In June, I had the very great honour of being named one of five finalists for the prestigious Arthur Ellis Award for Best Short Story.

The title that received this nomination was Watermelon Weekend, from our Crime anthology THIRTEEN, by the Mesdames of Mayhem.

I’m proud of this story. It was written with an understanding of how families work, and how their fragile dynamics may or may not be destroyed by encounters of the criminal kind.

But then, the truth is that I feel this way about all of my stories.

Maybe it’s my genre, which allows me to go beyond the nuts and bolts of “whodunit” and delve into the humanity of crime, or maybe it’s the stories themselves, concerned as they are with suffering and survival.

For whatever reason, my novels and short stories have touched readers, and for this I am eternally grateful.

There can be no greater joy for an author.