Lock Your Doors and Leave the Lights on!

The Clue Awards are the Darker Side of Mysteries!

The Clue Award is our Division for the more gritty, darker, crime noir type mystery novels. For the light hearted, cozy mysteries see the Mystery & Mayhem Award.

While most of our categories in this Award are for fictional mysteries, unlike the other Fiction Divisions, Clue also has a Non-Fiction category for True Crime and Investigation books. Instead of putting it into a Non-Fiction Division we took a note from what many bookstores do and put the Non-fiction Mysteries with the Fictional ones.

Book Riot featured the differences between True Crime and Thrillers:

True crime aficionados liked the deep dive into the psychology of it all. Jack El-Hai, a true crime writer who recently published The Lost Brothers, wrote, “I’m only an occasional reader of murder mysteries. Many fictional works about murder are about finding out who did it, and the narrative concludes with that discovery or with catching the perpetrator. I’m more interested in why they did it and the aftermath for everyone affected by the crime.”

True Crime books can also be very important on bringing light to unsolved crimes and helping to solve them. Michelle McNamara’s I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, which after the authors death, her husband, actor Patton Oswalt, worked with some other writers to finish the book. It was finally published 2 months before the arrest of The Golden State Killer. While her book did not directly affect finding the perpetrator, it did bring crucial publicity towards a largely forgotten case. It was later turned into an HBO documentary series!

The Categories of the Clue Awards are:

• Detective/Crime
• Suspense/Thriller
• Private Eye/Noir
• Legal/Medical/Police Procedural
• US Political Thriller
• Spy/Espionage/Undercover
• True Crime/Investigation

It would be a crime to miss out!

Don’t Delay! Enter Today!

We are delighted to celebrate the 2023 Winners of the Clue Awards who have already started to make their mark on the genre!

• Daniel V. Meier Jr. – Guidance to Death
  
• Frederick Douglass Reynolds – Saint Bloodbath
  
• Michelle Cox – A Haunting at Linley
  
• Jode Millman – The Empty Kayak
  
• Raymond Paul Johnson – The Raven Society: Conspiracy Ignited
• Margaret Mizushima – Standing Dead: A Timber Creek K-9 Mystery
  

The Grand Prize Winner for the CIBA 2023 CLUE Awards is:

The Other Murder

By Kevin G. Chapman

We’re excited to feature Kevin and our other winners, but before we do that, here are some of the best reviewed Thrillers that have come our way recently!

ECHO From A BAYOU
By J. Luke Bennecke

John Bastian’s life is falling apart, but after a serious accident, he gains another one. In J. Luke Bennecke’s suspense thriller, Echo from a Bayou, John must tie up the loose ends of a man who died decades ago.

One misfortune after another beats John down. His wife divorces him, and his California business is going bust. On a ski trip to boost his mood, he fails to save a man from falling to his death out of a slopes-bound cable car. The next day, on the mountain, John slams head-first into a tree.

He’s not the only one who wakes up in his hospital bed.

Read more here!

THE EXCURSION
By T.O. Paine

The Excursion by T.O. Paine is a horror thriller with enough twists and turns to satisfy even the most jaded reader.

Two people tell this story. Charly, a woman in her 30s, faces her emotionally damaged family. Randall, meanwhile, works as an agent of Zaroff Excursions, a hunting club for the uber-wealthy with an interest in an extreme form of hunting where the prey is much more intelligent than a deer or bear.

On a cold Thanksgiving weekend, Charly and a few other members of her family travel to an isolated cabin in the mountains above Denver. Her car gets stuck in a snowdrift, leaving her stranded, but that’s only the start of her trouble. She finds that the cabin has been rented by Randall’s company for that same weekend, forcing her family to share the lodge with strangers.

Read more here!

REVELATIONS: Ro Delahanty Series Book 6
By Dave Lager

Ro Delahanty bears heavy weights on her shoulders—a decades old conspiracy, the complexities of polyamorous love, and troubling family secrets—all of which she will begin to face in Revelations, book 6 of Dave Lager’s Ro Delahanty series.

The wealthy, powerful Pribyl family is up to something sinister in their new scrap shipment business, Ro is sure of it. But she has to prove it to herself before she can even start to convince anyone else. And as much as she’d like to dive head-first into that mystery, she has many more problems to solve as a Fort Armstrong County Sergeant Deputy.

An unsanctioned party threatens to become a dangerous mob, setting fire to a half-constructed house. Ro’s bold, decisive nature comes under fire from a rival at the Sheriff’s office. Worse, a major change in that office could upend the foundation of Ro’s life and even rob her of the comradery she and her colleagues rely on.

Read more here!

IDENTIFIED: A Hacker Thriller
By John Wilander

Identified by John Wilander is a dystopian novel about the omniscient power of our potential cyber future.

West, a young man, spent 15 years in prison for hacking government systems. His mother, a highly visible activist against his imprisonment, is also trying unsuccessfully to get her health insurance to pay for her fight against a deadly medical condition. In Identified West believes the government is responsible for illegally blocking her insurance and vows to find out who’s behind the effort and put his mom back on the insurance rolls.

This is no easy task. Cybersecurity is now a fully linked global enterprise called the G20S, an expansion of today’s G20 nations. Virtually every form of human activity across the world can be logged by the system. It will take a small crew of talented hackers who call themselves the Survivors to develop unique hacker tools for West to break into the system, find the guilty, and get his mother insured. At every point, success could slip out of their grasp.

Read more here!