By Colin Mardell
When I first started writing Wolf in the Henhouse, I wasn’t thinking about awards. I was thinking about a body in a well, a town with too many secrets, and a detective who didn’t want to go back home. I was thinking about shame, silence, and the kind of crime that doesn’t leave fingerprints—just fractures.
Last night, that story was honored with the 2025 Noose Award for Best Crime Thriller. Even as I write that sentence, it feels like it belongs to someone else. Winning the Noose is a strange, humbling thing. It’s not just a nod from a jury—it’s a signal to readers that this story cut deep, that it mattered. That means everything.
Wolf in the Henhouse wasn’t an easy book to write. It took longer than I want to admit. There were long weeks where I thought the plot would unravel, or that the characters would stop talking to me entirely. But it always came back to the core question: how far would you go to protect the people who once failed you?
The award itself carries a certain weight—figuratively and literally. For those unfamiliar, the Noose isn’t just a trophy. It’s a symbol of the tightrope we walk in crime fiction: justice and revenge, guilt and survival, truth and the lies we tell ourselves to sleep at night. That’s the space where Wolf in the Henhouse lives, and I’m honored beyond words that it resonated.
To my fellow nominees—your work is fierce, fearless, and necessary. It’s an incredible time to be writing crime fiction, and being named alongside you was already more than I expected.
And to every reader who’s reached out, posted a review, or recommended the book to a friend: thank you. You made sure the wolf got out of the henhouse and onto the shelves.
This isn’t the end of the story. I’m already deep into the next one—something colder, something even more uncertain. But for tonight, I’ll let myself celebrate.
And maybe, just maybe, I’ll believe I earned it.