Winners, Reminders and Such

I am excited to announce the winners of the 2011 Men of Mystery calendars. With the help of the Random Number Generator, I have determined that:

Sheila K from Florida
and
Stacy P from Ohio

will each be receiving one of these limited edition calendars. I will put them in the mail tomorrow so you can get the most possible use out of them, ladies. I'm thinking this might make a nice annual project, maybe make the theme different each year. What do you think?

Some other items I wanted to remind you about. First, don't forget that you have until Wednesday to enter the drawing for one of five e-books from Open Road Media. Winners will get their choice of one book from one of my four special guests last week: Jonathon King, Jack Higgins, Lawrence Block or Stephen Coonts. They are available for any format of e-reader you have, so don't miss out on that opportunity!

Also a reminder that Brian over at Spinetingler has been collecting links to all the "Best of" lists this year. You can see what everyone liked best in one easy access location.

The posts for the Criminal Plots reading challenge have gone up. So you can start posting the links to your reviews or adding your books in the comments sections for each of the books you're reading for the challenge. If you haven't signed up to join us, it isn't too late. We're going to have a grand time seeing all the books people choose for the challenge. (Note: as of this post, the Mr. Linky's aren't working due to maintenance. You can leave your link in the comments or add it later if it isn't working when you access.)

At The Precinct Facebook page, we're playing a hot round of The Title Game (on the Discussions tab). Seems like every time I go over to check on the status of the game, there's 20 new titles added. So, stop on over and test your title skills on that one. Also, at either The Precinct or The Agency (on the Discussions tab) we're taking the nominations for what books you think every crime fiction fan should read before they die. I want to turn this into a meme of sorts, but I can't do so unless we get more folks adding nominations. So stop over and drop in your thoughts on that topic. Sometimes I botch the Facebook links, so if these don't work, just do a search for The Precinct or The Agency and we'll pop up.

Some writers' tour schedules that have popped up that you may want to check out if you haven't already:

• Robert Crais
• Michael Koryta
• Brad Parks
• Steve Hockensmith
• T. Jefferson Parker

As I hear about additional schedules I'll share what I know! Hope you had a great weekend ringing in the new year. Here's to lots of great books and lots of great conversations about books! Happy Reading!