Annal:2008 Edgar Allan Poe Award® for Best Paperback Original

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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:

Queenpin: A Novel

Megan Abbott

A young woman hired to keep the books at a down-at-the-heels nightclub is taken under the wing of the infamous Gloria Denton, a mob luminary who reigned during the Golden Era of Bugsy Siegel and Lucky Luciano. Notoriously cunning and ruthless, Gloria shows her eager young protégée the ropes, ushering her into a glittering demimonde of late-night casinos, racetracks, betting parlors, inside heists, and big, big money. Suddenly, the world is at her feet—as long as she doesn’t take any chances, like falling for the wrong guy. As the roulette wheel turns, both mentor and protégée scramble to stay one step ahead of their bosses and each other.

 

Blood of Paradise

David Corbett

El Salvador: America’s great Cold War success story and the model for Iraq’s fledgling democracy–if one ignores the grinding poverty, the corruption, the spiraling crime, and a murder rate ranked near the top in the hemisphere. This is where Jude McManus works as an executive protection specialist

Ten years before, at age seventeen, he saw his father and two Chicago cop colleagues arrested for robbing street dealer. Now the past returns when one of his father’s old pals asks a favor–not for himself, but for the third member of his dad’s old crew.

Even though it’s ill-considered, Jude agrees, thinking he can oblige the request and walk away, unlike his father. But he underestimates the players and the stakes and he stumbles into a web of Third World corruption and personal betrayal where everything he values–and everyone he loves–is threatened. And only the greatest of sacrifices will save them.

 

Cruel Poetry: A Novel

Vicki Hendricks

Renata is young, beautiful, and has sex for money and kicks. Few are immune to her intoxicating allure-even her pet Burmese python, Pepe, seems captive to her charm. Richard is one of her clients, a poetry professor with a wife and two sons, whose erotic fascination with Rennie is threatening his home and job.

Meanwhile, Julie, a shy wannabe novelist, spies on Rennie from her room next door in between bouts of frustrated writing. Both would do anything to save Rennie from her dangerous occupation and become her one true love.

Set in Miami’s gaudy vacationland and the haunting atmosphere of the Everglades, Cruel Poetry is a gripping story of fatal attraction that captures the Florida behind the postcards. As the lives of Richard and Julie unravel amidst drugs and murder, Hendricks amps the adrenaline jolts and sweeps us to a bittersweet climax.

 

Robbie's Wife: A Novel

Russell Hill

Jack Stone fled Los Angeles, a failed marriage, and a failing career as a screenwriter to spend six months in the remote English countryside, hammering out the new script that would put him back on top. But what he found wasn’t solitude and peace—it was temptation. Because Maggie Barlow, the wife of the man putting him up, had something irresistible about her. Something that could drive a man to kill…

 

Who Is Conrad Hirst?: A Novel

Kevin Wignall

Who is Conrad Hirst? Knowing the answer could get you killed. Not knowing could get him killed.

Conrad Hirst is a hired killer working for a German crime boss. He’s valued precisely because of how broken he is, by how coldly he kills, by the solitary existence he leads.

But something has happened on Conrad’s most recent job that has left him determined to quit. Only four people know who he is and what he’s done—kill those four people, and Conrad is a free man.

As Conrad’s scheme unravels, he’s no longer sure whom he’s been working for, or why, or what they want of him now. In fact, he can’t even answer the ever-looming and ominous question: Who is Conrad Hirst?

Fast-paced, dark, and disturbing, Kevin Wignall’s newest page-turner is a story of identity and loss, of missed opportunities and the cruelty of fate.

 
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