As you may already know, we were pretty excited when we found out about March Mystery Madness last week. In fact, after a quick flurry of email conversations, we wound up sponsoring it.

With 64 of the best mystery and thriller novels pitted against each other in a six week competition, the first week of polling is done:

Narrow upsets, crushing defeats and last-second comebacks were all the rage. Blockbuster author Philip Margolin put up a fight, slashing his way to a narrow defeat against Andrew Taylor's Fallen Angel. Taylor now takes on Karin Slaughter, who squeaked out a narrow victory of her own over the beloved Louis Bayard and his The Pale Blue Eye. Will these close victories serve as inspiration or will fans of each author be satisfied just to be in the second round?

You can find the full list of 32 first-round winners here.

Don't forget to go vote for your favourites this week- it could mean a free library of 65 excellent books.

You can find out more about the books here.

You might be noticing that things are looking a tiny bit different around the site today. We've made some changes to the layout, and we've added a couple of new features.

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People have started to send in their David Gilmour Contest submissions. We've started to post entries in the event listing, here.

Remember, the contest deadline is October 9

It's been a couple days now, but thanks to Bookkninja George for his brief but kind words the other day, and welcome to those of you who found us through him.

It turns out that our "Staff Picks" have been really popular since we relaunched our website, and more than a few visitors have suggested that they would like to hear why we have picked these books in particular.

Fortunately, we booksellers are more than happy to tell you why we love the books we love.

Now when you click on the "Staff Picks" graphic, you'll get brief write-ups for the books and who picked them. Or if your wrist is too tired to make the journey to the right of the page, you can simply click here.