Annal:2003 Agatha Award for Best First Novel
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Agatha Award in the year 2003. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 2004 Macavity-1st Novel winner
- 2003 Agatha–1st Novel winner
- 2004 Anthony-1st Novel nominee
- 2004 Anthony-Historical nominee
- 2004 Barry-1st Novel nominee
- 2004 Edgar–Novel nominee
- Score: 44.54
What do Hercule Poirot and Charlotte Gray have in common? It may be the wonderful Maisie Dobbs. Lady Rowan Compton first met Maisie when, at thirteen, she went into service as a maid at her ladyship’s Belgravia mansion. A suffragette, Lady Rowan took the remarkably smart youngster under her wing and became her patron. She encouraged Maisie to study at Cambridge, and was aided in this by Maurice Blanche, a friend often retained as an investigator by the elite of Europe when discretion and results were required. It was he who first recognized Maisie’s intuitive…
Dealing in Murder: A Molly Doyle Mystery
- 2004 Anthony-Paperback nominee
- 2004 Barry-Paperback nominee
- 2003 Agatha–1st Novel nominee
- Score: 18.54
Elizabeth Porter was a top-of-the-lineManhattan antiques dealer until her ex-husband and his lover’s flagrantly criminal scam left her reputation in tatters. Now, using a new name, Molly Doyle, she’s starting over a continent away in a rundown antiques shop in cozy Carmel, California. Molly is determined to make the best of it. But the early antiques bird sometimes gets more than the worm, and one prompt arrival places her at a murder site with a corpse in her arms. After she turns up at a second seemingly unrelated death, the abrasive new police chief considers…
- 2004 Anthony-1st Novel nominee
- 2003 Agatha–1st Novel nominee
- Score: 12.54
When farmers cutting turf in a peat bog make a grisly discovery - the perfectly preserved severed head of a young woman with long red hair - Irish archaeologist Cormac Maguire and American pathologist Nora Gavin team up in a case that will open old wounds. Peat bogs prevent decay, so the decapitated young woman could have been buried for two decades, two centuries, or even much longer. Who is she? When was she killed? The extraordinary find leads to even more disturbing puzzles. The red-haired girl is clearly a case for the archaeologists, not the police. Still,…
- 2003 Agatha–1st Novel nominee
- Score: 6.53
The mountains guard their secrets….
The remote village of Trout Run lies inside New York State’s vast Adirondack Park, a tiny community cloistered within deep forests and rugged mountains. You can drive for miles without seeing another soul—so when high school senior Janelle Harvey vanishes while walking home along a lonely forest road, only the trees are mute witnesses to her disappearance.
Police Chief Frank Bennett is new to Trout Run, and he’s determined not to make another mistake in judgment like the one that cost him his previous job. But no…
Alpine for You: A Passport to Peril Mystery
- 2003 Agatha–1st Novel nominee
- Score: 6.53
Accompanying her grandmother on a seniors tour of Switzerland, Emily Andrew had envisioned a vacation straight out of a travel brochure: spectacular scenery, great food, and a classy European hotel, all worlds away from her rural Iowa hometown. But her dream trip quickly snowballs into mayhem when smooth-talking tour escort Andy Simon is found dead. To be sure, Andy was as randy as a mountain goat on Viagra, hitting on every miss—Swiss or otherwise—within striking distance. His constant advances were driving Emily cuckoo—but had someone orchestrated his untimely…
Murder Off Mike: A Talk Radio Mystery
- 2003 Agatha–1st Novel nominee
- Score: 6.53
Murder Off Mike introduces Shauna J. Bogart, a small and sassy radio talk show host/amateur sleuth. Shauna J. is used to dealing with the controversial, the contentious, the cranky, and the just plain crazed as the host of the afternoon gab fest on the top-rated station in California’s state capital. But nothing prepares her for the day a fellow shock jock turns up with a bullet in his head. The cops say it’s suicide, but Shauna J. isn’t buying it. She launches her own investigation, putting herself at peril.
Her investigation, aided and abetted by her…
O' Artful Death: A Mystery
- 2003 Agatha–1st Novel nominee
- Score: 6.53
Newcomer Sarah Stewart Taylor delivers a compelling and atmospheric cozy mystery that introduces Sweeney St. George, an art historian in Boston with a special interest in the art of death. Sweeney becomes interested in Byzantium, Vermont, an art colony that flourished in the late nineteenth century, when she comes upon a photograph of the striking gravestone of a girl who drowned, and may have been murdered, in 1890. The stone is in a tiny cemetery surrounded by other beautiful, if unremarkable, headstones, some dating back hundreds of years. But the unsigned…
