2013 Award Finalists

Hello Permanent Press fans, award season is upon us and we are proud announce three of our 2012 novels have qualified as finalists in three distinguished awards.

Oregon Hill - Hammett Prize Finalist

Howard Owen's first Willie Black mystery, sets the down-on-his-luck reporter apart as the only one still investigating the mysterious death of a dismembered university co-ed in the quiet town of Oregon Hill, Virginia.

The Hammett Prize is awarded by the International Association of crime writers and will be announced during the New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association (NAIBA) Fall Conference, in Somerset, New Jersey, September 30-October 2. The winner will receive a bronze trophy, designed by sculptor Peter Boiger.

Dead Anyway - Nero Award Finalist

Chris Knopf's new mystery series follows the events of Arthur Cathcart the market researcher and occasional finder of missing persons. After a close call with the wrong types of people Arthur is presumed and pronounced dead, and now he's going to find out why.

The Nero Award is presented by the Wolfe pack, a group dedicated to honoring the legendary had-boiled detective character of Nero Wolfe featured in over 30 novels written by Rex Stout. The award is given to authors whose work best represents the style of the genre originated by Stout. The award is presented at the Black Orchid Banquet, which is traditionally held on the first Saturday in December in New York City.

Racing the Devil - Shamus Award Finalist "Best First PI Novel"

Jaden Terrell's Nashville private investigator Jared McKean has a weakness for women in jeopardy - until one frames him for muder. His DNA and fingerprints are found at the murder scene and the victim was killed with a bullet from his gun. Now Jared must find a way to clear his name, hold his family together, and solve a case that could cost him his life.

The Shamus Award is presented by The Private Eye Writers of America. The Shamus Award is to honor excellent work in the Private Eye genre.The award was created by Robert J. Randisi in 1981. The winner will be announced at the PWA Banquet at Bouchercon in Albany, New York, on Friday, September 20. 

          

RainTaxi Raves Over The Inbetween People in Summer Issue Review

In the summer edition of the quarterly book review publication RainTaxi, Emma McEvoy's literary middle-eastern narrative The Inbetween People was highly praised in a two-page spread.

"Emma McEvoy’s ambitious and moving novel engages the viscerality of violence and its results, wrestles with the ethically essential imaginative task of understanding another’s human motivations and emotions, and explores the myriad in which people get lost in the land of Israel: Arab families are forced from their ancestral homes; IDF soldiers fight in “those neutral, passionless places” of the Sinai desert; conscientious objectors refused to serve past the 1967 borders wind up in prison; an Arab-Israeli IDF volunteer can’t regain his orientation; terrorist attacks disrupt daily activities; and, finally, a wife leaves her husband with only memories and cold dreams and the task of writing letter after letter...

Tragedy is a constant and McEvoy’s writing is most remarkable at capturing the sense of dumbfoundedness, communicating a stunned inability to communicate, as when one imprisoned objector speaks to his wife of “trying to be a decent human being,” and is accused of cowardice. The characters here occasionally stumble into wooden rhetoric—“there is goodness,” or “the past is the past”—but such statements heighten an emotional tautness within the novel. This underlying strain conjures precisely the tension in Israel during the last Intifada.

McEvoy has an eye, too, for specific visual and aural details of the place, the whirr of automated sprinklers, how “below you the lights of distant Galilee villages glisten like raw diamonds.” Yet is is on the emotional level that this book is most important, most brave; it insists that one must “try to imagine” the actions and experiences of others.

This is a stunning book, important not only in relation to the Israeli/Palestinian situation it addresses, but, indeed, as a wrenching work of literature explicitly concerned with the ethical functions and responsibilities of the human imagination." --RainTaxi

Look for the full review in the summer edition of RainTaxi.

The Inbetween People is available now from The Permanent Press!

The Inbetween People

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