Meet Beautiful Singles: Agatha award

A Paperback Birthday means Prizes for you!

BREAKING NEWS!

THE WRONG GIRL wins the DAPHNE for Best Mystery/Suspense!

(You know what I mean..)

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Do you still read paperbacks?

If the answer is yes, keep reading—I have an irresistible offer for you.

If the answer is no, keep reading. I will try to convince you. And then I will have an irresistible offer for you!

Paperbacks. Their demise is a topic of discussion throughout the publishing world—will people give up the cheaper sometimes-flimsy paper-intensive mass market paperbacks in favor of ecologically-sound, lighter and paper-saving ebooks?

Well, interesting, huh? I have at least three rooms in my house-- well, actually four. Ah, five. Yeah, five--that have bookshelves in them,and I can tell you the paperback shelves are sometimes double-shelved. You know, a row in the back and a row in the front.

Do you do that? I mean, it’s kind of more storage than display, right? If someone asks—do you have, say, LORD OF THE FLIES? THE FIRM? THE HOBBIT? SILAS MARNER? WITNESS FOR THE PROSCECUTION? You’d say, oh sure. I have those! Well, great, but where? Can you find them?

I fear I could not find them. But I cannot give them up.

And yes, and yes, I continue to buy mass market paperbacks. They are perfect for the beach, right? If they get sand between the pages, or a few blotches of sunscreen smudge the especially smudgeable print, well, you don’t really care, right? And in a pinch, you MIGHT dog-ear a page, right? Come on, you MIGHT.

They are great on planes, and in hotel rooms, and when you are finished, you can leave them behind as a special gift to a housekeeper or the next guest. Or tuck them into the seatback pocket for the flight attendant—they love to read!

They are a staple in beach and vacation homes, of course. I love to walk into a summer home or a bed and breakfast, or a lovely inn, and amidst the fragrance of salt air and mildewy curtains and coconoutty sunscreen, and come upon an overflowing shelf of paperbacks so happily readthat the bindings are sprung and the pages are thick with the damp air.

You know what I mean? They don’t even close anymore? And you know someone had a wonderful time. They are full of good energy.

This weekend, we were in Tanglewood, and in the inn where we stayed, we found a book just like that—it was Ken Follett’s KEY TO REBECCA, and I bet Jonathan is about the millionth person to read that particular copy. Some other happy vacationer finished it, and left it behind for the next happy group. I love that.

(I left behind the paperback of THE OTHER WOMAN. You never know who might read it, right? What if Steven Spielberg is the room’s next occupant? Ah HA.)

So I think summertime is the perfect paperback time. And that is why I am so thrilled that today is the paperback birth-month for THE WRONG GIRL.

THE WRONG GIRL had the extraordinary honor of winning both this year’s Agatha for Best Contemporary Novel, and the Daphne for Best Mystery/Suspense! It’s also an Anthony nominee.

So to celebrate this paperback birthday: two irresistible offers.

First: if you send me your proof of purchase of the paperback of THE WRONG GIRL, you’ll be entered in a drawing to win A Kindle Paperwhite, a Nook Glowlight or a $120 gift certificate to the bookstore of your choice!

Just email me through my website at http://www.HankPhillippiRyan.com or at hryan@comcast.net

(See be

low for the fine print.)

Second! Tell us in the comments how you feel about paperbacks…and one lucky commenter will win the paperback of the Mary Higgins Clark award-winning THE OTHER WOMAN!

Happy Paperback Birthday to THE WRONG GIRL! (You know what I mean....)

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Contest rules: enter as often as you like—one receipt per entry. Three winners will be drawn at random, and winners can choose their prize. Contest ends August 15, 2014, and winners will be notified on August 16. US and Canada only, please.

I Know I've Seen This Place Before

(Look above my head.)

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: This photo certainly proves it. Location definitely matters.See? My husband insisted he did not place us in the bookstore like this on purpose, but I bet he did. Isn’t it hilarious?

This is John Lescroart with me, by the way. One of the most brilliant mystery writers anywhere. I interviewed him for this 20^thbook—THE KEEPER--and he’s fantastic. If you don’t know him, he writes the Dismas Hardy books, and pretty much invented the sort of—domestic legal thriller/mystery. You know? Where the sleuth has a family that he loves, a wonderful daughter and a wife he adores, and good dear friends--and problems. Not huge ones, but the day to day little things that can make our live misera—I mean, interesting.

His characters are real people, and the situations are realistic—and his setting—San Francisco—is just as much a part of the books as the people.

We talked about that in the interview (here I am describing the moment I had a good idea in my upcoming book TRUTH BE TOLD), and about his relationship with San Francisco—he loves it (except for the weather) and lives there part of the time. But he’s very careful to make sure that when he writes about “real” San Francisco, that it’s accurate. He says—if he made a mistake he’d be flooded with complaints. (The “that street isn’t one way!” type of thing. (Do you see geographical mistakes in books? What do you do when you find one?)

In my books, set in Boston, I try for the same authenticity. If I had the Red Line trains going to Newton, or the Mass Turnpike going north and south, or –well you get the picture. Real Boston has to be accurate Boston.

And it’s easy for my brain to conflate reality with the books, sadly. My husband and I will be driving down the Mass Pike and I’ll say, oooh, exit 17! Here’s where Jane was chased by the bad guys! And then I realize, no—I made that up.

John described the exact same brainwaves in almost exactly the same ways—he says he’ll walk around SF and say oh, here’s where a certain character in THE KEEPER was killed!

And that’s great, right? Because it feels real. I’m now writing WHAT YOU SEE, which is about murder that takes place in a little park near Boston’s famous Quincy Market. And since it’s on a public street, I’ve used the exact real place. It’s creepy, now, for me to go by the Mayor Curley statue. I think—ooh, this is where my book begins! And I almost believe it’s true.

When you write about a real place, does the reality of the place fade away, and be replaced by what happened in your fictional world?

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN is the on-air investigative reporter for Boston's NBC affiliate. She's won 30 EMMYs, 12 Edward R. Murrow awards and dozens of other honors for her ground-breaking journalism. A bestselling author of six mystery novels, Ryan has won multiple prestigious awards for her crime fiction: the Agatha, Anthony, Macavity, and for THE OTHER WOMAN, the coveted Mary Higgins Clark Award. National reviews have called her a "master at crafting suspenseful mysteries" and "a superb and gifted storyteller." Her newest thriller, THE WRONG GIRL, has the extraordinary honor of winning the 2013 Agatha Award for Best Contemporary Novel! A four-week Boston Globe bestseller, it was dubbed "Another winner" in a Booklist starred review and "Stellar" by Library Journal. She's on the national board of Mystery Writers of America and 2013 president of national Sisters in Crime. Watch for her next novel, TRUTH BE TOLD, on October 7, 2014.

Visit her online at HankPhillippiRyan.com, on Twitter @hank_phillippi and Facebook at HankPhillippiRyanAuthorPage.