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Edgar Allan Poe Award Winners (mystery)
Description: The Edgar Allan Poe Awards are given annually by the Mystery Writers of America to honor the best in the mystery genre. Bookshare is pleased to offer the following titles awarded the Edgar Award for best novel. #award
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The Suspect
by L. R. WrightA beautifully crafted story about murder, and evil that is perhaps worse than murder. You will not find a more sympathetic murderer in all of literature. The author expertly leads to a conclusion that is both satisfying and disturbing.
God Save the Mark
by Donald E. WestlakeThis Edgar Award winner is a &“raucously funny&” novel of crime, con artists, and a poor sucker caught in the middle, by the author of the Dortmunder series (Kirkus Reviews). If there is a scam operating anywhere, sooner or later it will find Fred Fitch. The pure-hearted, gullible man seems to get taken every time he turns around. At this point, he&’s been ripped off so many times he&’s got a regular contact at New York&’s bunco squad. Now Fred&’s late Uncle Matt, who he never even heard of before, has willed him $317,000. Along with the inheritance comes the devoted Gertie Divine, Uncle Matt&’s old friend who is all too willing to become Fred&’s new friend—and a host of other mysterious characters who are willing to get chummy with Fred in hopes of getting their hands on that fortune. But soon it&’s not just Fred&’s money that&’s in danger but his life, in this &“high-spirited farce&” (The Washington Post) by the master of comic crime fiction—starring a character the New York Times called &“unforgettable . . . Everybody&’s favorite loser.&” &“Masterful.&” —Publishers Weekly
Citizen Vince
by Jess WalterAt 1:59 a.m. in Spokane, Washington-eight days before the 1980 presidential election-Vince Camden pockets his stash of stolen credit cards and drops by an all-night poker game before heading to his witness-protection job dusting crullers at Donut Make You Hungry. Along with a neurotic hooker girlfriend, this is the total sum of Vince's new life. But when a familiar face shows up in town, Vince realizes his sordid past is still too close behind him. During the next unforgettable week, he'll negotiate a coast-to-coast maze of obsessive cops, eager politicians, and assorted mobsters-only to find that redemption might exist, of all places, in the voting booth.
The Red Scream
by Mary Willis WalkerTexas-based crime reporter Molly Cates has just published her first book, describing the blood-curdling exploits of serial killer Louie Bronk. Now on death row, Louie's sentence is about to be carried out. Molly will be there as a witness, and she wants to write about it--the final coda to Louie's story. But suddenly, she's being strongly discouraged by her boss at the Lone Star Monthly and by Charlie McFarland, the millionaire real estate developer whose first wife, Tiny, was Bronk's most famous victim--and the only one whose murder is a capital offense. Then Molly starts to receive dark hints that Louie may not have killed Tiny after all. There is another murder following Louis's M.O.--one he could not have committed. The veracity of Molly's book is threatened--and then her very life. Caught between a rock and a hard place, Molly realizes that by attempting to save Louis she is putting her own life on the line, and discrediting her own work. Mary Willis Walker brings a lusty new voice to the mystery scene. Already recognized for her first novel, she has now created a character just cheeky and gusty enough to take her place among the top ranks of female protagonists such as Kinsey Millhone and Kay Scarpetta.
Edgar Allen Poe Award Winner
Briarpatch
by Ross ThomasWhen Ben Dill, an investigator for a Senate Subcommittee, gets a call from his home town telling him that his sister, a homicide detective, died in a car bomb explosion, he puts his investigator skills to work to find who killed her and why.
The Progress Of A Crime
by Julian SymonsHugh Bennett, young reporter on a local paper, witnessed a terrible crime - a group of boys stabbed a man to death on Guy Fawkes' night, right in front of the fire on the village green. But as Bennett attempts to write the story for his paper, doubts begin to creep in about what he had actually seen, and he finds himself facing an immense moral dilemma. On first publication, The 'Progress of a Crime' was seen as setting new standards in crime fiction.
Edgar Allan Poe Award Winner
New Orleans Mourning
by Julie SmithSkip Langdon, policewoman daughter of a social climbing doctor, solves the murder of a socially prominent New Orleans man. Rich with local color and history.
The Laughing Policeman
by Maj Sjöwall and Per WahlööThe incredible fourth novel in the Martin Beck mystery series by the internationally renowned crime writing duo Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, finds Martin Beck heading a major manhunt in pursuit of a mass-murderer.
On a cold and rainy Stockholm night, nine bus riders are gunned down by a mysterious assassin. The press portrays it as a freak attack and dubs the killer a madman. But Superintendent Martin Beck thinks otherwise--one of his most ambitious young detectives was among those killed--and he suspects it was more than coincidence. Working on a hunch, Beck seeks out the girlfriend of the murdered detective, and with her help Beck reconstructs the steps that led to his murder. The police comb the country for the killer, only to find that this attack may be connected to a case that has been unsolved for years.
Edgar Allen Poe Award Winner
Winter And Night
by S. J. RozanFrom the critically acclaimed, award-winning S. J. Rozan comes her finest novel to date - an explosive novel about the corrosive power of secrets and corruption in a small town. In the middle of the night, private investigator Bill Smith is awakened by a call from the NYPD. They're holding a 15-year-old kid named Gary -- a kid Bill knows. But before Bill can find out what is going on, Gary escapes Bill's custody into the dark night and unfamiliar streets. Bill, with the help of his partner Lydia Chin, tries to find the missing teen and uncover what it is that led him so far from home. Tracking Gary's family to a small town in New Jersey, Bill finds himself in a town where nothing matters but high school football, where the secrets of the past - both the town's and Bill's own - threaten to destroy the present. And if Bill is to have any chance of saving Gary and preventing a tragedy, he has to both unravel a long buried crime and confront the darkness of his own past.
Winter and Night is the winner of the 2003 Edgar Award for Best Novel.
Let Me Die in His Footsteps
by Lori RoyIn the spellbinding and suspenseful Let Me Die in His Footsteps, Edgar Award winner for Best Novel, author Lori Roy wrests from a Southern town the secrets of two families touched by an evil that has passed between generations.
On a dark Kentucky night in 1952, exactly halfway between her fifteenth and sixteenth birthdays, Annie Holleran crosses into forbidden territory. Everyone knows Hollerans don't go near Baines, not since Joseph Carl was buried two decades before, but Annie runs through her family's lavender fields toward the well on the Baines’ place, hoping to see her future in the water. Instead, she finds a body, and Annie's future becomes inextricably tied with her family's dark past.
In 1936, the year Annie's aunt, Juna Crowley, came of age, there were seven Baine boys. Before Juna, Joseph Carl had been the best of all the Baine brothers. But then he looked into Juna's black eyes and they made him do things that cost innocent people their lives. With the pall of a young child’s death and the dark appetites of men working the sleepy town into a frenzy, Sheriff Irlene Fulkerson saw justice served—or did she?
As the investigation continues and she comes of age as Aunt Juna did in her own time, Annie's dread mounts. Juna will come home now, to finish what she started. If Annie is to save herself, her family, and this small Kentucky town, she must prepare for Juna's return, and the revelation of what really happened all those years ago.
Edgar Allen Poe Award Winner
A Dark-Adapted Eye
by Ruth RendellA woman investigates the shocking secrets that brought down her once proud family in this suspenseful Edgar Award winner from a New York Times–bestselling author. Faith Severn has never understood why the willful matriarch of her high-society family, aunt Vera Hillyard, snapped and murdered her own beloved sister. But long after Vera is condemned to hang, a journalist&’s startling discoveries allow Faith to perceive her family&’s story in a new light. Set in post–World War II Britain, A Dark-Adapted Eye is both a gripping mystery and a harrowing psychological portrait of a complex woman at the head of a troubled family. Called &“a rich, beautifully crafted novel&” by P. D. James, Time magazine has described its author as &“the best mystery writer in the English-speaking world.&”
Resurrection Men
by Ian RankinInspector John Rebus has messed up badly this time, so badly that he's been sent to a kind of reform school for damaged cops. While there among the last-chancers known as "resurrection men," he joins a covert mission to gain evidence of a drug heist orchestrated by three of his classmates. But the group has been assigned an unsolved murder that may have resulted from Rebus's own mistake. Now Rebus can't determine if he's been set up for a fall or if his disgraced classmates are as ruthless as he suspects. When Detective Sergeant Siobhan Clarke discovers that her investigation of an art dealer's murder is tied to Rebus's inquiry, the two-protÈgÈ and mentor-join forces. Soon they find themselves in the midst of an even bigger scandal than they had imagined-a plot with conspirators in every corner of Scotland and deadly implications about their colleagues. With the brilliant eye for character and place that earned him the name "the Dickens of Edinburgh," Ian Rankin delivers a page-turning novel of intricate suspense.
Edgar Allen Poe Award Winner
Death and the Joyful Woman
by Ellis PetersWhen the woman he loves is accused of murder, Dominic Felse sets out to find the true culprit
Is a vulgarity ground for murder? Alfred Armiger had antagonized many with his greed and crass acquisitiveness. So when the ruthless beer baron is discovered dead, his head beaten in by a magnum of champagne, there is no shortage of suspects.
All of Comerford is shocked when Detective George Felse arrests Kitty Norris, the daughter of a rival beer baron, the last person to see Armiger alive, and the main beneficiary of his will. But Kitty, charming and popular, has an unexpected advocate in Felse’s young son, Dominic, who has fallen in love with her. Passionately convinced of Kitty’s innocence, Dominic sets out to find the true culprit, a hazardous undertaking that could cost him his life.
Death and the Joyful Woman is the 2nd book in the Felse Investigations, but you may enjoy reading the series in any order.
Edgar Allen Poe Award Winner
Silent Joe (First Edition)
by T. Jefferson ParkerJoe Trona is scarred in more ways than one. Rescued from an orphanage by Will Trona, a charismatic politician who sensed his dark potential, Joe is swept into the maelstrom of influence and intimidation that surrounds his adoptive father's career.
California Girl
by T. Jefferson ParkerThe Orange County, California, that the Becker brothers knew as boys is no more—unrecognizably altered since the afternoon in 1954 when Nick, Clay, David, and Andy rumbled with the lowlife Vonns, while five-year-old Janelle Vonn watched from the sidelines. The new decade has ushered in the era of Johnson, hippies, John Birchers, and LSD. Clay becomes a casualty of a far-off jungle war. Nick becomes a cop, Andy a reporter, David a minister. And a terrible crime touches them all in ways they could never have anticipated when the mutilated corpse of teenage beauty queen Janelle Vonn is discovered in an abandoned warehouse.
Promised Land
by Robert B. ParkerThe Boston PI gets tangled in Cape Cod&’s criminal underworld in this Edgar Award–winning mystery from the New York Times–bestselling author. Cape Cod businessman Harvey Shepard is in over his head. He lost a quarter million on a shady real estate deal, the loan shark is circling, and now he needs a private investigator to find out where his wife, Pam, disappeared to. Spencer takes the case, but finding Pam isn&’t the hard part—the hard part is finding out she&’s suspected of a bank robbery that led to murder. Robert B. Parker&’s Spencer novels featuring the former boxer turned Boston PI are &“one of the great series in the history of the American detective story.&” Promised Land, the Edgar Award–winning fourth Spencer novel, was also adapted into the pilot episode of the classic tv series Spencer: For Hire (The New York Times).
Down the River unto the Sea
by Walter MosleyJoe King Oliver was one of the NYPD's finest investigators, until, dispatched to arrest a well-heeled car thief, he is framed for assault by his enemies within the NYPD, a charge which lands him in solitary at Rikers Island.
A decade later, King is a private detective, running his agency with the help of his teenage daughter, Aja-Denise. Broken by the brutality he suffered and committed in equal measure while behind bars, his work and his daughter are the only light in his solitary life.
When he receives a card in the mail from the woman who admits she was paid to frame him those years ago, King realizes that he has no choice but to take his own case: figuring out who on the force wanted him disposed of--and why.
Running in parallel with King's own quest for justice is the case of a Black radical journalist accused of killing two on-duty police officers who had been abusing their badges to traffic in drugs and women within the city's poorest neighborhoods.
Joined by Melquarth Frost, a brilliant sociopath, our hero must beat dirty cops and dirtier bankers, craven lawyers, and above all keep his daughter far from the underworld in which he works.
All the while, two lives hang in the balance: King's client's, and King's own.
Winner of the 2019 Edgar Award for Best Novel
Beast in View
by Margaret MillarHailed as one of the greatest psychological mysteries ever written and winner of the 1956 Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award for Best Novel, Beast in View remains as freshly sinister today as the day it was first published. Thirty-year-old Helen Clarvoe is scared and all alone. The heiress of a small fortune, she is resented by her mother and, to a lesser degree, her brother. The only person who seemingly cares for her is the family's attorney, Paul Blackshear. A shut-in, Helen maintains her residence in upscale hotel downtown. But passive-aggressive resentment isn't the only thing hounding Helen Clarvoe. A string of bizarre and sometimes threatening prank phone calls has upended her spinster's routine. Increasingly threatened, she turns to a reluctant Mr. Blackshear to get to the bottom of these strange calls. Originally doubtful of their seriousness, Blackshear quickly realizes that he is in the midst of something far more nightmarish than he thought possible. As he unravels the mystery behind the calls the identity behind them slowly emerges, predatory and treacherous.
Gideon's Fire
by J. J. MarricGeorge Gideon, Commander of the C.I.D., is met at the office one morning with the news of a sex maniac, a mass murderer and a fire in an old tenement building out at Lambeth. "Whole family was wiped out mother, five kids, and the father. Several other people burned and suffering from shock, and whole building was gutted place went up like a match box . . . One of our chaps looks like being the eighth victim . . . But the worst of it is, George, it was arson. Started with petrol. No doubt about it." With all these urgent problems filling his day, Gideon has little time to spare for an ugly family crisis building up in his own home . . .
Bootlegger's Daughter
by Margaret MaronUnconventional, still unwed (at the ripe old age of 34) North Carolina attorney Deborah Knott has done the unthinkable: tossed her hat into the heated race for district judge of old boy-ruled Colleton County. The only female candidate, she's busy defending indigent clients and reeling in voters. Then suddenly, the young daughter of Janie Whitehead begs her to help solve Janie's senseless, never-solved, eighteen-year-old murder. Deborah takes on the case: following twisted, typically Southern bloodlines, turning up dangerous, decades-old secrets, and inspiring someone to go on an all-out campaign to derail her future--political and otherwise. But it will take more than sleazy smear tactics to scare this determined steel magnolia off the scent of down-home deceit...even in a town where a cool slug of moonshine made by Deborah's father can go down just as smoothly as a cold case of triple murder.
Edgar Allen Poe Award Winner.
Maigret in Exile, The Rheingold Route, and The Murder of Miranda
by Georges Simenon and Margaret Millar and Arthur MalingMaigret in Exile by Georges Simenon
Inspector Jules Maigret has fallen into disfavor with his Paris superiors and has been shunted to a district supervisor's job on the northern French coast. Depressed and bored, Maigret regains a sense of purpose when a corpse is discovered in the house of a retired judge.
The Rheingold Route by Arthur Maling
An ex-U.S. Treasury agent is hired to smuggle money from England to Switzerland by a double crossing lawyer.
The Rheingold Route won the Edgar Allan Poe Award.
Murder of Miranda by Margaret Millar
Where is Miranda Shaw? She had just been widowed and her lawyer needs her signature for probate, but her mansion is empty and two addled teenagers, Cordelia and Juliet, are wearing her jewellery. Has she eloped? With Grady, the lifeguard at her club, who is also missing? Is she dodging her lawyer? Or has she been murdered ... ?
Bluebird, Bluebird
by Attica LockeA powerful thriller about the explosive intersection of love, race, and justice from a writer and producer of the Emmy winning Fox TV show Empire.
When it comes to law and order, East Texas plays by its own rules--a fact that Darren Mathews, a black Texas Ranger, knows all too well.
Deeply ambivalent about growing up black in the lone star state, he was the first in his family to get as far away from Texas as he could. Until duty called him home.
When his allegiance to his roots puts his job in jeopardy, he travels up Highway 59 to the small town of Lark, where two murders--a black lawyer from Chicago and a local white woman--have stirred up a hornet's nest of resentment.
Darren must solve the crimes--and save himself in the process--before Lark's long-simmering racial fault lines erupt.
A rural noir suffused with the unique music, color, and nuance of East Texas, Bluebird, Bluebird is an exhilarating, timely novel about the collision of race and justice in America.
2018 Edgar Award Winner for Best Novel
Labrava
by Elmore LeonardJoe LaBrava first fell in love with femme fatale movie queen Jean Shaw in a darkened theater when he was twelve. Now he's finally meeting his dream woman in the flesh, albeit in a rundown Miami crisis center. Cleaned up and sober, though, she still makes LaBrava's heart race. And now that Jean's being terrorized by redneck thug Richard Nobles and his slimy Marielito partner Cundo Rey, Joe has a golden opportunity to play the hero. Or he could wind up the patsy--or dead--in the final reel.
Edgar Allen Poe Award Winner
Live by Night
by Dennis LehaneA New York Times best-selling author with multiple awards to his name, Lehane sets his latest in Roaring Twenties Boston, Florida, and Cuba; its no surprise that the promotion brings up HBOs Boardwalk Empire. Youngest son of an upright Boston police sergeant, Joe Coughlin opts for the dark side, working his way to the top of organized crime but also setting himself up, inevitably, for betrayal and revenge.
The Bottoms
by Joe R. LansdaleThe Great Depression, East Texas. The woods are thick, the rivers wild, the weather ripe with tornadoes, and the Crane family, like most families in that neck of the woods, are eking out a thin living. When young Harry Crane discovers a mutilated body bound to a tree with barbed wire in the river bottoms, the underbelly of East Texas is exposed. Whites fear a renegade Negro. Blacks fear a vengeful massacre, or, if the killer is white, that the law will let him slip through its fingers. Harry believes the murderer is the Goat Man, an East Texas monster of legend who lurks beneath the swing bridge on the Sabine River, like the Billy Goat Gruff. Harry and his sister have actually seen the Goat Man, or something much like him, in his nocturnal haunts. As the bodies mount up, an elderly black man is lynched, both blacks and whites are terrorised, and Harry's father - the local law - and grandmother investigate, searching for a killer who may be a lot closer than they think.