On a chilly Thursday evening, I blew off a date with an elliptical machine at my gym in favor of wine, cheese, and industry gossip at the National Arts Club on Gramercy Park. The occasion was the announcement of the 2007 Los Angeles Times Book Finalists. As GalleyCat noted, there were no major surprises in the short lists, but it was noteworthy that the five finalists in the mystery/thriller category were all European: Irishman Benjamin Black (aka John Banville) for Christine Falls (Holt); Swede Äke Edwardson for Frozen Tracks: An Inspector Erik Novel (Viking), Norwegian Karin Fossum for The Indian Bride (Harcourt), Dublin-based Tania French for In the Woods (Viking),  and German Jan Costin Wagner for Ice Moon.(which is set in Finland but written in German).

Is this an interesting reflection of the continuing globalization of a genre long dominated by American and British writers? Perhaps. Coming in our April 1 Mystery column is Michele Leber's roundup of forthcoming crime fiction set in Italy (actually, three of the authors are American or British writers living in Italy; the fourth is the great Sicilian mystery author Andrea Camilleri). But more thrillers and suspense novels by Italian writers are on the way, including Carlo Lucarelli's  Via Delle Oche (Europa, June), the concluding volume in his Inspector De Luca trilogy. (Lucarelli and Camilleri, by the way, are anthologized in the new volume, Crimini: The Bitter Lemon Book of Italian Crime Fiction, Bitter Lemon, April.) And this June Italian publisher Baldini Castoldi Dalai Editore enters the U.S. market with I I Kill, a psychological thriller set in Monte Carlo by Giorgio Faletti. A best seller in Italy, the novel has been blurbed by thriller master Jeffrey Deaver, and a movie deal is in the works. Look for other mystery developments in Slovakia, Scotland, the Middle East, Taiwan, and even Mongolia, to be discussed in our April 15 Mystery Preview..