Annal:2003 Barry Award for Best First Novel

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Results of the Barry Award in the year 2003. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:

In the Bleak Midwinter: A Reverend Clare Ferguson Mystery

Julia Spencer-Fleming

It’s a cold, snowy December in the upstate New York town of Millers Kill, and newly ordained Clare Fergusson is on thin ice as the first female priest of its small Episcopal church. The ancient regime running the parish covertly demands that she prove herself as a leader. However, her blunt manner, honed by years as an army pilot, is meeting with a chilly reception from some members of her congregation and Chief of Police Russ Van Alystyne, in particular, doesn’t know what to make of her, or how to address “a lady priest” for that matter.

The last thing she…

 

The Devil's Redhead

David Corbett

In this masterfully written fiction debut, David Corbett combines a gripping crime story with a poignant tale of enduring love.

Freelance photographer and wildcat smuggler Dan Abatangelo blows into Vegas to hit the tables and taste the night life. In his path waits Shel Beaudry, a knockout redhead with a smile that says, Gentlemen, start your engines. The attraction is instant–and soon the two are living the gypsy life on the West coast, where Dan captains a distribution ring for premium Thai marijuana, His credo “no guns, no gangsters, it’s only…

 

Not All Tarts are Apple

Pip Granger

A first novel serves up an inimitable slice of British life from Coronation Summer, 1953, in a city not much different than that familiar to Charles Dickens and Oliver Twist. Seven-year-old Rosie lives happily with Uncle Bert and pillow-plump Aunt Maggie above their cafe on Old Compton Street. The Soho neighborhood is rife with tough and sinewy London life including pimps and prostitutes, thieves and con men, the bent and the wicked. One day at school Rosie learns her real mum’s a tart. In fact, the Perfumed Lady is not only a tart, she’s addicted to gin—but…

 

The Distance: A Billy Nichols Novel

Eddie Muller

Morris White is a Sous Chef at a first-rate Philadelphia French restaurant. All he wants is to leave behind his past—the poor neighborhood and petty crime he knew as a kid—and open his own restaurant. His dream comes one step closer to reality when the affair he’s having with Vicky Ward heats up. Not only is she the manager of the restaurant, but she comes from money and a privileged background. The only thing that could stop them from turning their dream into a reality, is Morris’s half-brother, Vince Kammer, who is about to get out of Graterford…

 

The Blue Edge of Midnight

Jonathon King

Featuring ex-cop Max Freeman, The Blue Edge of Midnight marks the debut of a powerful new crime series.

Max Freeman’s old life ended on a night that will haunt him forever. The night he killed a twelve-year-old child in self-defense in a Philadelphia shootout. The night he stopped being a cop. Now he lives an existence of solitary confinement on the edge of the Florida Everglades, where he answers to no one but the demons that eat away at his conscience.

Until the night he finds the corpse of a child beside an ancient river. The night Max Freeman’s past…

 

Buck Fever: A Blanco County Texas Novel

Ben Rehder

Blanco County, Texas: It’s the week before deer hunting season, as close to a statewide holiday you get in Texas, and the locals are getting restless. Red O’Brien and Billy Don Craddock aren’t the only good ol’ boys out at night spotlighting deer from their pickups, trying to get a jump on the hundreds of hunters that will be out come Saturday. Game Warden John Marlin has his hands full with poaching complaints coming in faster than he can write out-of-season tickets. Then a call of a different sort comes in. A man dressed up in some sort of deer costume has been…

 
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