Annal:2008 Edgar Allan Poe Award® for Best Novel

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Results of the Edgar Allan Poe Award® in the year 2008. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:

Down River: A Novel

John Hart

Adam Chase has a violent streak, and not without reason. As a boy, he saw things that no child should see, suffered wounds that cut to the core and scarred thin. The trauma left him passionate and misunderstood—a fighter. After being narrowly acquitted of a murder charge, Adam is hounded out of the only home he’s ever known. For five long years he disappears. Now he’s back and nobody knows why, not his family or the cops, not the enemies he left behind.

But Adam has his reasons.

Within hours of his return, he is beaten and accosted, confronted by his family and the women he still holds dear. When bodies start turning up, the small town rises against him and Adam again finds himself embroiled in the fight of his life.

 

Christine Falls: A Novel

Benjamin Black

It’s not the dead that seem strange to Quirke. It’s the living. One night, after a few drinks at an office party, Quirke shuffles down into the morgue where he works and finds his brother-in-law, Malachy, altering a file he has no business even reading. Odd enough in itself to find Malachy there, but the next morning, when the haze has lifted, it looks an awful lot like his brother-in-law, the esteemed doctor, was in fact tampering with a corpse—and concealing the cause of death.

It turns out the body belonged to a young woman named Christine Falls. And as Quirke reluctantly presses on toward the true facts behind her death, he comes up against some insidious—and very well-guarded—secrets of Dublin’s high Catholic society, among them members of his own family.

 

Priest: A Novel

Ken Bruen

Ireland, awash with cash and greed, no longer turns to the Church for solace or comfort. But the decapitation of Father Joyce in a Galway confessional horrifies even the most jaded citizen. Jack Taylor, devastated by a recent personal loss, has always believed himself to be beyond salvation. But a new job offers a fresh start, and an unexpected partnership makes him hope that his one desperate visionof familymight yet be fulfilled.

 

Soul Patch: A Moe Prager Mystery

Reed Farrel Coleman

In this darkly intriguing follow-up to the Shamus and Barry winning The James Deans, ex-NYPD cop turned P.I. and entrepreneur, Moe Prager is faced with a gut-wrenching case. The apparent suicide of his old friend and NYPD Chief of Detectives, Larry McDonald, forces Moe back onto the decaying Coney Island streets he patrolled when he was in uniform. But now, beneath the boardwalk and behind the rusted and crumbling rides of the midway, he finds a trail of death, betrayal, and corruption reaching back to 1972. As Faulkner once said, “The past is never dead. It isn’t even past.” So it goes for Moe Prager in Soul Patch.

 

The Yiddish Policemen's Union: A Novel

Michael Chabon

For sixty years, Jewish refugees and their descendants have prospered in the Federal District of Sitka, a “temporary” safe haven in the Alaskan panhandle, created in the wake of revelations of the Holocaust and the shocking 1948 collapse of the fledgling state of Israel. Now the District is set to revert to Alaskan control, and their dream is coming to an end.

But homicide detective Meyer Landsman of the District Police has enough problems without worrying about the upcoming Reversion. His life is a shambles, his marriage a wreck, his career a disaster. And in the cheap hotel where he has washed up, someone has just murdered his neighbor, a former chess prodigy. When word comes down from on high that the case is to be dropped immediately, Landsman soon finds himself contending with all the powerful forces of faith, obsession, hopefulness, evil, and salvation that are his heritage—and with the unfinished business of his marriage.

 
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