Nominees for Dilys Winn Mystery Award

This year's nominees for The Dilys Award have just been announced. The award has been given annually since 1992 by the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association (IMBA). Once a year, members submit nominations for the mystery titles they most enjoyed handselling and then vote to select the winner, with the award presented at Left Coast Crime convention each year. The Dilys Award is named in honor of Dilys Winn, the founder of the first specialty bookseller of mystery books in the United States. The list of finalists this year includes one of my personal favorites (Sweetness -- which just came out in paperback today!) and several that I'm eager to read. Here's the list:

• Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, Alan Bradley
• A Quiet Belief in Angels, R.J. Ellroy
• The Dark Horse, Craig Johnson
• The Girl Who Played with Fire, Stieg Larsson
• The Ghosts of Belfast, Stuart Neville
• The Brutal Telling, Louise Penny
• The Shanghai Moon, S.J. Rozan

Previous winners of the Dilys Award include Peter Hoeg for Smilla's Sense of Snow, Julie Spencer-Fleming for In the Bleak Midwinter, Louise Penny for Still Life, Colin Cotterill for Thirty-Three Teeth, and Val McDermid for A Place of Execution.