Annal:2003 Macavity Award for Best First Mystery Novel
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Macavity Award in the year 2003. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
In the Bleak Midwinter: A Reverend Clare Ferguson Mystery
- 2003 Barry-1st Novel winner
- 2003 Macavity-1st Novel winner
- 2002 Agatha–1st Novel winner
- 2003 Anthony-1st Novel nominee
- Score: 36.53
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…
- 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…
The Distance: A Billy Nichols Novel
- 2003 Shamus-1st Novel winner
- 2003 Anthony-1st Novel nominee
- 2003 Barry-1st Novel nominee
- 2003 Macavity-1st Novel nominee
- Score: 28.53
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…
A Valley to Die For: The First Something to Die for Mystery
- 2003 Macavity-1st Novel nominee
- Score: 6.53
Carrie McCrite and her husband, Amos, had dreamed of retiring to a home in the Ozark mountains. After Amos dies in a hunting accident, Carrie decides to go ahead with their dream, but alone. She needs to be someone—to prove she’s a capable woman who can take care of herself.
Carrie meets neighbor JoAnne Harrington, a man-hater who certainly provides an example of female independence. And there are important things to do when a stone quarry threatens to turn part of their beloved valley into heaps of gravel. The two women and their neighbors band…
