July 2026
Daisy Bateman (Stacie Grey) – My third thriller, She Had Enough, will be out in the world as of July 21st! To celebrate, I will be in conversation with our own Faye Snowden on July 22, at 6 PM at Books Inc in Alameda. RSVP here, there will be cake!
Also, as part of the launch, I will be making a tour of every Barnes and Noble in the Bay Area to sign books on Saturday, July 25, starting in Walnut Creek in the morning and ending in Emeryville or when I can’t take it anymore. Follow along on Instagram here.
Dale Berry – I will be at San Diego Comic Con International 2026, July 22-26, Space #E-02 at the San Diego Convention Center, 111 West Harbor Drive.
I’ll be returning to my ol’ Myriad Publications table, selling the new Bullets & Balloons eBook, plus How To Write a Mystery: a MWA Handbook, The Be-Bop Barbarians, Tales of the Moonlight Cutter and more from the heart of the event.
Steven T. Callan – I’m excited to tell you about the news I received last week. My latest novel, The Outlaw from Newville, the second in the Game Warden Henry Glance series, has been declared winner of the 2026 Next Generation Indie Book Awards in the Crime Fiction category.
The Next Generation Indie Book Awards is the largest international book awards competition for independent authors and publishers. I couldn’t be prouder, and I couldn’t be more grateful to all of the gracious readers who have provided me with encouragement and support for all these years.
I’m currently working on my third novel in the Game Warden Henry Glance series and will be sure to let you know when it’s going to be released.
Mark Coggins – My August Riordan short story, “Liverjack,” appears in Starlite Pulp Review #8, to be released at the beginning of July.
Michael Cooper – I’m happy to still get agreement after winning the overall grand prize at the Chanticleer International Book Awards for The Rabbi’s Knight as Best Book of 2025 in April.
Last month it was the winner of a National Indie Excellence Award in the Religious-Fiction category. I guess it just goes to show the power of prayer!
Carmella Dutra – I’d like to share a book event Michelle Chouniard and I have together on July 15, 7 PM at Banter Bookshop in Fremont CA (3768 Capitol Ave, Fremont, CA 94538).
The bookshop is calling our event Hot Wings and Serial Killers. This is a free event but requires registration to attend. Michelle and I will join for an engaging discussion about our latest releases! To end the evening we’ll enjoy cake, murder cookies, and cider with everyone.
Register here.
Dwight Holing –The Broken Blood, the eighth book in my Nick Drake Mystery Series, continues its year-long winning streak with an IPPY Gold Medal for Best Suspense/Thriller in June—following a Laramie First Place finish in April and a Silver Falchion at Killer Nashville last August.
Claire Johnson – Crookedest Street in the World is now available in ebook and trade paperback from Level Best Books. In Book No. 3 in the Fog City Noir series, Maggie Laurent, P.I., is slowly making a name for herself in San Francisco. In the current book, the life of a young Chinese novitiate is at stake. Maggie braves San Francisco’s underworld to keep her safe, bringing down on her head the wrath of the mayor and police chief of San Francisco, and the kingpins of the prostitution, gambling, and drug trades operated by Chinese gang lords.
I am sticking my toes in the historical fiction market with the release of For Thee, available in ebook and trade paperback from Level Best Books. For Thee is a first-person account of Pauline Pfeiffer’s marriage to Ernest Hemingway. We follow Pauline from the cotton fields of Arkansas to post-World War I Paris, where she meets a young writer, Ernest Hemingway, and his wife, Hadley Richardson. This novel contains snapshots of all the leading lights of that expat set in Paris, including Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Sara and Gerald Murphy. Ernest and Pauline’s affair ends his marriage to Hadley, and they settle in Key West. They follow the bullfights in Spain, shoot game in the mountains of Idaho and Wyoming, hunt for big game in Africa, and troll the waters of Cuba to reel in marlin. A devout Catholic when she first meets Ernest, Pauline willfully sins against the tenets of her upbringing and abandons her religion, all for a man who ten years later will edit her out of his life with the same casual disdain he’d normally reserve for a badly written sentence.
Laurie R. King is looking forward to the upcoming Book Passage Mystery Conference, talking about writing: characters, historical fiction, and establishing time & place. And, frankly, looking forward to chatting with and learning from her colleagues. See you there!
James L’Etoile – On July 6 at 2:30 PM, I will be a guest on the Ramblings From The Little Shed podcast from Ontario, Canada.
I will attend the Public Safety Writers Association Conference in Las Vegas, from July 9th through the 12th, where is I’ll teach a workshop of The Author’s Toolkit: How to Build a Successful Book. He will also team up with MWA NorCal member Ellen Kirschman to offer a session on The Serial Killer Next Door.
The annual Book Passage Mystery Writers Conference will run from July 17-19 at the Corte Madera location and I will join the faculty again this year to join in craft oriented sessions for new and aspiring writers.
Nick Mamatas – My play, The Failure of the Century, about the writer H. P. Lovecraft, had its premiere as part of Crow’s Fest, a summer festival by Upstart Crow Theater Company in Boulder, CO. The play is also being published as a chapbook by San Francisco publisher The Fabulist. Pre-order here.