That’s right! We have some pretty extraordinary news!
The Glamour of Evil — the Vatican spy thriller by BookGo’s own Michael McKinley and Nancy Merritt Bell — has been awarded the Grand Prize in the Crime Fiction Indie Gold Awards, the new awards programme celebrating the very best in independent mystery, thriller, and suspense fiction. The judges’ vote was unanimous!!!
We were also amazed to be named among such a long list of incredible other crime and thriller writers. You can check out the award and all the other finalists here.
Crime Fiction Indie Gold Awards
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In this issue, we’ve got a profile on the Indie Gold awards and the man who invented it, crime thriller author James Dain. Michael also pens a personal account telling the story of The Glamour of Evil’s long road to the prize. Nancy gives a deep dive into the art of editing a thriller. And we’ve also got a round-up of other thrillers we’re loving right now!
P.S. We're always looking for great thrillers to shout about — yours or someone else’s. If you’ve got a recommendation, drop us a line at info@bookgo.pub. We’d love to feature it!
P.P.S. Want to help BookGo out? Forward this email! If you know someone who loves a smart, globe-trotting thriller, send this along to them – they might just find their next favourite read!
Award Announcement: The Glamour of Evil wins the Indie Gold Grand Prize.
Feature: Author James Dain and the Indie Heart of Gold
Agony of Genius: On spies, the Vatican, and never giving up on a story you believe in by Michael McKinley
Writer’s Kit: How to love your editor by Nancy Merritt Bell
Reading Round-Up: Three unmissable thrillers by women by Tomas Elliott
Coming Soon: BookGoing international: the view from the London Book Fair and more exciting updates from the UK and Europe!
We are absolutely delighted to announce that The Glamour of Evil: A Maddie Lynch Mystery by Michael McKinley and Nancy Merritt Bell has been awarded the Grand Prize in Contest #1 of the Crime Fiction Indie Gold Awards!
Magdalena “Maddie” Lynch, 29, never planned to become the Vatican’s Jane Bond. But when the world’s oldest — and most secretive — intelligence service needs a smart outsider to investigate a murdered priest and a missing 250 millions Euros, Maddie is their woman.
What begins as one errand quickly becomes something far more dangerous: a globe-trotting chase from New York to Dublin to Jerusalem, entangling a rogue Catholic group, a warmongering US presidential candidate, and a stunning assassin…
And when Maddie realises that the priest, the missing money, and the death of her own father in Lebanon are all connected, the hunters become the hunted.
If she wants to keep fighting evil, first she has to survive it!
“If you love fast-paced thrillers with moral complexity, global stakes, and a protagonist thrown into an unexpected world, this one’s for you. Also perfect for readers who enjoy espionage, religion-politics confluences, or stories that push you to question who’s really pulling the strings behind power.” — @readers.wave, Instagram
The Crime Fiction Indie Gold Awards is a brand new contest that sets out to honour the best in indie crime fiction writing. It is a massive genre — and so the contest embraces it in full, from mystery and thriller to cozy mysteries, FBI and police fiction, noir, psychological fiction, and detective fiction.
The contest is the brainchild of James Dain: an indie crime writer himself, an English Professor at the College of the Desert in Palm Desert, California, and — in what may be the most unexpected detail in indie publishing — a top snowboarder.
A tireless and talented author, Dain doesn’t have one mystery series but two. In the Twisted series, the dark yarns of crime and killing are told from different points of view — including that of the murderers themselves, among them a reforming child abuser. His other series, Hard Knocks, follows a different blue-collar, regular-guy detective hero in each book. In Blood on the Mountain, Dain draws on his own snowboarding skills to create his hero Mag, a snowboarder drawn into investigating a suspicious death when his fiancée is killed in a ski accident. It was another Hard Knocks entry, Everyone Dies in Youngstown, that earned raves for its gritty, fast-paced style and took “Best Novel” at the Los Angeles Neo-Noir Festival.
The idea for the Indie Gold contest was born from two things: winning an award himself, and watching indie authors treated as second-class citizens. If you’ve ever tried to get your indie publication onto a favourite book podcast — NPR’s Get Lit, for instance — and discovered they won’t even look at it, you’ll understand the frustration. As Dain puts it: “It is really more of traditionally published authors and publishers controlling the whole publishing world. So, I just felt that indie authors deserve more recognition. And since I’m a crime author, I thought, okay, let’s do a crime contest.”
Indie Gold doesn’t just spotlight writers — it also provides a how-to PR kit to help winners leverage their award into more readers and sales. And the honours are generous: alongside the Grand Prize, thirty authors were recognised — ten gold, ten silver, ten bronze. Congratulations to them all!
The second contest is already open for submissions. So if you’re finishing up an indie crime novel, head to indiegoldawards.com and give your work a chance to win. With many thanks to James Dain for building something the indie world genuinely needed.
By Michael McKinley, Co-author of The Glamour of Evil
The Glamour of Evil just won the Grand Prize in Contest #1 of the Crime Fiction Indie Gold Awards. To say I was thrilled beyond words would be an understatement. I also felt vindicated. More on that below.
About a decade ago, I was making a film inside the Vatican — poking around within its walls — when I was surprised to learn that the Vatican had a spy agency. According to the famed Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, it was “the best and most effective espionage service I know in the world.”
The Vatican’s spy agency — known historically as The Entity or Santa Alleanza (Holy Alliance), and in our novel as Omega — is very real. When I learned about it, I thought: they need their own James Bond. Nancy’s genius was to say, “Not James. Jane.” And so Maddie Lynch — a secular, twenty-nine-year-old TV producer from New York — was born as the Vatican’s Jane Bond.
You could say that spying has been connected to Christianity before both the Vatican and the Church fully existed, going back to Judas and his thirty pieces of silver. Once the institution got up and running, the global HQ of the Roman Catholic Church has been involved in covert activities since the sixteenth century — through the French Revolution, the Napoleonic era, and of course World War II, which was what prompted Wiesenthal’s assessment as he chased Nazi war criminals. He also noted the Vatican’s role in the so-called rat lines: the post-war escape routes through which Nazis and Croatian Ustaše leaders fled to South America unpunished. We explore this too in The Glamour of Evil.
Today, the Vatican’s spy agency doesn’t use drones or hackers. It uses its global network of Vatican diplomats and their staff to tap into the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics — and everyone beyond — providing intelligence in its many forms. There is nothing like a veil to allow access to secret worlds.
The novel’s title comes from the Catholic baptismal ritual, in which godparents and the congregation are asked to stand against Satan for the child being baptised. One of the questions the priest asks is: do we “resist the glamour of evil”? I always loved that phrase. It suggests evil has a powerfully seductive gravity — and is not the usual fang-toothed beast slithering through Eden.
Over the next decade, there were several versions of the book. It even went out on the traditional market for a few months, where overworked editorial staff didn’t have the time — or inclination — to read a book that requires genuine attention. The Glamour of Evil is not a simple tale of good versus evil. It’s a complex weave of how a good but multilayered person, who doesn’t believe in God, goes on one errand, gets drafted into another, and on her journey discovers that evil very much exists. And if it exists — then does God?
When we started BookGo, we thought: let’s put Glamour out there ourselves, and see what happens. Maybe we were deluded. Maybe it was a vanity project that would never find an audience. But the first and only contest we entered awarded us the Grand Prize. We are both honoured and inspired. We are now working on Book 2 and Book 3, taking Maddie further into the darkness as she searches for the light.
The lesson: don’t give up on stories you believe in. It might take a while to find your audience — but they exist. All you have to do is connect. And there have never been more ways to do that than there are today.
By Nancy Merritt Bell, Co-author of The Glamour of Evil
“There is no such thing as good writing, only good rewriting” — so wrote Robert Graves (or possibly Truman Capote, depending on who you ask). And then there is great editing too, I would add, being an editor myself.
The right editor can make the difference between a good book and a great one. To Kill a Mockingbird would have died in its first draft without an excellent editor. If you’ve read Go Set a Watchman — Harper Lee’s involuted, uncertain 2015 novel — you know this for a fact. Thankfully, in 1959, there was Tay Hohoff at J.B. Lippincott Company. She saw the great promise in Lee’s rather juvenile first draft, demanded countless revisions, and was a powerful personal support to Lee, who adored her in return.
Mysteries, thrillers, and crime fiction — with their tight plotting, fast pacing, and deadly puzzle pieces — are in particular need of good editors. Don Winslow, author of the Power of the Dog series and the Odyssey-inspired Danny Ryan Trilogy, works closely with publishing teams at HarperCollins-William Morrow, focusing on pacing, prose rhythm, and narrative efficiency. As Winslow once told me about editing a murder mystery: it’s like drawing a tiger — take away everything that is not the tiger.
I’ve helped remove non-tiger elements from a dozen thrillers. Most recently, I worked on The Glamour of Evil — which, as you’ll have read above, just won the Grand Prize at the Indie Gold Awards. After editing the book, I went on to become its co-author, a rare role-change in the writing world. But as editor, I had already made some foundational changes.
The story was originally led not by Maddie but by a male spy. Though the pitch was compelling — “the Vatican’s James Bond” — the lead felt too familiar. So I said: “Not James. Jane. Jane Bond.” The book’s original author, my brilliant colleague and husband Michael McKinley, agreed. And the book sprang to life.
I also worked on pacing. The Glamour of Evil has a complex plot reaching back to World War II, touching geopolitical fault lines, and populated by very smart characters who all have a great deal to say. Keeping all that in motion required careful editing: trimming backstory and exposition (readers need essential facts, not history lessons), and adding action. When the characters are moving, the story is moving. Sometimes it was just about turning a dialogue-heavy scene into a walk-and-talk — ideally with the characters in disguise, carrying secret documents, and possibly being chased.
It’s never too soon to bring in an editor — but bringing in the right one is everything. The wrong editor can damage you as a writer and your book may not recover. A good editor will read your manuscript (or at least the opening) and meet with you before you commit, as a kind of editorial audition.
Be especially wary of editors using AI. What AI gets, AI gives — and your novel may wash up on the shores of someone else’s book, with your copyright in question. Find a real, experienced editor who works in your genre and speaks your literary language. Like Harper Lee, you may come to love your editor for the literary therapy they bring. A great editor doesn’t just polish your prose — they help make sure your book is the very best it can be. Even a Grand Prize winner.
Writer’s Kit is a recurring feature in the BookGo newsletter. Our writers, board, and editors take on the tough questions of the writing life — so you can just write. At YourBook, our writer’s services division, we have a crew of experienced editors available for hire. Write to us at info@bookgo.pub to find out if our editors are right for you.
By Tomas Elliott
International Women’s Day may have passed, but reading is year-round. To celebrate the women who dominate the thriller genre — and to honour the spirit of our own Maddie Lynch — here are three outstanding thrillers by women that deserve a place on your shelf.
1. In the Woods by Tana French (2007)
The first novel in Tana French’s Dublin Murder Squad series is a masterclass in literary crime fiction: atmospheric, psychologically complex, and anchored by a detective haunted by a childhood mystery he cannot fully remember. In the Woods is the kind of book that makes you want to call in sick and stay in bed until you’ve finished it.
Perfect for fans of: slow-burn suspense, psychological depth, literary prose, unreliable narrators.
2. Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner (2024)
Already recommended in our Halloween issue, Kushner’s Creation Lake more than deserves a second mention here. A female CIA operative goes undercover in rural France, infiltrating a radical agrarian commune — and the novel weaves together espionage, philosophy, and a formidably cool protagonist. We feel like Maddie Lynch and Sadie Smith would be one hell of a team!
Perfect for fans of: espionage thrillers, feminist fiction, literary ambition, European settings.
3. Five Survive by Holly Jackson (2022)
Five Survive is a standalone thriller from the author of the A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder series. Six strangers are trapped on a road trip when their RV breaks down in the middle of nowhere and a sniper starts picking them off. It’s propulsive, smart, and utterly unputdownable. Jackson’s Not Quite Dead Yet also recently won the Goodreads’ Favorite Mystery & Thriller of 2025 award, but I haven’t had time to read it yet so stay tuned!
Perfect for fans of: fast-paced thrillers, locked-room tension, twists, young adult crossover.
Want to hear more about The Glamour of Evil? Check out this interview with authors Michael and Nancy from a few months ago.
We promised a report from our recent visit to the London Book Fair last time, but we got distracted by the success of The Glamour of Evil, so we’ll have updates on that next time as well as more about exciting things happening in BookGo’s ever more international outlook.
Until then, stay well and keep supporting readers and writers everywhere!
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