
ABC News (Australia) is reporting that Peter Temple's Miles Franklin Literary Award-winning crime thriller Truth is being adapted for film.
"It was just like the perfect storm for me, finding this book, finding that I actually could get the rights to it," said John Polson, who is expected to direct. "The characters are so well drawn, so original, so beautifully depicted and so devastating in some ways."
Truth introduces Inspector Stephen Villani, head of homicide in Melbourne, Australia, who has a full agenda: a murdered woman in a penthouse apartment, three men butchered in a sadistic rampage, a tattoo-faced drug dealer corrupting his rebellious daughter, a crumbling marriage. As these seemingly unrelated events begin to unfold, Villani finds himself immersed in an unfamiliar world of political scandal and ethical ambiguity. He must navigate the inept bureaucracy that is the police department, all the while maintaining a solid front and trying to keep the press, his family, and his own past from breaking him completely. With each twist and every turn of this taut crime novel, Villani is forced to question whom he can trust.
You can read the first chapter(s) of Truth below. Use the Aa settings button to adjust text size, line spacing, and word density.
(Hat tip to In Reference to Murder: Media Murder for Monday for alerting us to this development.)
Checking through our list of films currently scheduled for release this week on DVD and/or Blu-ray disc, shown below are those that fall into the mystery, suspense, and thriller categories.
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Suspicion (1987)
Initially Johnnie Aysgarth (Anthony Andrews) seems to be the perfect rich man looking for a wife, and to the rich heiress Lina McLaidlaw (Jane Curtin), he seems to be the man for her. Soon though, he starts displaying a morbid interest in murders, shows himself unable to keep a job and is a compulsive gambler. Curtin's growing fears of her new husband become a certainty when she discovers that her life insurance that he is trying to borrow against can only be fulfilled in the event of her death ...
Suspicion is a made-for-television remake of the 1941 Alfred Hitchcock classic of the same title. (NR; 1:36)
Purchase Options: DVD
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The Milliennium Trilogy (2010)
All three original Swedish-language adaptations of the Stieg Larsson thrillers, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo / The Girl Who Played with Fire / The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, in a single Blu-ray Disc set, together with a fourth disc that contains "Millennium: The Story", a 53 minute documentary detailing the phenomenon of the "Millennium" trilogy and the personal history of the author up until his tragic death before The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo was published, interviews with Michael Nyqvist and Noomi Rapace, and more, all at a special price.
Purchase Options: Blu-ray
Telemystery, your source for one of the most comprehensive selections of detective, amateur sleuth, private investigator, and suspense television mystery series, mini-series and made-for-television movies, now available on or coming soon to DVD or Blu-ray disc, is profiling two British series being released this week.
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John Nettles stars as Detective Chief Inspector Tom Barnaby in Midsomer Murders, based on characters created by crime novelist Caroline Graham.
The Midsomer Murders: Set Seventeen DVD set of 4 discs contain the episodes that originally aired in the UK in March and July, 2009.
In "The Dogleg Murders", a peaceful afternoon on the links turns fatal when a man is bludgeoned at the notoriously difficult 13th hole. "The Black Book" is a complicated case, in which a brutal murderer begins targeting the Midsomer art world. Something is killing sheep in Midsomer Parva, and whispers abound that it’s the mysterious beast of Midsomer in "Secrets and Spies". And in "The Glitch", software magnate Clinton Finn funds the construction of a new building for a local school, but not everyone is impressed with his generosity.
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Amanda Redman stars as Detective Chief Superintendent Sandra Pullman, who leads the office of the Unsolved Crime and Open Case Squad, consisting of three retired police officers whose police skills and intuition she relies on, in New Tricks.
The three retired detectives are played by Dennis Waterman, James Bolam and Alun Armstrong, a trio of crime busters capable of learning new tricks to crack tough crimes.
The New Tricks: Season Three DVD set of 3 discs contain the 8 episodes that originally aired on BBC from April through June 2006.
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Visit the Telemystery website to discover more television mystery series currently available on and coming soon to DVD and Blu-ray disc.
Games of Mystery is pleased to announce the availability of a new mystery casual game from Big Fish Games released today and available to BFG Club members. You can find out more about these games by visiting our Mystery Games: Big Fish Download Games page or by clicking on the links provided below.
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Jack Macey, Newtown's local PI, is kidnapped while investigating a series of robberies linked to a mysterious set of relics discovered in the town. You take on the role of Penny, his daughter, who discovers he's missing after finding a letter addressed to her at his office. Explore the town, talk to its inhabitants and solve intriguing puzzles in this exciting hidden object adventure game!
Relics of Fate: A Penny Macey Mystery may be downloaded and purchased for $6.99 with a Big Fish Game Club membership. A demonstration version (376.67 MB) may be downloaded and played for free for one hour.
Watch a preview video below:
Get any standard game for $6.99 with a Big Fish Game Club membership. Other benefits include the $2.99 Daily Deal, Tomorrow's Game Today, and special member rewards. And if you purchase any 6 games within a single month, you earn a free game with the Big Fish Game Club Monthly Punch Card! (Collector's Editions earn 3 punches each, half-way towards your free game!)
Read Ms. Terri's reviews of the adventure and casual mystery games featured on this site, including Midnight Mysteries: The Edgar Allan Poe Conspiracy, Nancy Drew Dossier: Lights, Camera, Curses!, Enlightenus, and many more!
Big Fish Games: Bestsellers
Big Fish Games: New releases
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Games of Mystery is your source for mystery-themed video, electronic, and board games, parties for kids and adults, and murder mystery weekends and mystery getaway vacations!
A new Mystery Godoku Puzzle has been created by the editors of the Hidden Staircase Mystery Books and is now available on our website.
Godoku is similar to Sudoku, but uses letters instead of numbers. To give you a headstart, we provide you a mystery clue to fill in a complete row or column (if you choose to use it!).
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This week's letters and mystery clue:
A C E M O R S U Y
There is no one to hear this in the title of a 2010 thriller by K. J. Dahlen (9 letters).
We now have two weeks of our puzzles on one page in PDF format for easier printing. Print this week's puzzle here.
Previous puzzles are stored in the Mystery Godoku Archives.
Enjoy the weekly Mystery Godoku Puzzle from the Hidden Staircase Mystery Books, and Thanks for visiting our website!
The Impaler by Gregory Funaro. A Sam Markham Mystery. Pinnacle Mass Market Paperback, February 2011.
This is an exceptionally detailed, well-thought out intellectual thriller that demands close attention; fast-reading it is not. Still, though it is creative and clever, and there are plenty of shocking, even horrific scenes, it seems to be missing something to make it exciting or, for lack of a better word, thrilling.
Read the full text of our review at Mysterious Reviews: The Impaler by Gregory Funaro.
Purchase Options:
Read the first chapter(s) of The Impaler below. Use the Aa settings button to adjust text size, line spacing, and word density.
This coming Tuesday, February 22nd, 2011, HarperCollins is reissuing the graphic novel Cowboys & Aliens in hardcover. A trade paperback will be published in May, a few weeks prior to the release of the film adapted from the book. This new edition of the book includes all-new tie-in art to the film.
Written by Andrew Foley and Fred Van Lente with artwork by Dennis Calero and Luciano Lima, from a concept by Scott Rosenberg, Cowboys & Aliens is the story of what happens when an alien invasion interrupts the ultimate showdown between cowboys and Indians in the Old West.
Originally published in 2006 by Image Comics, the graphic novel is being adapted into the film Cowboys & Aliens starring Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford, which is scheduled to open in theaters July 29th, 2011; a preview of the film aired during the Super Bowl.
ABC Family is expected to order a series based on the young adult thriller The Lying Game by Sara Shepard, according to a report by Deadline|Hollywood. A pilot was filmed last fall starring Alexandra Chando playing the roles of twin teenaged girls separated at birth. Shepard is also the author of the "Pretty Little Liars" series of books, which are the basis for the television series Pretty Little Liars, also on ABC Family.
In The Lying Game, what would you do if you had a long-lost twin? What if she disappeared the day you were supposed to meet? How far would you go to find out what went wrong? Emma Paxton travels to Arizona to start a new life with her long-lost sister—but the life she's about to begin is the one her sister left behind ...
You can read the first chapter(s) of The Lying Game below. Use the Aa settings button to adjust text size, line spacing, and word density.
Film and television projects featuring Harry Houdini seem to be coming from all directions!
A week or so ago we reported on a film project in which Houdini and Arthur Conan Doyle team up with a psychic to solve a series of murders in 1920s New York City. Separately there were reports that SyFy was developing a television series centered on the two men solving mysteries, based on the graphic novel Among the Spirits by Steve Valentine and Paul Chart.
And now The Hollywood Reporter's Heat Vision blog is reporting that Summit Entertainment has hired Noah Oppenheim to adapt the biography The Secret Life of Houdini, The Making of America's First Superhero by William Kalush and Larry Sloman, creating a fictional action/adventure story to feature the master magician.
None may make it into production, but the all seem to have merits.
You can read the first chapter(s) of The Secret Life of Houdini below. Use the Aa settings button to adjust text size, line spacing, and word density.
Telltale Games has released a teaser trailer for the first episode in its upcoming series Jurassic Park: The Game.
We don't know much about the gameplay, other than the events take place immediately following the close of the first Jurassic Park film and players will portray supporting characters in the film.
Jurassic Park: The Game will be available for PC and Mac, and is currently scheduled for release in April 2011. Watch the trailer below.
A Gift for Murder by Karen McCullough. A Heather McNeil Mystery. Five Star Hardcover, January 2011.
This delightful murder mystery introducing a new amateur sleuth includes some laughs, a touch of romance, and an abundance of red herrings. Heather is an engaging lead, and her supporting cast offers both contrast and balance to her role.
Read the full text of our review at Mysterious Reviews: A Gift for Murder by Karen McCullough.
Purchase Options:
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