Honor roll:Edgar Allan Poe Award® for Best Paperback Original

From AwardAnnals

Each of these books has been nominated for a Edgar Allan Poe Award® for Best Paperback Original. They are ranked by honors received.

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The James Deans: A Moe Prager Mystery

Reed Farrel Coleman

It’s 1983 and Reaganomics is in full swing. But beneath the facade of junk bonds and easy money, New York remains a gritty metropolis offering Nirvana with one hand and desolation with the other. Moe Prager, ex-NYPD cop turned reluctant P.I. is too busy reeling from a family tragedy to see what’s coming. He’s about to be sucked into a case that might deliver him what he’s always wanted or plunge him into purgatory.

Two years earlier, Moira Heaton, a young intern for an up-and-coming politico, vanished without a trace. Although there is no evidence supporting…

Butchers Hill: A Tess Monaghan Mystery

Laura Lippman

Tess Monaghan has finally made the move and hung out her shingle as a p.i.-for-hire, complete with an office in Butchers Hill. Maybe it’s not the best address in Baltimore, but you gotta start somewhere, and Tess’s greyhound Esskay has no trouble taking marathon naps anywhere there’s a roof. Then in walks Luther Beale, the notorious vigilante who five years ago shot a boy for vandalizing his car. Just out of prison, he says he wants to make reparations to the kids who witnessed his crime, so he needs Tess to find them. But once she starts snooping, the witnesses…

In Big Trouble: A Tess Monaghan Mystery

Laura Lippman

First as a reporter and then as a p.i., Tess Monaghan has learned how to survive and thrive on the streets of Baltimore. But a new case will force her to confront her own past, and a man she loved and lost. It starts when she gets a newspaper photograph of her old boyfriend with a tantalizing shard of headline attached: In Big Trouble. The answers lie far from Baltimore, deep in a world of good-time music, old-fashioned ambiiton, and rich people’s games. For Tess must find out what happened to a man she thought she knew, to a woman who may have changed him forever, and to the victims of a killer who dances to a different—and deadly—drummer.

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.

Charm City: A Tess Monaghan Mystery

Laura Lippman

As a practiced reporter until her newspaper went to that great pressroom in the sky, P.I. Tess Monaghan knows and loves every inch of her native Baltimore, even the parts being slobbered on by the sad-sack greyhound she’s minding for her uncle. It’s a quirky city where baseball reigns, but lately homicide seems to be the second most popular local sport. Business tycoon “Wink” Wynkowski is trying to change all that by bringing pro basketball back to town, and everybody’s rooting fro him—until a devastating, muckraking expose of his lurid past appears on the front…

Fade Away: A Myron Bolitar Mystery

Harlan Coben

The home was top-notch New Jersey suburban. The living room was Martha Stewart. The basement was Legos—and blood. For sports agent Myron Bolitar, the disappearance of a man he’d once competed against was bringing back memories—of the sport he and Greg Downing had both played and the woman they both loved. Now, among the stars, the wanna-bes, the gamblers and groupies, Myron is unraveling the strange, violent life of a sports hero gone wrong, and coming face-to-face with a past he can’t relive, and a present he may not survive.

In novels that crackle with wit…

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.

Find Me Again

Sylvia Maultash Warsh

Still coming to terms with the death of her husband, Dr. Rebecca Temple tries to continue her practice and carry on with life as usual. She meets a charming Polish count who has written a historical novel based on his own family. During a visit to his home, she discovers a murder and soon realizes that the count’s manuscript may contain clues to the killer’s identity.

Frustrated by the inaction of a skeptical police department, she scours the manuscript for answers. As she reads, she journeys back to Enlightenment Europe and uncovers the true story of a love…

The Kidnapping of Rosie Dawn: A Joe Barley Mystery

Eric Wright

Joe Barley, a part-time lecturer in English Literature and part-time security guard, is alerted by his maid to the disappearance of another of her employers, Rosie Dawn, a student of classics who is working her way through school by being an exotic dancer and the mistress of a fast-food entrepreneur. The novel also involves campus politics—a student tries to exploit the nervous administration over its minority policies.