The Mystery & Mayhem Book Awards recognize emerging new talent and outstanding works in the genre of Cozy and Not-So-Cozy Mysteries. The Grand Prize Winner, Michelle Cox’s book, A Haunting at Linley will be promoted for years to come in our annual Hall of Fame article, as well as be featured on the M&M contest page year ’round!

The best part about being a Chanticleer Int’l Book Award Winner is the love and attention you get all year ‘round!

The 2023 M&M Winners were announced at the 2024 Chanticleer Authors Conference in April, and you can see the official winners post here!

Join us in celebrating the 2023 First Place M&M Winners!

Liese Sherwood Fabre – The Adventure on the Purloined Portrait

A long-buried past. A stolen portrait. The artist’s murder. Can Sherlock discover the connection between the three before he’s stopped permanently?

Sherlock can’t shake his apprehension about a family trip to Paris. His mother’s unflappable confidence vanished months ago, and her anxiety has set the whole family on edge. His greatest fears are realized when they witness the death of one of Mrs. Holmes’ former suitors.

As Sherlock seeks to unravel the reason behind the artist’s murder, he unearths a long-buried secret about his mother and survives several attempts to keep him from getting to the truth.

Can he bring a murderer to justice before he’s buried with these hidden secrets forever?

The Adventure of the Purloined Portrait is the gripping fourth case in The Early Case Files of Sherlock Holmes. If you enjoy traditional historical mysteries, you’ll love this origin series about the world’s greatest consulting detective.

Find it on Amazon

Gail Grant Park – We Are Shadows: An Irish Ghost Story

Moira Gallagher has been conversing with ghosts since she was five. Now as an adult, she’s finally putting that ability to good use.

Moira’s ability to talk with the dead gives her detective agency, Gallagher Investigations, an edge in uncovering secrets the past has buried. With the help of her sisters, Nuala and Deirdre, she assists those unsettled spirits in finding peace by righting the wrongs done to them before they found themselves on the Other Side. The past collides with the present as these Irish sisters solve cold-case murders and mayhem through their dreams, paranormal visitations, and spunk.

If you enjoy a cozy mystery, ghosts of the friendly and not-so-friendly variety, or anything Irish, you’ll love We Are Shadows.

Find it Locally and on Amazon

Rebecca Olmstead – Dreams and Illusions

Suffering a crisis of faith, will one woman’s cryptic visions lead to the path of healing and save her sister from death row?

Gabrielle Dorian believes God has turned against her. Despite prophetic dreams, the grieving boutique owner resents that her alleged gift didn’t prevent her parents’ accidental deaths or protect her husband from a fatal worksite accident. So after receiving a panicked call from the last of her family, the distraught woman shelves her own sorrow and rushes to Seattle to rescue her estranged sister.

Discovering her sibling has been charged with murder, Gabrielle begins to fear the worst when her brother-in-law is missing and his best friend mysteriously comes up with bail money. Battling a hated former classmate in charge of the case, she fights through the murk of suspicious clues that all point to a guilty verdict.

With her last loved one’s life on the line, can she uncover the truth before it’s too late?

Dreams and Illusions is the riveting first book in the Gabrielle Dorian Mysteries Series. If you like headstrong heroines, fast-paced drama, and dark twists, you’ll love Rebecca Olmstead’s tale of doubt and redemption.

Find it on Amazon

Elizabeth Crowens – Hounds of the Hollywood Baskervilles

Asta, the dog from the popular Thin Man series, has vanished, and production for his next film is pending. MGM Studios offers a huge reward, and that’s exactly what young private detectives Babs Norman and Guy Brandt need for their struggling business to survive. Celebrity dognapping now a growing trend, when the police and city pound ridicule Basil Rathbone and ask, “Sherlock Holmes has lost his dog?” Basil also hires the B. Norman Agency to find his missing Cocker Spaniel.

The three concoct a plan for Basil to assume his on-screen persona and round up possible suspects, including Myrna Loy and William Powell; Dashiell Hammett, creator of The Thin Man; Nigel Bruce, Basil’s on-screen Doctor Watson; Hollywood-newcomer, German philanthropist and film financier Countess Velma von Rache, and the top animal trainers in Tinseltown. Yet everyone will be in for a shock when the real reason behind the canine disappearances is even more sinister than imagined.

Find it Locally and on Amazon

 

Patrick E Craig -The Quilt That Knew

• A young girl buried in the woods for forty years…
• A desperate killer loose in the village…
• A mysterious quilt and a golden ring…

Jenny Hershberger returns to Apple Creek, Ohio, the village where she grew up. But this is not a happy homecoming. She’s been called upon to solve a horrible crime. But will the killer find her first…

Find it Locally and on Amazon

Lyn Squire – Immortalized to Death

Death strikes England’s foremost novelist, his latest tale only half told. Was he murdered because someone feared a ruinous revelation? Or was it revenge for some past misdeed? Set in the Kent countryside and London slums of 1870, Immortalised to Death embeds an ingenious solution to Charles Dickens’s unfinished The Mystery of Edwin Drood within the evolving and ultimately tragic consequences of a broader mystery surrounding the author himself. Debut author Lyn Squire kicks off his fascinating Dunston Burnett Trilogy with legendary Victorian novelist Charles Dickens dead at his desk, pen still in hand. Convinced that the identity of Dickens’s murderer lies in the book’s missing denouement, Dickens’s nephew and unlikely detective, Dunston Burnett, sets out to complete his uncle’s half-finished novel. A stunning revelation crowns this tale about the mysterious death of England’s greatest novelist, and exposes the author’s long-held secret.

Find it on Amazon

E.W. Finke – Coyote’s Wail

The baffling death of a beloved Elder. A convocation of eagles, sacred messengers of Kji-Niskam, poisoned. Mi’kmaw First Nation Chief Peter Joe must learn who’s behind the killings before more die. A determined wildlife activist, a self-important Minister of Parliament, a virulent poison, and a plan to eradicate Newfoundland’s newest and smartest predators tangle his trail to the cause and perpetrator, and put his life in danger.

Are things as they seem? The Old Ones’ stories hold the answers.

Find it at Barnes & Noble

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Thank you for joining us to celebrate the 2023 M&M First Place Winners!

You can see our Hall of Fame on the M&M Grand Prize Winners, including Michelle Cox’s incredible book A Haunting at Linley here.

Your book can join the Tiers of Achievement, but only if you submit to the Chanticleer Int’l Book Awards!

Got a great Fiction Book? The 2024 M&M Book Awards are open through the end of September!

Note: Submissions are open until the dates update on the website!

Curl up with a Cozy Mystery Today!

Fall is the best time to enter the M&M Book Awards

You have until September 30th to share your Novel with us and enter the 2024 CIBAs!

This Division is dedicated to one of the most Well-known Mystery authors, Dame Agatha Christie. Poirot, Miss Marple, Tommy and Tuppence, and so much more.

WWI Nurse, Writer, Playwright (and record holder of longest running Stage Play, The Mousetrap which opened in 1952), and Archaeologist, the latter of which contributed greatly to her novels.

When she wasn’t busy writing, She spent quite a good amount of her life working on excavations in Egypt and Iraq with her 2nd Husband, archaeologist Max Mallowan.

But enough about Christie. The Hall of Fame features the Grand Prize Winners of the Mystery and Mayhem Award who we are proud to have in the Chanticleer Family!

A Haunting at Linley: A Henrietta and Inspector Howard Novel
By Michelle Cox

In this seventh book of the series, Clive and Henrietta return to England to find Castle Linley in financial ruin. When Clive’s cousin, Wallace, invites an estate agent in to assess the home’s value, the agent is later found poisoned, throwing all of the Castle’s guests into suspicion. Clive and Henrietta are soon drawn into an investigation, which is slowed by an incompetent local inspector and several unexplained phenomena—the cause of which many, especially the frail Lady Linley, believe to be the workings of the ghost of a hanged maid.

Meanwhile, Gunther and Elsie have begun life on a farm in Omaha. Circumstances are difficult, but they are content—until Oldrich Exely appears, proposing an option Elsie finds difficult to ignore. Melody Merriweather, still masquerading as a nun to aid Elsie’s escape, likewise finds it difficult to ignore a letter with tragic news from home, while Julia, on the other hand, receives a very different sort of letter from Glenn Forbes.

Back in England, Clive is called away to London on suspicious business, leaving Henrietta to carry on with the investigation alone. When she is mysteriously locked in the study one night, however, things take on a more deadly, supernatural feel, leaving her to fear that Lady Linley’s “ghost” might just be real after all…

Order it today!

A Spying Eye: A Henrietta and Inspector Howard Novel
By Michelle Cox

Brooding Château du Freudeneck, just outside Strasbourg, France has villains in the drawing rooms, stolen art hidden in the cellars, and bats in the belfry – all the best elements for a 19th-century Gothic mystery.

However, in Michelle Cox’s novel, A Spying Eye it’s the 20th century. The Great War is passed, but the next war already looms on the horizon. The people of Strasbourg feel the growing conflict sharply, at the heart of Alsace-Lorraine, a fertile region that has been contested between France and Germany since time immemorial.

Which means those bats are in the unfortunate head of the elderly Baron Von Harmon, the current lord and master (as much as he’s still able to be, at least) of the Chateau, while the stolen art is pursued by both the villainous Nazis and the only slightly-less villainous agents of Britain’s MI5.

Read More Here

Ophelia’s Room
By Michael Scott Garvin

Ophelia’s Room by Michael Scott Garvin begins with a bang – and a child’s whimper.

A frantic, distraught father pounds on a bolted chapel door in a small country hospital…. A tiny, two-day-old infant cries in peril….  A deranged grandfather sees demons in every shadowy corner.

The opening scene read like something out of a young parent’s nightmare. Will their child be healthy? Will they grow up to be successful? Will the child be safe in their grandparents’ arms?  Questions that any new mother and father ask themselves. In Garvin’s Ophelia’s Room, the answers are terrifying.

Read More Here

The Discovery
By Patrick M. Garry

Patrick M. Garry’s The Discovery encompasses a narrative that traverses a family legal case jigsaw puzzle toward a discovery of self by exploring the ghost of ancient regrets, basic human desires, and questions of faith.

Frank Horgan, a former lawyer at one of Minneapolis’ largest firms, now practices small-case litigation in the little community of Basswood Hills. Frank, a victim of his own follies, has one more chance to restore his career to its former glory. But not before a huge legal matter comes knocking on his door at his father’s diner. This case kicks off the legal drama, bringing in several main and secondary characters to play their parts in the ultimate discovery of buried contentedness and eventually a scandal that breaks into the national newspaper.

Meanwhile, Frank comes upon the case of the most prominent McCorkle family in Basswood Hills.

Read More Here

Dharma, A Rekha Rao Mystery
By Vee Kumari

A complex murder mystery always requires a little spice. In Dharma, A Rekha Rao Mystery, that extra seasoning is provided by the casting of an Indian American woman as the amateur sleuth, despite her realistic fears for her personal safety.

Professor Rekha Rao is no Bollywood Mighty Girl. She’s a whip-smart American-born 32-year-old college instructor who must deal with her own PTSD after the murder of her father and her unstoppable passion for releasing the man wrongly convicted of her father’s slaying. That obsession is the reason Rekha was dismissed from her old teaching position. The scene is set for deep, personal involvement in the murder of a colleague, a fellow professor who is killed. And a rare, centuries-old statue excavated from an archeological dig in India is the murder weapon.

Read More Here

A Promise Given
By Michelle Cox

With a much-anticipated wedding is in the works, but family complications and entanglements threaten the celebration, when is love A Promise Given, and when is it a compromise taken?

Amidst tribulations of friends and family, the smart and beautiful Henrietta, and the intense Inspector Clive Howard say, “I do.” Now the loving couple will learn how to be Mr. and Mrs. Howard on their honeymoon in England with his relatives at Castle Linley, where intrigue and mystery await their arrival.

Read More Here

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Now that you’re set on your next reads, what are you waiting for? The only way to join this amazing list of Hearten Winners is to Enter Today!

Those who submit and advance will have the chance to win the Overall Grand Prize of the CIBAs and $1000!

The M&M Book Awards recognize emerging new talent and outstanding works in the Cozy and Not-So-Cozy Mystery & Mayhem fiction genre.  The M&M Book Awards is a division of the Chanticleer International Book Awards (The CIBAs).

Chanticleer International Book Awards is looking for the best books featuring “mystery and mayhem,” amateur sleuthing, light suspense, travel mystery, classic mystery, British cozy, not-so-cozy, hobby sleuths, senior sleuths, or historical mystery, perhaps with a touch of romance or humor, we will put them to the test and choose the best among them. (For suspense, thriller, detective, crime fiction see our Clue Awards, and for international intrigue see our Global Thriller Awards)

 1st Place Category winners and Grand Prize Division Winners were announced at the CIBAs Banquet and Ceremony by Gail Halverson on Saturday, April 20th, 2024 at the Four Points By Sheraton in beautiful Bellingham, Wash. sponsored by the 2024 Chanticleer Authors Conference. 

This is the OFFICIAL 2023 LIST of the M&M BOOK AWARDS First Place Category Winners and the M&M Grand Prize Winner.

 

Join us in celebrating the following authors and their works!

• Liese Sherwood-Fabre – The Adventure of the Purloined Portrait

• Gail Grant Park – We Are Shadows: An Irish Ghost Story

• Rebecca Olmstead – Dreams and Illusions

• Elizabeth Crowens – Hounds of the Hollywood Baskervilles

• Patrick E. Craig – The Quilt That Knew

• E. W. Finke – Coyote’s Wail

• Michelle Cox – A Haunting at Linley

• Lyn Squire – Immortalised to Death
  

The Grand Prize Winner for the CIBA 2023 Mystery & Mayhem Awards is:

A Haunting at Linley

A Henrietta and Inspector Howard Novel

by Michelle Cox 

You can see all of our amazing 2023 M&M Finalists here! Congratulations to all and thank you for submitting!

Well done climbing the CIBA Levels of Achievement!

PROMOTING OUR AUTHORS! 

Attn CIBA Winners: More goodies and prizes will be coming your way along with promotion in our magazine, website, and advertisements in Chanticleer Int’l Book Awards long-tail marketing strategy. Welcome to the CIBA Hall of Fame for Award Winners!

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A Note to ALL the WINNERS: The coveted CIBA Blue Ribbons will be mailed out starting in June. We will contact you with an email to verify your mailing address and other items. You will receive an OFFICIAL EMAIL NOTIFICATION with Digital Badges and more information.

NOTE: We will post at least two 2023 CIBA Divisions’ OFFICIAL Winners per business day starting April 24, 2024. We do a final sweep and reconciliation prior to making the Official CIBA Posts for the 2023 First Place and Grand Prize Winners. We thank  you in advance for your patience and understanding. There are many moving parts involved with the Chanticleer International Book Awards Program.

Thank you for participating in the 2023 CIBAs! We are looking forward to reading your future entries.

The Chanticleer Team