Honor roll:Edgar Allan Poe Award® for Best First Novel
From AwardAnnals
Each of these books has been nominated for a Edgar Allan Poe Award® for Best First Novel. They are ranked by honors received.
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- 2008 Anthony-1st Novel winner
- 2008 Barry-1st Novel winner
- 2008 Edgar-1st Novel winner
- 2008 Macavity-1st Novel winner
- 2007 LATimes–Mystery finalist
- Score: 46.58
As dusk approaches a small Dublin suburb in the summer of 1984, mothers begin to call their children home. But on this warm evening, three children do not return from the dark and silent woods. When the police arrive, they find only one of the children gripping a tree trunk in terror, wearing blood-filled sneakers, and unable to recall a single detail of the previous hours.
Twenty years later, the found boy, Rob Ryan, is a detective on the Dublin Murder Squad and keeps his past a secret. But when a twelve-year-old girl is found murdered in the same woods, he and Detective Cassie Maddoxhis partner and closest friendfind themselves investigating a case chillingly similar to the previous unsolved mystery. Now, with only snippets of long-buried memories to guide him, Ryan has the chance to uncover both the mystery of the case before him and that of his own shadowy past.
Open Season: A Joe Pickett Novel
- 2002 Anthony-1st Novel winner
- 2002 Barry-1st Novel winner
- 2002 Macavity-1st Novel winner
- 2002 Edgar-1st Novel nominee
- 2001 LATimes–Mystery finalist
- Score: 42.52
Few first mysteries have been welcomed as enthusiastically as Open Season, or with better cause.
“When a high-powered bullet hits living flesh, it makes a distinctive -pow-WHOP-sound that is unmistakable even at tremendous distance.” And so it begins for Joe Pickett, a Wyoming game warden who, with the shot of a rifle, is thrust into a race to save not only an endangered species, but also the life and family he loves.
C. J. Box knows the wilderness and he knows how to create a wonderfully authentic, vividly alive sense of place. Most of all, he knows…
- 1991 Anthony-1st Novel winner
- 1991 Edgar-1st Novel winner
- 1991 Macavity-1st Novel winner
- 1990 New Blood Dagger winner
- Score: 40.41
Under cover of night in Richmond, Virginia, a human monster strikes, leaving a gruesome trail of stranglings that has paralyzed the city. Medical examiner Kay Scarpetta suspects the worst: a deliberate campaign by a brilliant serial killer whose signature offers precious few clues. With an unerring eye, she calls on the latest advances in forensic research to unmask the madman. But this investigation will test Kay like no other, because it’s being sabotaged from within and someone wants her dead.
A Conspiracy of Paper: A Novel
- 2001 Barry-1st Novel winner
- 2001 Edgar-1st Novel winner
- 2001 Macavity-1st Novel winner
- 2001 Anthony-1st Novel nominee
- Score: 36.51
Benjamin Weaver is an outsider in eighteenth-century London: a Jew among Christians; a ruffian among aristocrats; a retired pugilist who, hired by London’s gentry, travels through the criminal underworld in pursuit of debtors and thieves.
In A Conspiracy of Paper, Weaver investigates a crime of the most personal sort: the mysterious death of his estranged father, a notorious stockjobber. To find the answers, Weaver must contend with a desperate prostitute who knows too much about his past, relatives who remind him of his alienation from the Jewish…
- 2001 Anthony-1st Novel nominee
- 2001 Barry-1st Novel nominee
- 2001 Dagger shortlist
- 2001 Edgar-1st Novel nominee
- 2001 New Blood Dagger shortlist
- 2000 Hammett nominee
- Score: 36.51
Loaded guns, ladies of the night, broken neon, broken dreams. Here is a world that is immediately recognizable—through a shot glass at three A.M. This is life with rough edges, in a novel that gives you the straight goods—point blank— one cold, snowbound Christmas Eve in Kansas. One single night, defined in shadings of black and white, when everything changes…
For most, the city is closing up. For a few outsiders, this night, Christmas Eve 1979, is just beginning. Charlie Arglist is a lawyer saying goodbye to Wichita by revisiting the landscape of his used up…
Immoral: A Novel
- 2006 Macavity-1st Novel winner
- 2006 Anthony-1st Novel nominee
- 2006 Barry-1st Novel nominee
- 2006 Edgar-1st Novel nominee
- 2006 New Blood Dagger shortlist
- Score: 34.56
In a riveting debut thriller that has drawn comparisons to masters of the genre like Dennis Lehane and Michael Connelly, Brian Freeman weaves obsession, sex, and revenge into a story that grips the reader with vivid characters and shocking plot twists from the first page to the last.
Lieutenant Jonathan Stride is suffering from an ugly case of déjà vu. For the second time in a year, a beautiful teenage girl has disappeared off the streets of Duluth, Minnesota—gone without a trace, like a bitter gust off Lake Superior. The two victims couldn’t be more…
The Bridge of Sighs: A Novel
- 2004 Anthony-Historical nominee
- 2004 Barry-1st Novel nominee
- 2004 Edgar-1st Novel nominee
- 2004 Macavity-1st Novel nominee
- 2003 Historical Dagger shortlist
- Score: 30.54
It’s August, 1948, three years after the Russians “liberated” the nation from German Occupation. But the Red Army still patrols the capital’s rubble-strewn streets, and the ideals of the Revolution are but memories. Twenty-two-year-old Detective Emil Brod finally gets his chance to serve his country, investigating murder for the People’s Militia.
The first victim is a state songwriter, but the facts point to a political motive. Emil would like to investigate further, but his colleagues in Homicide are suspicious or silent: He is on his own in this new,…
- 2004 Edgar-1st Novel winner
- 2004 Anthony-1st Novel nominee
- 2004 Macavity-1st Novel nominee
- 2003 LATimes–Mystery finalist
- Score: 28.54
Madrid 1938. Carlos Tejada Alonso y Leon is a Sergeant in the Guardia Civil, a rank rare for a man not yet thirty, but Tejada is an unusual recruit. The bitter civil war between the Nationalists and the Republicans has interrupted his legal studies in Salamanca. Second son of a conservative Southern family of landowners, he is an enthusiast for the Catholic Franquista cause, a dedicated, and now triumphant, Nationalist.
This war has drawn international attention. In a dress rehearsal for World War II, fascists support the Nationalists, while Communists have…
- 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…
One for the Money: A Stephanie Plum Novel
- 1995 New Blood Dagger winner
- 1995 Edgar-1st Novel nominee
- 1995 Shamus-1st Novel nominee
- 1994 Agatha–1st Novel nominee
- Score: 28.45
Watch out, world. Here comes Stephanie Plum, a bounty hunter with attitude. In Stephanie’s opinion, toxic waste, rabid drivers, armed schizophrenics, and August heat, humidity, and hydrocarbons are all part of the great adventure of living in Jersey. She’s a product of the “burg,” a blue-collar pocket of Trenton where houses are attached and narrow, cars are American, windows are clean, and (God forbid you should be late) dinner is served at six. Now Stephanie’s all grown up and out on her own, living five miles from Mom and Dad’s, doing her best to sever the…
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