So, this year, we're hosting our wonderful crime writing festival at the historic Columbia Club, 121 Monument Circle, Indianapolis, IN 46204, (317) 767-1361  columbia-club.org 

The current home of the Columbia Club was built on Monument Circle in 1925 by famed local architecture firm Rubush & Hunter, replacing a smaller club that had existed on the site from 1889 to 1898. As one of the most prominent and architecturally significant buildings in downtown Indianapolis, the Columbia Club was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1983.

The Columbia Club is located in downtown Indianapolis, close to Soldiers and Sailors Monument, Bankers Life Fieldhouse, and Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians. Nearby points of interest also include Lucas Oil Stadium and NCAA Hall of Champions.

Inside the Columbia Club are numerous pieces of Hoosier art and historic artifact, including items from the Benjamin Harrison presidential campaign and part of the Lincoln family china collection. After a 2004 acquisition of paintings, the Columbia Club now boasts fourteen works by members of the Hoosier Group of painters, including T.C. Steele.  

Other fine hotels within two blocks of The Columbia Club include The Hilton Garden Inn next door, the Sheraton City Center across the street, and the Conrad Hilton Hotel & Suites and the Hilton Indianapolis Hotel & Suites are two blocks away.  

STEVE HAMILTON: 2013 Magna Guest of Honor   

In 2006, Steve Hamilton won the Michigan Author Award for his outstanding body of work. His novels have won numerous awards and media acclaim beginning with the very first in the Alex McKnight series, A Cold Day in Paradise, which won the Private Eye Writers of America/St. Martin's Press Award for Best First Mystery by an Unpublished Writer. Once published, it went on to win the MWA Edgar and the PWA Shamus Awards for Best First Novel, and was short-listed for the Anthony and Barry Awards. His novel The Lock Artist won the 2011 Edgar Award.  The awards didn't stop there but he's too modest to crow about them.

Born and raised in Detroit, Hamilton graduated from the University of Michigan where he won the prestigious Hopwood Award for fiction.  

Hamilton currently works for IBM in upstate New York where he lives with his wife Julia and their two children.

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: 2013 Magna Banquet Speaker

Hank Phillippi Ryan is an investigative reporter for Channel 7 News on WHDH-TV, the NBC-affiliate station for Boston, Massachusetts. A native of Indianapolis, Indiana, she attended Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio, and also studied abroad at the International School in Hamburg, Germany. Ryan joined WHDH-TV in 1983 as a general assignment reporter. In 1989, she was named principal reporter for the station's investigative unit. Ryan has won 28 Emmy Awards and 12 Edward R. Murrow Awards for her investigative and consumer reporting.

Her first published novel, Prime Time, won the Agatha Award for best new mystery of 2007. Her follow-up mystery, Face Time, was published in 2008 (and re-issued in 2009) and was a Book Sense Notable Book. Both books feature Boston investigative reporter Charlotte "Charlie" McNally and are published by MIRA Books.

Air Time (MIRA/Sept 2009), the third in the series, was an Agatha Award nominee for Best Mystery of 2009, as well as a 2010 Anthony Award nominee for Best Paperback Mystery.The fourth in the series, Drive Time (MIRA/Feb 2010), received a starred review from Library Journal, saying it "places Ryan in the same league as Lisa Scottoline". It also received a nomination for "Best Paperback original" at the 2011 Anthony Awards.

Her newest thriller, the best-selling The Other Woman (Forge/ Sept 2012), is an Indie Next GREAT READ, chosen as a Best Book of 2012 by Suspense Magazine, and an RTBR Reviewers Choice nominee for Best Mystery/Suspense novel of 2012.