Righteous Assassin, book #1 in the Mike Stoneman Thriller Series, was a Semi-Finalist for the 2019 CLUE Award. Both Lethal Voyage and Deadly Enterprise made the Short List for the 2020 award (I just got in under the submission deadline for the newer book). Only Lethal Voyage advanced to the Semi-Finalist group for the 2020 award. As between the two, I’m happy to have Lethal Voyage as my entry, since it is (in my view) the better of the two books. Now I wait until late April with the Chanticleer Book Review stages its annual writers’ conference (April 21-25). The conference will be virtual this year, and as part of the festivities, Chanticleer will announce the Finalists, category winners, and grand prize winners for it’s 2020 Chanticleer International Book Awards competition. Within the CLUE Award for Mystery, Suspense, & Thriller novels, there are five sub-categories:

• Suspense/Thriller
• Detective/Crime
• Private Eye (Noir)
• Legal/Medical/Police Procedural
• Spy/Espionage

There is some overlap in the categories, but I chose to put Lethal Voyage in the Detective/Crime category. We’ll see whether it is among the 5 Finalists in the category, and whether it wins its category, and whether it is named the Grand Prize winner for the CLUE Award — all in about 3 weeks.