Award
Barry Award
The Barry Awards celebrate excellence in crime fiction, honoring the year’s most outstanding mystery, thriller, and suspense books. They are presented annually by the editors and readers of Deadly Pleasures, a publication devoted to crime and mystery fiction.
Named in tribute to renowned critic Barry Gardner, the awards reflect a blend of critical insight and reader enthusiasm. Nominees are selected by the magazine’s editors, while winners are chosen by readers—giving the Barrys a distinctive balance between expert curation and fan appreciation.
Named in tribute to renowned critic Barry Gardner, the awards reflect a blend of critical insight and reader enthusiasm. Nominees are selected by the magazine’s editors, while winners are chosen by readers—giving the Barrys a distinctive balance between expert curation and fan appreciation.
2025
Best First Mystery/Crime Novel
Ordinary Bear
Farley stands out among his Iñupiat neighbors in the Alaska village he calls home, both white and enormous, like the hungry polar bears that wander its streets. Jovial and a little hapless, he works as an investigator for a North Slope oil company, passing the long Arctic winters drinking whiskey...
Best Mystery/Crime Novel
The Waiting
Renée Ballard and Harry Bosch, Book 6
Renée Ballard and the LAPD’s Open-Unsolved Unit get a hot shot DNA connection between a recently arrested man and a serial rapist and murderer who went quiet two decades ago. The arrested man is only twenty-four, so the genetic link must be familial: his father was the Pillowcase Rapist, responsible...
2024
Best First Mystery/Crime Novel
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/Crime Novel
Small Mercies
In the summer of 1974, a heatwave blankets Boston and Mary Pat Fennessy is trying to stay one step ahead of the bill collectors. Mary Pat has lived her entire life in the housing projects of “Southie,” the Irish American enclave that stubbornly adheres to old tradition and stands proudly apart in...
2023
Best First Mystery/Crime Novel
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/Crime Novel
Desert Star
Renée Ballard and Harry Bosch, Book 5
LAPD detective Renée Ballard and Harry Bosch team up to hunt the brutal killer who is Bosch’s “white whale”—a man responsible for the murder of an entire family.
A year has passed since LAPD detective Renée Ballard quit the force in the face of misogyny, demoralization, and endless red tape. But...
2022
Best First Mystery/Crime Novel
Sleeping Bear
After her young husband’s untimely death, Army veteran Cassie Gale decides to take a few days of solitude in the Alaskan wilderness before she starts her new job. But when she fails to show up on her first day and her dog is discovered injured at her wrecked campsite, her father knows that this is...
Best Mystery/Crime 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/Crime Novel
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/Crime 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/Crime Novel
The Chestnut Man
A psychopath is terrorizing Copenhagen. His calling card is a “chestnut man”—a handmade doll made of matchsticks and two chestnuts—which he leaves at each bloody crime scene.
Examining the dolls, forensics makes a shocking discovery—a fingerprint belonging to a young girl, a government minister’s...
Best Mystery/Crime Novel
The Lost Man
Two brothers meet at the remote fence line separating their cattle ranches in the lonely outback. In an isolated belt of Queensland, they are each other’s nearest neighbor, their homes a four hours’ drive apart.
Brothers Nathan and Bub Bright meet for the first time in months at the remote fence...
2019
Best First Mystery/Crime Novel
The Chalk Man
In 1986, Eddie and his friends are on the verge of adolescence, spending their days biking in search of adventure. The chalk men are their secret code, stick figures they draw for one another as hidden messages. But one morning the friends find a chalk man leading them to the woods. They follow the...
Best Mystery/Crime 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/Crime Novel
The Dry
When he hears that his childhood best friend Luke has been found dead after committing a terrible crime, Federal Agent Aaron Falk gets a note saying, “Luke lied. You lied. Be at the funeral.”
Twenty years ago, the boys were each other’s alibi when Falk was accused of murder. He hasn’t returned to...
Best Mystery/Crime Novel
The Marsh King's Daughter
Helena Pelletier has a loving husband, two beautiful daughters, and a business that fills her days. But she also has a secret: she is the product of an abduction. Her mother was kidnapped as a teenager by her father and kept in a remote cabin in the marshlands of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Helena,...
2017
Best First Mystery/Crime Novel
The Drifter
Peter Ash, Book 1
Peter Ash came home from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with only one souvenir: what he calls his “white static,” the buzzing claustrophobia due to post-traumatic stress that has driven him to spend a year roaming in nature, sleeping under the stars. But when a friend from the Marines commits...
Best Mystery/Crime 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/Crime Novel
The Unquiet Dead
Rachel Getty and Esa Khattak, Book 1
Despite their many differences, Detective Rachel Getty trusts her boss, Esa Khattak, implicitly. But she's still uneasy at Khattak's tight-lipped secrecy when he asks her to look into Christopher Drayton's death.
Drayton's apparently accidental fall from a cliff doesn't seem to warrant a police...
Best Mystery/Crime Novel
Badlands
Cassie Dewell, Book 3
The town of Grimstad used to be a place people came from but were never headed to. Now it’s the oil capital of North Dakota. With oil comes money, with money come drugs, and with drugs come the dirtiest criminals Grimstad’s new deputy sheriff Cassie Dewell has ever encountered...
Twelve-year-old...
2015
Best First Mystery/Crime Novel
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/Crime Novel
Natchez Burning
Penn Cage, Book 4
Raised in the southern splendor of Natchez, Mississippi, Penn Cage learned all he knows of duty from his father, Dr. Tom Cage. But now the beloved family doctor has been accused of murdering the African American nurse with whom he worked in the dark days of the 1960s.
Once a crusading prosecutor,...
2014
Best First Mystery/Crime Novel
Japantown
Jim Brodie, Book 1
San Francisco antiques dealer Jim Brodie receives a call one night from a friend at the SFPD: an entire family has been senselessly gunned down in the Japantown neighborhood of the bustling city.
As an American born and raised in Japan and part-owner of his father’s Tokyo private investigation...
Best Mystery/Crime 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/Crime Novel
A Killing in the Hills
Bell Elkins, Book 1
What's happening in Acker's Gap, West Virginia?
Three elderly men are gunned down over their coffee at a local diner, and seemingly half the town is there to witness the act. Still, it happened so fast, and no one seems to have gotten a good look at the shooter. Was it random? Was it connected to...
Best Mystery/Crime Novel
The Blackhouse
Lewis, Book 1
When a grisly murder occurs on the Isle of Lewis that has the hallmarks of a killing he's investigating on the mainland, Edinburgh detective and native islander Fin Macleod is dispatched to see if the two deaths are connected. His return after nearly two decades not only represents a police...
2012
Best First Mystery/Crime Novel
The Informationist
Vanessa Michael Munroe, Book 1
Governments pay her. Criminals fear her. Nobody sees her coming. Vanessa “Michael” Munroe deals in information—expensive information—working for corporations, heads of state, private clients, and anyone else who can pay for her unique brand of expertise.
Born to missionary parents in lawless...
Best Mystery/Crime Novel
The Keeper of Lost Causes
Department Q, Book 1
The Keeper of Lost Causes, the first installment of Adler-Olsen's Department Q series, features the deeply flawed chief detective Carl Mørck, who used to be a good homicide detective—one of Copenhagen's best. Then a bullet almost took his life. Two of his colleagues weren't so lucky, and Carl, who...
2011
Best First Mystery/Crime Novel
The Poacher's Son
Mike Bowditch, Book 1
Set in the wilds of Maine, this is an explosive tale of an estranged son thrust into the hunt for a murderous fugitive—his own father.
Game warden Mike Bowditch returns home one evening to find an alarming voice from the past on his answering machine: his father Jack, a hard-drinking womanizer who...
Best Mystery/Crime Novel
The Lock Artist
Marked by tragedy, traumatized at the age of eight, Michael, now eighteen, is no ordinary young man. Besides not uttering a single word in ten years, he discovers the one thing he can somehow do better than anyone else. Whether it's a locked door without a key, a padlock with no combination, or even...
2010
Best First Mystery/Crime Novel
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/Crime Novel
The Last Child
Thirteen-year-old Johnny Merrimon had the perfect life: a warm home and loving parents; a twin sister, Alyssa, with whom he shared an irreplaceable bond. He knew nothing of loss until the day Alyssa vanished from the side of a lonely street. Now, a year later, Johnny finds himself isolated and...
2009
Best First Mystery/Crime Novel
Child 44
Child 44, Book 1
Stalin's Soviet Union strives to be a paradise for its workers, providing for all of their needs. One of its fundamental pillars is that its citizens live free from the fear of ordinary crime and criminals. But in this society, millions do live in fear ... of the State. Death is a whisper away. The...
Best Mystery/Crime Novel
The Draining Lake
Inspector Erlendur, Book 4
Following an earthquake, the water level of an Icelandic lake suddenly falls, revealing a skeleton that is weighed down by a heavy radio device bearing inscriptions in Russian. Inspector Erlendur's investigation takes him back to the Cold War era, when bright, left-wing students in Iceland were sent...
2008
Best First Mystery/Crime Novel
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/Crime 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/Crime Novel
Still Life
Chief Inspector Gamache, Book 1
Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Sûreté du Québec and his team of investigators are called in to the scene of a suspicious death in a rural village south of Montreal. Jane Neal, a local fixture in the tiny hamlet of Three Pines, just north of the U.S. border, has been found dead in the woods....
Best Mystery/Crime Novel
The Night Gardener
In this thrilling crime novel, homicide detective Gus Ramone is on the case for the potential murder of a local teen in a community garden—but the investigation slowly unearths dark memories of similar decades-old cold cases.
Gus Ramone is "good police," a former Internal Affairs investigator now...
2006
Best First Mystery/Crime Novel
Cold Granite
Logan Mcrae, Book 1
Winter in Aberdeen: murder, mayhem and terrible weather… It’s DS Logan McRae’s first day back on the job after a year off, and it couldn’t get much worse.
Three-year-old David Reid’s body is discovered in a ditch, strangled, mutilated and a long time dead. And he’s only the first. There’s a serial...
Best Mystery/Crime Novel
Red Leaves
Eric Moore has a prosperous business, a comfortable home, a stable family life in a quiet town. Then, on an ordinary night, his teenage son Keith babysits Amy Giordano, the eight-year-old daughter of a neighboring family. The next morning Amy is missing, and Eric isn't sure his son is innocent.
In...
2005
Best First Mystery/Crime Novel
The Shadow of the Wind
Cemetery of Forgotten Books, Book 1
Barcelona, 1945: A city slowly heals in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, and Daniel, an antiquarian book dealer’s son who mourns the loss of his mother, finds solace in a mysterious book entitled The Shadow of the Wind, by one Julián Carax.
But when he sets out to find the author’s other...
Best Mystery/Crime Novel
The Enemy
Jack Reacher, Book 8
Jack Reacher. Hero. Loner. Soldier. Soldier’s son. An elite military cop, he was one of the army’s brightest stars. But in every cop’s life there is one case that changes everything. For Jack Reacher, this is that case.
New Year’s Day, 1990. In a North Carolina motel, a two-star general is found...
2004
Best First Mystery/Crime Novel
Monkeewrench
Monkeewrench, Book 1
People are dying for the new computer game by the software company Monkeewrench. Literally. With *Serial Killer Detective* out in limited release, the real-life murders of a jogger and a young woman have already mimicked the first two scenarios in the game.
But Grace McBride and her eccentric...
Best Mystery/Crime Novel
Every Secret Thing
Years after serving time for a childhood crime, two young women—Alice and Ronnie—return to their Baltimore neighborhood, each trying to move forward under the weight of their past. Their lives remain closely watched, shaped by lingering suspicion and the uneasy presence of those who remember what...
2003
Best First Mystery/Crime Novel
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/Crime Novel
City of Bones
Harry Bosch, Book 8
On New Year's Day, a dog finds a bone in the Hollywood Hills—and unearths a murder committed more than twenty years earlier. It's a cold case, but for Detective Harry Bosch, it stirs up memories of his childhood as an orphan. He can't let it go.
As the investigation takes Bosch deeper into the...
2002
Best First Mystery/Crime Novel
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/Crime Novel
Mystic River
When they were children, Sean Devine, Jimmy Marcus, and Dave Boyle were friends. But then a strange car pulled up to their street, a moment of childhood trauma that would define their lives. One boy got into the car, two did not, and something terrible happened―something that ended their friendship...
2001
Best First Mystery/Crime Novel
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...
Best Mystery/Crime Novel
Deep South
Anna Pigeon, Book 8
In Deep South, Park Ranger Anna Pigeon heads to Mississippi, only to encounter terrible secrets in the heart of the south…
Anna Pigeon finally gives in to her bureaucratic clock and signs on for a promotion. Next thing she knows, she's knee-deep in mud and Mississippi. Not exactly what she had in...
2000
Best First Mystery/Crime Novel
Murder With Peacocks
Meg Langslow Mysteries, Book 1
Meg Langslow arrives at her parents’ Virginia home expecting a brief visit, only to find herself caught in the chaos of multiple overlapping weddings, eccentric relatives, and a steadily growing to-do list she never agreed to manage. As preparations spiral out of control, the already hectic...
Best Mystery/Crime Novel
In a Dry Season
Inspector Banks, Book 10
In the blistering, dry summer, the waters of Thornfield Reservoir have been depleted, revealing the ruins of the small Yorkshire village that lay at its bottom, bringing with it the unidentified bones of a brutally murdered young woman.
Detective Chief Inspector Banks faces a daunting challenge: he...
1999
Best First Mystery/Crime Novel
Iron Lake
Cork O'connor, Book 1
Part Irish, part Anishinaabe Indian, Cork is having difficulty dealing with the marital meltdown that has separated him from his children, getting by on heavy doses of caffeine, nicotine, and guilt. Once a cop on Chicago’s South Side, there’s not much that can shock him.
But when the town’s judge...
Best Mystery/Crime Novel
Gone, Baby, Gone
Kenzie & Gennaro, Book 4
The tough neighborhood of Dorchester is no place for the innocent or the weak. Its territory is defined by hard heads and even harder luck; its streets are littered with the detritus of broken families, hearts, dreams. Now, one of its youngest is missing. Private investigators Patrick Kenzie and...
On Beulah Height
Dalziel and Pascoe, Book 17
Into thin air...
Three little girls, one by one, had vanished from the farming village of Dendale. And Superintendent Andy Dalziel, a young detective in those days, never found their bodies--or the person who snatched them.
Then the valley where Dendale stood was flooded to create a reservoir,...
1998
Best First Mystery/Crime Novel
Killing Floor
Jack Reacher, Book 1
Jack Reacher, a former military policeman, arrives in the small town of Margrave, Georgia, expecting nothing more than a quiet stop on his travels. Instead, he is immediately arrested for murder, caught up in a case he has no connection to—at least at first. As he works to clear his name, he begins...
Best Mystery/Crime Novel
Trunk Music
Harry Bosch, Book 5
Back on the job after an involuntary leave of absence, LAPD homicide detective Harry Bosch is ready for a challenge. But his first case is a little more than he bargained for. It starts with the body of a Hollywood producer in the trunk of a Rolls-Royce, shot twice in the head at close range—what...
1997
Best First Mystery/Crime Novel
A Test of Wills
Ian Rutledge, Book 1
A Test of Wills introduces Inspector Ian Rutledge, a Scotland Yard detective struggling to rebuild his life after serving in the trenches of the First World War. Haunted by the psychological scars of combat and the voice of a dead soldier that lingers constantly in his mind, Rutledge is sent to a...
Best Mystery/Crime 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...