Award
Macavity Award
The Macavity Awards honor outstanding achievement in mystery and crime writing. Presented annually by Mystery Readers International, they are named after Macavity the Mystery Cat from T. S. Eliot’s poem “Macavity: The Mystery Cat,” and are notable for their reader-driven nominations and voting.
2025
Best First Mystery
Ghosts of Waikiki
Maya Wong, Book 1
After the newspaper she works for folds and the freelance assignments no longer pay the bills, Maya Wong reluctantly returns to her native Hawaiʻi to ghostwrite controversial land developer Parker Hamilton's biography. But when the Hamilton patriarch is found dead under suspicious circumstances,...
Best Mystery Novel
California Bear
NONE OF YOU ARE SAFE
“KILLER”: Jack Queen has been exonerated and freed from prison thanks to retired LAPD officer Cato Hightower. But when guilt gnaws at Jack, he admits: “I actually did it.” To which Hightower responds: “Yeah, no kidding.” You see, the ex-cop has a special job in mind for the...
2024
Best First Mystery
The Peacock and the Sparrow
Shane Collins, a world-weary CIA spy, is ready to come in from the cold. Stationed in Bahrain off the coast of Saudi Arabia for his final tour, he has little use for his mission—uncovering Iranian support for the insurgency against the monarchy.
Then Collins meets Almaisa, a beautiful and enigmatic...
Best Mystery Novel
All the Sinners Bleed
After years of working as an FBI agent, Titus Crown returns home to Charon County, land of moonshine and corn bread, fistfights and honeysuckle. Seeing his hometown struggling with a bigoted police force inspires Titus to run for sheriff. He wins and becomes the first Black sheriff in the history of...
2023
Best First Mystery
The Maid
Molly the Maid, Book 1
Molly Gray is not like everyone else. She struggles with social skills and misreads the intentions of others. Her gran used to interpret the world for her, codifying it into simple rules that Molly could live by. Since Gran died a few months ago, twenty-five-year-old Molly has been navigating life’s...
Best Mystery Novel
A World of Curiosities
Chief Inspector Gamache, Book 18
As the villagers prepare for a special celebration, Armand Gamache and Jean-Guy Beauvoir find themselves increasingly worried. A young man and woman have reappeared in the Sûreté du Québec investigators’ lives after many years. The two were young children when their troubled mother was murdered,...
2022
Best First Mystery
Arsenic and Adobo
Tita Rosie's Kitchen, Book 1
When Lila Macapagal moves back home to recover from a horrible breakup, her life seems to be following all the typical rom-com tropes. She's tasked with saving her Tita Rosie's failing restaurant, and she has to deal with a group of matchmaking aunties who shower her with love and judgment.
But...
Best Mystery Novel
Razorblade Tears
Ike Randolph has been out of jail for fifteen years, with not so much as a speeding ticket in all that time. But a Black man with cops at the door knows to be afraid. The last thing he expects to hear is that his son Isiah has been murdered, along with Isiah’s white husband Derek.
Isiah was a gay...
2021
Best First Mystery
Winter Counts
Virgil Wounded Horse is the local enforcer on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota. When justice is denied by the American legal system or the tribal council, Virgil is hired to deliver his own punishment, the kind that’s hard to forget.
But when heroin makes its way into the reservation...
Best Mystery Novel
Blacktop Wasteland
Beauregard “Bug” Montage is a man with many different titles: husband, father, friend, honest car mechanic. But before he gave it up, Bug used to be known from the hills of North Carolina to the beaches of Florida as the best Wheel Man on the East Coast.
After a series of financial calamities, Bug...
2020
Best First Mystery
One Night Gone
It was the perfect place to disappear...
One sultry summer, Maureen Haddaway arrives in the wealthy town of Opal Beach to start her life anew—to achieve her destiny. There, she finds herself lured by the promise of friendship, love, starry skies, and wild parties. But Maureen’s new life just might...
Best Mystery Novel
The Chain
It's something parents do every morning: Rachel Klein drops her daughter at the bus stop and heads into her day. But a cell phone call from an unknown number changes everything: it's a woman on the line, informing her that she has Kylie bound and gagged in her back seat, and the only way Rachel will...
2019
Best First Mystery
Dodging and Burning
A lurid crime scene photo of a beautiful woman arrives on mystery writer Bunny Prescott's doorstep with no return address—and it's not the first time she's seen it.
Fifty-five years earlier, in the summer of 1945, Ceola Bliss is a lonely twelve-year-old tomboy, mourning the loss of her brother,...
Best Mystery Novel
November Road
In the aftermath of President Kennedy’s assassination, Frank Guidry—a trusted lieutenant for a New Orleans crime boss—realizes he may have been closer to the event than he understood, and that his proximity now makes him a liability. Sensing danger, he abandons his life and goes on the run, trying...
2018
Best First Mystery
The Lost Ones
Nora Watts, Book 1
A dark, compulsively readable psychological suspense debut, the first in a new series featuring the brilliant, fearless, chaotic, and deeply flawed Nora Watts—a character as heartbreakingly troubled, emotionally complex, and irresistibly compelling as Stieg Larsson’s Lisbeth Salander and Jo Nesbø’s...
Best Mystery Novel
Magpie Murders
Susan Ryeland, Book 1
When editor Susan Ryeland is given the manuscript of Alan Conway’s latest novel, she has no reason to think it will be much different from any of his others. After working with the bestselling crime writer for years, she’s intimately familiar with his detective, Atticus Pünd, who solves cozy...
2017
Best First Mystery
IQ
IQ, Book 1
A resident of one of LA's toughest neighborhoods uses his blistering intellect to solve the crimes the LAPD ignores. East Long Beach. The LAPD is barely keeping up with the neighborhood's high crime rate. Murders go unsolved, lost children unrecovered. But someone from the neighborhood has taken it...
Best Mystery Novel
A Great Reckoning
Chief Inspector Gamache, Book 12
When an intricate old map is found stuffed into the walls of the bistro in Three Pines, it at first seems no more than a curiosity. But the closer the villagers look, the stranger it becomes. Given to Armand Gamache as a gift the first day of his new job, the map eventually leads him to shattering...
2016
Best First Mystery
Past Crimes
Van Shaw, Book 1
When his estranged grandfather is shot and left for dead, an Army Ranger must plunge into the criminal underworld of his youth to find a murderer and uncover a shocking family secret in this atmospheric and evocative debut thriller.
Van Shaw was raised to be a thief, but at eighteen he suddenly...
Best Mystery Novel
The Long and Faraway Gone
In the summer of 1986, two tragedies rocked Oklahoma City. Six movie-theater employees were killed in an armed robbery, while one inexplicably survived. Then, a teenage girl vanished from the annual State Fair. Neither crime was ever solved.
Twenty-five years later, the reverberations of those...
2015
Best First Mystery
Invisible City
Rebekah Roberts, Book 1
Just months after Rebekah Roberts was born, her mother, an Hasidic Jew from Brooklyn, abandoned her Christian boyfriend and newborn baby to return to her religion. Neither Rebekah nor her father have heard from her since.
Now a recent college graduate, Rebekah has moved to New York City to follow...
Best Mystery Novel
The Killer Next Door
Everyone who lives at 23 Beulah Grove has a secret. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be renting rooms in a sketchy South London building for cash—no credit check, no lease. It’s the kind of place you end up when you you’ve run out of other options. The six residents mostly keep to themselves, but one...
2014
Best First Mystery
A Killing at Cotton Hill
Samuel Craddock, Book 1
In this award-winning debut mystery novel, the chief of police of a small town is also an unreliable drunk. So when Dora Lee Parjeter is murdered, her old friend and former police chief Samuel Craddock steps in to investigate. He discovers that a lot of people may have had it in for Dora Lee—the...
Best Mystery Novel
Ordinary Grace
New Bremen, Minnesota, 1961. The Twins were playing their debut season, ice-cold root beers were selling out at the soda counter of Halderson’s Drugstore, and Hot Stuff comic books were a mainstay on every barbershop magazine rack. It was a time of innocence and hope for a country with a new, young...
2013
Best First Mystery
Don't Ever Get Old
Buck Schatz, Book 1
When Buck Schatz, senior citizen and retired Memphis cop, learns that an old adversary may have escaped Germany with a fortune in stolen gold, Buck decides to hunt down the fugitive and claim the loot. But a lot of people want a piece of the stolen treasure, and Buck's investigation quickly attracts...
Best Mystery Novel
The Beautiful Mystery
Chief Inspector Gamache, Book 8
No outsiders are ever admitted to the monastery of Saint-Gilbert-Entre-les-Loups, hidden deep in the wilderness of Quebec, where two dozen cloistered monks live in peace and prayer. They grow vegetables, they tend chickens, they make chocolate. And they sing. Ironically, for a community that has...
2012
Best First Mystery
All Cry Chaos
Henri Poincaré, Book 1
The action begins when mathematician James Fenster is assassinated on the eve of a long-scheduled speech at a World Trade Organization meeting. The hit is as elegant as it is bizarre. Fenster's Amsterdam hotel room is incinerated, yet the rest of the building remains intact. The murder trail leads...
Best Mystery Novel
Claire Dewitt And The City Of The Dead
Claire Dewitt, Book 1
Claire DeWitt is not your average private investigator. She has brilliant deductive skills and is an ace at discovering evidence. But Claire also uses her dreams, omens, and mind-expanding herbs to help her solve mysteries, and relies on Détection — the only book published by the late, great, and...
2011
Best First Mystery
Rogue Island
Liam Mulligan, Book 1
Liam Mulligan is as old school as a newspaper man gets. His beat is Providence, Rhode Island, and he knows every street and alley. He knows the priests and prostitutes, the cops and street thugs. He knows the mobsters and politicians—who are pretty much one and the same.
Someone is systematically...
Best Mystery Novel
Bury Your Dead
Chief Inspector Gamache, Book 6
It is Winter Carnival in Quebec City, bitterly cold and surpassingly beautiful. Chief Inspector Armand Gamache has come not to join the revels but to recover from an investigation gone hauntingly wrong. But violent death is inescapable, even in the apparent sanctuary of the Literary and Historical...
2010
Best First Mystery
The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie
Flavia De Luce, Book 1
It is the summer of 1950—and at the once-grand mansion of Buckshaw, young Flavia de Luce, an aspiring chemist with a passion for poison, is intrigued by a series of inexplicable events: A dead bird is found on the doorstep, a postage stamp bizarrely pinned to its beak. Then, hours later, Flavia...
Best Mystery Novel
Tower
Nick's Irish-American father, a Brooklyn rent-a-cop working security in the World Trade Center's North Tower, named him after a Hemingway hero. The old man must have been expecting a different kind of kid. Because, like the R&B song says, Nick was born under a bad sign. As aimless as a stray...
2009
Best First Mystery
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
Millennium, Book 1
Harriet Vanger, a scion of one of Sweden’s wealthiest families disappeared without a trace more than forty years ago. All these years later, her aged uncle continues to try to discover what happened to her. He hires Mikael Blomkvist, a journalist recently sidelined by a libel conviction, to...
Best Mystery Novel
Where Memories Lie
Duncan Kincaid & Gemma James, Book 12
A sinister mystery that leads all the way back to the Holocaust ensnares Scotland Yard detectives Duncan Kincaid and Gemma James in Where Memories Lie from award-winning “masterful novelist” (Denver Post) Deborah Crombie. A writer in the same elite class as Elizabeth George, Martha Grimes, and Anne...
2008
Best First Mystery
In the Woods
Dublin Murder Squad, Book 1
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...
Best Mystery Novel
What the Dead Know
When he’s called to the scene of an accident, detective Kevin Infante is drawn into a shocking and puzzling crime that still haunts the Baltimore P.D.
Twenty years ago, two little girls were kidnapped from a shopping mall, igniting fear and anger throughout the city. Now, a clearly disoriented...
2007
Best First Mystery
Mr. Clarinet
Max Mingus, Book 1
Max Mingus wanted to turn down the case—15 million bucks or not. Three years had passed since Haitian billionaire Allain Carver’s five-year-old son was abducted. Sure, Max had been the best detective in Miami once. But that was before he went to jail. Before his wife died. Plus, he’d heard what had...
Best Mystery Novel
The Virgin of Small Plains
For seventeen years, a rural community in Kansas has faithfully tended the grave of an anonymous teenage girl christened the Virgin of Small Plains. And some claim that, perhaps owing to the girl’s intervention, strange miracles and unexplainable healings have occurred. Slowly, word of the legend...
2006
Best First Mystery
Immoral
Jonathan Stride, Book 1
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...
Best Mystery Novel
The Lincoln Lawyer
Lincoln Lawyer, Book 1
Mickey Haller is a Lincoln Lawyer, a criminal defense attorney who operates out of the backseat of his Lincoln Town Car, traveling between the far-flung courthouses of Los Angeles to defend clients of every kind. Bikers, con artists, drunk drivers, drug dealers - they're all on Mickey Haller's...
2005
Best First Mystery
Dating Dead Men
Wollie Shelley, Book 1
Los Angeles greeting-card artist Wollie Shelley is dating forty men in sixty days as research for a radio talk show host's upcoming book, How to Avoid Getting Dumped All the Time. Wollie is meeting plenty of eligible bachelors but not falling in love, not until she stumbles over a dead body en route...
Best Mystery Novel
The Killing of the Tinkers
Jack Taylor, Book 2
When Jack Taylor blew town at the end of The Guards his alcoholism was a distant memory and sober dreams of a new life in London were shining in his eyes. In the opening pages of The Killing of the Tinkers, Jack's back in Galway a year later with a new leather jacket on his back, a pack of smokes in...
2004
Best First Mystery
Maisie Dobbs
Maisie Dobbs, Book 1
Maisie Dobbs isn’t just any young housemaid. Through her own natural intelligence—and the patronage of her benevolent employers—she works her way into college at Cambridge. When World War I breaks out, Maisie goes to the front as a nurse. It is there that she learns that coincidences are meaningful...
Best Mystery Novel
The House Sitter
Peter Diamond, Book 8 - Part 8
The corpse of a beautiful woman, clad in only a bathing suit, is found strangled to death on a popular Sussex beach. When she is finally identified, it turns out she was a top profiler for the National Crime Faculty, who was working on the case of a serial killer. And though she was a Bath resident,...
2003
Best First Mystery
In the Bleak Midwinter
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,...
Best Mystery Novel
Winter and Night
Lydia Chin and Bill Smith, Book 8
In the middle of the night, private investigator Bill Smith is awakened by a call from the NYPD. They're holding a 15-year-old kid named Gary -- a kid Bill knows. But before Bill can find out what is going on, Gary escapes Bill's custody into the dark night and unfamiliar streets. Bill, with the...
2002
Best First Mystery
Open Season
Joe Pickett, Book 1
Joe Pickett is the new game warden in Twelve Sleep, Wyoming, a town where nearly everyone hunts and the game warden—especially one like Joe who won't take bribes or look the other way—is far from popular.
When he finds a local hunting outfitter dead, splayed out on the woodpile behind his...
Best Mystery Novel
Folly
Rae Newborn is a woman on the edge: on the edge of sanity, on the edge of tragedy, and now on the edge of the world. She has moved to an island at the far reaches of the continent to restore the house of an equally haunted figure, her mysterious great-uncle; but as her life begins to rebuild itself...
2001
Best Mystery Novel
A Place of Execution
On a freezing day in December 1963, Alison Carter vanishes from her rural village, an insular community that distrusts the outside world. For the young George Bennett, a newly promoted inspector, it is the beginning of his most difficult and harrowing case—a suspected murder with no body, an...
A Conspiracy of Paper
Benjamin Weaver, Book 1
Benjamin Weaver, a Jew and an ex-boxer, is an outsider in eighteenth-century London, tracking down debtors and felons for aristocratic clients. The son of a wealthy stock trader, he lives estranged from his family—until he is asked to investigate his father’s sudden death.
Thus Weaver descends...
2000
Best First Mystery
Inner City Blues
Charlotte Justice, Book 1
Meet Detective Charlotte Justice, a black woman in the very white, very male, and sometimes very racist Los Angeles Police Department. The time is 48 hours into the epochal L.A. riots and she and her fellow officers are exhausted. She saves the curfew-breaking black doctor Lance Mitchell from a...
Best Mystery Novel
The Flower Master
Rei Shimura, Book 3
Rei Shimura, a California girl living in Tokyo, has an antiques business that's only slightly more successful than her love life. When her aunt enrolls her in the Kayama School of Ikebana to learn how to arrange flowers, disaster strikes. A mean teacher is found with scissors in her neck, and Takeo...
1999
Best First Mystery
Sympathy for the Devil: A Culinary Mystery
Madeline Bean, Book 1
Madeline Bean, caterer to the stars, is in the middle of the biggest job of her career. She and her partner Wesley have pulled off Hollywood's most outrageous A-list Halloween party for notorious producer Bruno Huntley, complete with an eerie fortuneteller who is astonishingly accurate, and exotic...
Best Mystery Novel
Blood Work
When Graciella Rivers steps onto his boat, ex-FBI agent Terrell McCaleb has no idea he's about to come out of retirement. He's recuperating from a heart transplant and avoiding anything stressful. But when Graciella tells him the way her sister, Gloria, was murdered, Terry realizes he has no...
1998
Best First Mystery
Dead Body Language
Connor Westphal, Book 1
Thirty-seven year old journalist, Connor Westphal, has relocated from San Francisco to Flat Skunk, a mining-turned-tourist town in the foothills of the Sierras, to start up her own weekly paper. Suddenly, dead bodies begin turning up in the most unusual places, setting Connor on a hunt for a killer....
Best Mystery Novel
Dreaming of the Bones
Duncan Kincaid & Gemma James, Book 5
Victoria, his ex-wife, who walked out without an explanation more than a decade ago, asks him to look into the suicide of local poet, Lydia Brooke -- a case that's been officially closed for five years. The troubled young writer's death, Victoria claims, might well have been murder.
No one is more...
1997
Best First Mystery
Death in Little Tokyo
Ken Tanaka, Book 1
Ken Tanaka, a Japanese American investigator in Los Angeles, is drawn into a case when a murder disrupts the tight-knit community of Little Tokyo. What initially appears to be a localized crime soon reveals connections that extend beyond the neighborhood, pulling Tanaka into a more complex...
Best Mystery Novel
Bloodhounds
Peter Diamond, Book 4
A rare stamp and a corpse are discovered in Bath within hours of each other. As he investigates, Inspector Peter Diamond discovers that both the person who found the stamp and the victim belong to the Bloodhounds, an elite group of mystery lovers, who now urge Diamond to bring the murderer to...
1996
Best First Mystery
The Strange Files of Fremont Jones
Fremont Jones, Book 1
Brave, resourceful, adventurous Fremont (née Caroline) Jones is a woman ahead of her time. Hungry for independence, she's traded in her conventional life in Boston for a career as a "type-writer" in turn-of-the-century San Francisco. But Fremont soon discovers that her clients aren't always what...
Best Mystery Novel
Under the Beetle's Cellar
When a young girl is kidnapped and hidden away, the crime sends shockwaves through her Texas community. As investigators scramble to find her, the case quickly becomes a high-stakes race against time, shaped by limited clues and the growing fear that each passing hour narrows the chances of...
1995
Best First Mystery
Do Unto Others
Jordan Poteet, Book 1
After a few good years of city life, Jordan Poteet returns to his small hometown of Mirabeau, Texas, to work as a librarian. Yet his quet domesticity is shattered when he locks horns with Ms. Beta Harcher, the town’s prize religious fanatic, in a knock-down drag-out battle over censorship.
When...
Best Mystery Novel
She Walks These Hills
Ballad, Book 3
In the Appalachian Mountains, a young hiker disappears along a remote trail, setting off a search that draws in local law enforcement and unsettles the surrounding community. At the same time, an escaped convict is believed to be moving through the same rugged terrain, heightening fear and urgency...
1994
Best First Mystery
Death Comes As Epiphany
Catherine Levendeur, Book 1
Catherine LeVendeur is a young scholar come to conquer her sin of pride at the Convent of the Paraclete, famous for learning, prayer, and its abbess, the fabled Heloise.
When a manuscript the convent produced for the great Abbe Suger disappears, rumors surface saying the book contains sacrilegious...
Best Mystery Novel
The Sculptress
It was a slaughterhouse, the most horrific scene I have ever witnessed... Olive Martin is a dangerous woman. I advise you to be extremely wary in your dealings with her.'
The facts of the case were simple: Olive Martin had pleaded guilty to killing and dismembering her sister and mother, earning...
1993
Best First Mystery
Blanche on the Lam
Blanche White, Book 1
Blanche White, a domestic worker with a sharp mind and a deep understanding of people, goes on the run after a minor legal trouble threatens to land her in jail. To avoid arrest, she takes a job in a wealthy household in North Carolina, using the opportunity to stay hidden while keeping a close eye...
Best Mystery Novel
Bootlegger's Daughter
Deborah Knott, Book 1
Deborah Knott, a lawyer and the daughter of a former bootlegger turned local political figure, returns to her North Carolina hometown and becomes entangled in a murder case that strikes close to home. When a body is discovered on family land, the investigation quickly draws in people connected to...
1992
Best First Mystery
Murder on the Iditarod Trail
Jessie Arnold, Book 1
It is an arduous sport, but not a deadly one. But suddenly the top Iditarod contestants are dying in bizarre ways: first a veteran musher smashes into a tree, then competitors begin turning up dead, with each murder more brutal than the last. State trooper Alex Jensen begins a homicide...
Zero at the Bone
Katherine Driscoll is just three weeks away from disaster: foreclosure on her home and business, even the sale of her beloved dog. She has no hope of raising the $91,000 she so desperately needs--until the father she hasn't seen for thirty years writes to her, offering her enough money to solve her...
Best Mystery Novel
I.O.U.
Jenny Cain, Book 7
The layered plot of the latest in the excellent Jenny Cain series finds the Port Frederick, Mass., sleuth probing the cause of her recently deceased mother's insanity. Cain discovers that her mother's mental collapse many years before coincided with the bankruptcy of the family business. The closing...
1991
Best First Mystery
Postmortem
Kay Scarpetta, Book 1
Dr. Kay Scarpetta, chief medical examiner for Virginia, is called in to investigate a series of brutal murders that show disturbing similarities. As more victims are discovered, it becomes clear that a methodical killer is at work, leaving behind little evidence and staying just ahead of the...
Best Mystery Novel
If Ever I Return, Pretty Peggy O
Sheriff Spencer Arrowood keeps the peace in his small Tennessee town most of the time. Every once in a while, though, something goes wrong.
When 1960s folksinger Peggy Muryan moves to town seeking solitude and a career comeback, and she receives a postcard with a threatening message, her idyll is...
1990
Best First Mystery
Grime and Punishment
Jane Jeffry, Book 1
It's So hard to Kill Good Help These Days. . .
With three kids to raise on her own, Jane Jeffry sometimes needs a hand with the housework. But many of her complaining neighbors believe that the Happy Helper cleaning lady they all share wouldn't know a dustball if she was choking on it. That hardly...
Best Mystery Novel
A Little Class on Murder
When mystery bookstore owner Annie Laurance is invited to teach "The Three Great Ladies of the Mystery" class at Chastain Community College, the sometime sleuth discovers that all is not strictly academic in Chastain's hallowed halls of learning. And when a shocking scandal in the school newspaper...
1989
Best First Mystery
The Killings at Badger's Drift
Chief Inspector Barnaby, Book 1
Badger's Drift is an ideal English village, complete with vicar, bumbling local doctor, and kindly spinster with a nice line in homemade cookies. But when the spinster dies suddenly, her best friend kicks up an unseemly fuss, loud enough to attract the attention of Detective Chief Inspector Tom...
Best Mystery Novel
A Thief of Time
Leaphorn & Chee, Book 8
From New York Times bestselling author Tony Hillerman, A Thief of Time is the eighth novel featuring Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn and Officer Jim Chee as they find themselves in hot pursuit of a depraved killer.
At a moonlit Indian ruin where "thieves of time" ravage sacred ground in the name of profit,...
1988
Best First Mystery
The Monkey's Raincoat
Meet Elvis Cole, L.A. Private Eye. . . . He quotes Jiminy Cricket and carries a .38. He’s a literate, wisecracking Vietnam vet who is determined to never grow up.
When quiet Ellen Lang enters Elvis Cole’s Disney-Deco office, she’s lost something very valuable—her husband and her young son. The case...
Best Mystery Novel
Marriage Is Murder
Jenny Cain, Book 4
Jenny Cain and police detective Geof Bushfield already had pre-nuptial jitters. Then a sudden wave of domestic violence rocked placid Port Frederick—in just two weeks, the husbands of three battered wives were shot dead.
Homicide was all too familiar to Geof, but this was enough to make him want to...
1987
Best First Mystery
The Ritual Bath
Peter Decker and Rina Lazarus, Book 1
Detective Peter Decker of the LAPD is stunned when he gets the report. Someone has shattered the sanctuary of a remote yeshiva community in the California hills with an unimaginable crime. One of the women was brutally raped as she returned from the mikvah, the bathhouse where the cleansing ritual...
A Case of Loyalties
Artist Carrie Rayborn becomes involved in the murder investigation of Oakland detectives Carlos Cruz and Jay Goldstein after her teenage daughter, Tricia, is arrested for the killing of an unpleasant, much disliked molester and cult member, Clifford Hawkins.
Best Mystery Novel
A Taste for Death
How did an upper-crust Minister come to lie, slit throat to slit throat, next to a neighborhood derelict of the lowest order? Challenged with the investigation of a crime that appears to have endless motives, Dalgliesh explores the sinister web spun around a half-burnt diary and a violet-eyed widow...