Annal:2003 Edgar Allan Poe Award® for Best First Novel
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Edgar Allan Poe Award® in the year 2003. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 2003 Edgar-1st Novel winner
- 2003 Anthony-1st Novel nominee
- 2003 Barry-1st Novel nominee
- 2003 Macavity-1st Novel nominee
- Score: 28.53
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
- 2003 Barry-1st Novel nominee
- 2003 Edgar-1st Novel nominee
- Score: 12.53
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…
- 2003 Edgar-1st Novel nominee
- Score: 6.53
A woman stands accused but the cost to prove her innocence… may just be her life.
Captain Kate Gallagher has a plane to land and a daughter to get home to. But first, she’s got to contend with a confrontational co-pilot, blizzard conditions, and something far more treacherous–a plane contaminated with a lethal virus. When the controls refuse to respond to her commands, she’s got two choices: Turn the plane around or trust her instinct.
One day later, the world’s press is picking through the mangled remains of Flight 394 and crying pilot error. To clear her…
Open and Shut: A Novel
- 2003 Edgar-1st Novel nominee
- 2003 Shamus-1st Novel nominee
- Score: 12.53
Attorney Andy Carpenter’s legal maneuvers are legion in and out of the courtrooms of Paterson, New Jersey. A talented lawyer who knows how to play all the cards, he is torn between mending a marriage that no longer works and growing attached to a beautiful, no-nonsense private investigator. Besides his love for sports, Andy also adores Tara, a golden retriever clearly smarter than half the lawyers who clog the courts of Passaic County.
Then one day the fun stops.
It all begins when Andy’s father, venerated ex-district attorney Nelson Carpenter, asks him…
- 2003 Edgar-1st Novel nominee
- Score: 6.53
Burnt-out reporter Nelson Ingram knows that in Litchfield, Alabama, not everything is as it seems-even an apparent Klan lynching. But it will take more than Nelson’s renewed sense of purpose to uncover the buried secrets of the deep South.
