Booklist Online: More than 130,000 book reviews for librarians, book groups, and book lovers - from the trusted experts at the American Library Association

Today’s Mystery Month book trailer might be better titled “(Everything but) Lost,” but I find it effective nonetheless. For the final book in Bolton’s Lacey Flint trilogy, St. Martin’s has squished together trailers for the first two books in the series (Now You See Me, Dead Scared) and popped in a frame at the end to let us know Lost is the wildest yet. I wonder, does that mean more or less scary clowns?

I don’t play a detective on TV or in book trailers, but I think Lacey #2 might be an impostor.

Here’s a brain teaser for you: in the far-flung future, a human detective teams up withan android to solve a homicide. Is this a mystery novel, or is it science fiction? The great thing about Isaac Asimov’s The Caves of Steel (1954) is, no matter how many times you read it, and no matter how many angles you look at it from, it’s very difficult to assign it definitively to either genre.

Same goes for Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon (2002), which is also set in the future, although Morgan doesn’t fling it quite as far as Asimov did. The book’s got all the trappings of SF—marvelous new technologies, new societies, and so forth—but at its heart it’s a noir. A man is hired to solve a murder, gets mixed up with the victim’s seductive wife, and risks his own life in some of the darkest, seediest corners of the city. Is the book SF or is it a mystery?

Tell you what: Why don’t you check out this list of SF mysteries and let me know which genre you’d put them in, if you had to choose only one. And let me know which titles you’d add to the list, too.

Mystery month continues at BTT with one of crime fiction’s reigning kings. Could Harlan Coben add an award for book trailers to his already sagging mantel? Here’s the trailer for his latest, Six Years.

Once you figure this whole thing out, let’s do something for that ring around the collar.

Here’s a spot of good news for Len Deighton fans: Simon Beaufoy, who won an Oscar for his Slumdog Millionaire screenplay, is working on an 18-part television series based on Deighton’s Bernard Samson novels. I found out about it at The Hollywood Reporter.

Samson is, of course, the British SIS operative who starred in three related trilogies: Berlin Game (1983), Mexico Set  (’84), London Match (’85); Spy Hook (’88), Spy Line (’89), Spy Sinker (’90); and Faith (’94), Hope (’95) and Charity (’96).

This won’t be the first small-screen appearance for Bernard; Ian Holm played him, and pretty well too if memory serves, in the 1988 miniseries based on the Game, Set and Match trilogy.

Who would you like to see play him this time?

“Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Burt Bacharach.”

When Austin Powers (Mike Myers) looks directly at the audience and introduces the famed composer in Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, you know this isn’t your typical mystery spoof. As silly as it is, it’s also sly and daring: as much as it’s done on television these days, you don’t find characters in lot of movies breaking the fourth wall and talking directly to the viewer. Could easily have backfired and pulled us right out of the story.

There are a lot of mystery spoofs: literary spoofs, television shows, movies. Many of them aren’t so good, but there are some very clever ones, like the Austin Powers movies or Jasper Fforde’s The Big Over Easy. Check out my little ditty on the subject and let me know what you think. Have I left out any of your favorites?

I like to think that the Mystery Writers of America planned to announce the winners of this year’s Edgar Awards to coincide to Booklist‘s Mystery Month celebration (surely it’s not the other way around).  Here are the winners in each category with links to Booklist reviews where available.

BEST NOVEL

Live by Night, by Dennis Lehane

BEST FIRST NOVEL BY AN AMERICAN AUTHOR

The Expats, by Chris Pavone

BEST PAPERBACK ORIGINAL

The Last Policeman, by Ben H. Winters

BEST FACT CRIME

Midnight in Peking: How the Murder of a Young Englishwoman Haunted the Last Days of Old China, by Paul French

BEST CRITICAL/BIOGRAPHICAL

The Scientific Sherlock Holmes: Cracking the Case with Science and Forensics, by James O’Brien

BEST SHORT STORY

“The Unremarkable Heart” – Mystery Writers of America Presents: Vengeance, by Karin Slaughter

BEST JUVENILE

The Quick Fix, by Jack D. Ferraiolo

BEST YOUNG ADULT

Code Name Verity, by Elizabeth Wein

In honor of Mystery Month, which we’ll be celebrating throughout May here at Booklist Online, I’ve put together a list of middle-grade mysteries with food themes. In the introduction, I mention Harriet the Spy’s tomato sandwiches, and apparently, I’m not the only one who’s tried to recreate Harriet’s iconic snack. Have your own favorite food moment from a youth mystery old or new? We’d love to hear from you. Meanwhile, enjoy the list, and bon appétit!

It’s Mystery Month at Booklist, and Book Trailer Thursday is cashing in on the action. Setting the bar high for production value AND bleakness, here’s the short-film trailer for John le Carré’s A Delicate Truth.

Check back all month for more!

Let’s say you’re on the lam and hiding in a root cellar in rural Mississippi, hardly daring to breathe, afraid to so much as peep outside during the daylight hours lest the law-abiding homeowner spot your unshaven mug and drop a dime to the local sheriff—that’s a perfectly good excuse for not knowing about Booklist‘s Mystery Month. But, really, only if you’ve been hiding in that root cellar for the last five years.

As everyone in the law-abiding world knows, May is the time when we celebrate the publication of Booklist‘s annual Mystery Showcase issue with a little celebration we like to call Mystery Month. We kicked things off yesterday with a webinar, “Thrilling Mysteries: Can’t Miss Crime Fiction for Spring,” and, as of this morning, our May 1 print issue is now live on Booklist Online.

Crime-fiction fans are in for a feast. We’re sharing some highlights in today’s issue of REaD ALERT, and magazine subscribers who have set up an online profile will enjoy free and unfettered access to nearly 150 reviews and a dozen awesome features, including “The Year’s Best Crime Novels,” “A Hard-Boiled Gazetteer to the Best Mystery Settings in the World,” an interview with Lawrence Block, and much, much more.

On Booklist Online, we’ll be complementing all this seriously good stuff with irreverent and entertaining lists every day of the month. To give you a taste, today’s list is “Hard-Boiled Eggheads: 16 Novels by Literary Authors Who Really Want to Play Detective.” We’ll also be publishing extra mystery reviews online and rounding them up in issues of Booklist Online Exclusives mailing May 9 and May 30. And we’ll share the best of the best on May 31 in a special “Best of Mystery Month” issue of REaD ALERT.

Our blogs will be chock-full of crime-fiction posts, too, and we’ll be sharing gems from our mystery vault on Twitter and Facebook. Speaking of Twitter, we’ll be tweeting each and every one of our 38 starred reviews before the end of the month. If you want to make sure you don’t miss a thing, follow me at @Booklist_Keir, and Booklist at @ALA_Booklist, and keep an eye on the hashtag #mysterymonth. I hope you’ll spread the word—and join the conversation.

Right up there with “flushing the toilet with the bathroom door closed (because you could get sucked in!),” “the dark” is among the most common, very rational childhood (or adulthood, no judgment here) fears. What’s Lemony Snicket got to say about it?

Are you sure you wanna go down there, little Laszlo?