Award
Edgar Award
The Edgar Awards are among the most prestigious honors in the world of mystery and crime writing. Presented annually by the Mystery Writers of America, they recognize outstanding works in genres such as mystery, thriller, suspense, and true crime across a wide range of formats.
Named in honor of Edgar Allan Poe—a pioneer of detective fiction—the awards celebrate both literary excellence and the enduring appeal of stories that explore crime, investigation, and the darker sides of human nature.
Named in honor of Edgar Allan Poe—a pioneer of detective fiction—the awards celebrate both literary excellence and the enduring appeal of stories that explore crime, investigation, and the darker sides of human nature.
2026
Best First Novel
Dead Money
DON’T CALL ME A FIXER. THIS ISN’T HBO. As the unofficial “problem solver” for Silicon Valley’s most ruthless venture capitalist, Mackenzie Clyde’s an expert at wrangling tech bros and their multimillions—even as her own shot at a windfall remains just out of reach. But now she’s playing for higher...
Best Novel
The Big Empty
Elvis Cole and Joe Pike, Book 20
Traci Beller was thirteen when her father disappeared in the sleepy town of Rancha, not far from Los Angeles. The evidence says Tommy Beller abandoned his family, but Traci never believed it. Now, ten years later, Traci is a high-profile influencer with millions of followers and the money to hire...
2025
Best First Novel
Holy City
No one innocent. No one free. Nothing sacred.
Holy City is the captivating debut from Henry Wise about a deputy sheriff who must work alongside an unpredictable private detective after he finds himself on the outs from his sheriff's department over his unwillingness to look the other way when an...
Best Novel
The In Crowd
DI Caius Beauchamp, Book 2
In the garden of a large Georgian villa in Southwest London, socialites and politicos swap gossip and sip Pimm's while making snide remarks at each other. Not far from this frivolity, though, a body has been discovered in the River Thames. At first, it appears to be an unfortunate accident, but the...
2024
Best First 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 Novel
Flags on the Bayou
In the fall of 1863, the Union army is in control of the Mississippi River. Much of Louisiana, including New Orleans and Baton Rouge, is occupied. The Confederate army is retreating toward Texas, and being replaced by Red Legs, irregulars commanded by a maniacal figure, and enslaved men and women...
2023
Best First Novel
Don't Know Tough
In Denton, Arkansas, the fate of the high school football team rests on the shoulders of Billy Lowe, a volatile but talented running back. Billy comes from an extremely troubled home: a trailer park where he is terrorized by his mother’s abusive boyfriend. Billy takes out his anger on the field, but...
Best Novel
Notes on an Execution
Ansel Packer is scheduled to die in twelve hours. He knows what he’s done, and now awaits execution, the same chilling fate he forced on those girls, years ago. But Ansel doesn’t want to die; he wants to be celebrated, understood.
Through a kaleidoscope of women—a mother, a sister, a homicide...
2022
Best First Novel
Deer Season
It’s the opening weekend of deer season in Gunthrum, Nebraska, in 1985, and Alma Costagan’s intellectually disabled farmhand, Hal Bullard, has gone hunting with some of the locals, leaving her in a huff.
That same weekend, a teenage girl goes missing, and Hal returns with a flimsy story about the...
Best Novel
Five Decembers
December 1941. America teeters on the brink of war, and in Honolulu, Hawaii, police detective Joe McGrady is assigned to investigate a homicide that will change his life forever. Because the trail of murder he uncovers will lead him across the Pacific, far from home and the woman he loves; and...
2021
Best First Novel
Please See Us
Summer has come to Atlantic City, but the boardwalk is empty of tourists, the casino lights have dimmed, and two Jane Does lie hidden in the marshland behind the Sunset Motel. Only one person knows they’re there.
Meanwhile, Clara, a struggling boardwalk psychic, gives tarot readings to make ends...
Best Novel
Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line
Nine-year-old Jai watches too many reality police shows, thinks he’s smarter than his friend Pari (even though she gets the best grades), and considers himself to be a better boss than Faiz (even though Faiz is the one with a job). When a classmate goes missing, Jai decides to use the crime-solving...
2020
Best First Novel
Miracle Creek
In a small town in Virginia, a group of people know each other because they’re part of a special treatment center, a hyperbaric chamber that may cure a range of conditions from infertility to autism. But then the chamber explodes, two people die, and it’s clear the explosion wasn’t an accident.
A...
Best Novel
The Stranger Diaries
Clare Cassidy is no stranger to murder. A high school English teacher specializing in the Gothic writer R. M. Holland, she teaches a course on it every year. But when one of Clare’s colleagues and closest friends is found dead, with a line from R. M. Holland’s most famous story, “The Stranger,” left...
2019
Best First Novel
Bearskin
Rice Moore is just beginning to think his troubles are behind him. He’s found a job protecting a remote forest preserve in Virginian Appalachia where his main responsibilities include tracking wildlife and refurbishing cabins. It’s hard work, and totally solitary—perfect to hide away from the...
Best Novel
Down the River Unto the Sea
King Oliver, Book 1
Joe King Oliver was one of the NYPD's finest investigators until he was framed for sexual assault by unknown enemies within the force. A decade has passed since his release from Rikers, and he now runs a private detective agency with the help of his teenage daughter.
Physically and emotionally...
2018
Best First Novel
She Rides Shotgun
Eleven-year-old Polly McClusky is shy, too old for the teddy bear she carries with her everywhere, when she is unexpectedly reunited with her father, Nate, fresh out of jail and driving a stolen car. He takes her from the front of her school into a world of robbery, violence, and the constant threat...
Best Novel
Bluebird, Bluebird
Highway 59, Book 1
When it comes to law and order, East Texas plays by its own rules -- a fact that Darren Mathews, a black Texas Ranger, knows all too well. Deeply ambivalent about growing up black in the Lone Star State, he was the first in his family to get as far away from Texas as he could. Until duty called him...
2017
Best First Novel
Under the Harrow
When Nora takes the train from London to visit her sister in the countryside, she expects to find her waiting at the station, or at home cooking dinner. But when she walks into Rachel’s familiar house, what she finds is entirely different: her sister has been the victim of a brutal murder.
Stunned...
Best Novel
Before the Fall
On a foggy summer night, eleven people—ten privileged, one down-on-his-luck painter—depart Martha's Vineyard on a private jet headed for New York. Sixteen minutes later, the unthinkable happens: the plane plunges into the ocean. The only survivors are the painter Scott Burroughs and a four-year-old...
2016
Best First Novel
The Sympathizer
Told as a confession, The Sympathizer follows a nameless narrator—a half-French, half-Vietnamese communist double agent—who lives between worlds during and after the fall of Saigon. Embedded within the South Vietnamese army while secretly reporting to the North, he witnesses the chaotic final days...
Best Novel
Let Me Die in His Footsteps
On a dark Kentucky night in 1952, exactly halfway between her fifteenth and sixteenth birthdays, Annie Holleran crosses into forbidden territory. Everyone knows Hollerans don’t go near Baines, not since Joseph Carl was buried two decades before, but armed with a silver-handled flashlight, Annie runs...
2015
Best First Novel
Dry Bones in the Valley
Henry Farrell, Book 1
In Wild Thyme, Pennsylvania, secrets and feuds go back generations. The lone policeman in a small township on the sparse northern border, Henry Farrell expected to spend his mornings hunting and fishing, his evenings playing old-time music. Instead, he has watched the steady encroachment of gas...
Best Novel
Mr. Mercedes
Bill Hodges, Book 1
The stolen Mercedes emerges from the pre-dawn fog and plows through a crowd of men and women on line for a job fair in a distressed American city. Then the lone driver backs up, charges again, and speeds off, leaving eight dead and more wounded.
The case goes unsolved and ex-cop Bill Hodges is out...
2014
Best First Novel
Red Sparrow
Red Sparrow, Book 1
In present-day Russia, ruled by blue-eyed, unblinking President Vladimir Putin, Russian intelligence officer Dominika Egorova struggles to survive in the post-Soviet intelligence jungle.
Ordered against her will to become a “Sparrow,” a trained seductress, Dominika is assigned to operate against...
Best 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 Novel
The Expats
Can We Ever Escape Our Secrets?
Kate Moore is a working mother, struggling to make ends meet, to raise children, to keep a spark in her marriage... and to maintain an increasingly unbearable life-defining secret. So when her husband is offered a lucrative job in Luxembourg, she jumps at the chance...
Best Novel
Live by Night
Coughlin, Book 2
In the roaring years of Prohibition, Joe Coughlin—the son of a Boston police captain—turns his back on the law and embraces a life of crime. What begins as small-time rebellion soon draws him into the dangerous world of organized crime, where ambition, loyalty, and betrayal walk hand in hand.
As...
2012
Best First Novel
Bent Road
For twenty years, Celia Scott has watched her husband, Arthur, hide from the secrets surrounding his sister Eve's death. As a young man, Arthur fled his small Kansas hometown, moved to Detroit, married Celia, and never looked back. But when the 1967 riots frighten him even more than his past, he...
Best Novel
Gone
Jack Caffery, Book 5
Detective Jack Caffery’s newest case seems like a routine carjacking, a crime he’s seen plenty of times before until he realizes the sickening truth: the thief wasn’t after the car, but the 11-year-old girl in the backseat.
Meanwhile, police diver Sergeant Flea Marley is pursuing her own theory of...
2011
Best First Novel
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 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 Novel
In the Shadow of Gotham
Simon Ziele, Book 1
Dobson, New York, 1905. Detective Simon Ziele lost his fiancée in the General Slocum ferry disaster--a thousand perished on that summer day in 1904 when an onboard fire burned the boat down in the waters of the East River. Still reeling from the tragedy, Ziele transferred to a police department...
Best 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 Novel
The Foreigner
Emerson Chang is a mild mannered bachelor on the cusp of forty, a financial analyst in a neatly pressed suit, a child of Taiwanese immigrants who doesn't speak a word of Chinese, and, well, a virgin. His only real family is his mother, whose subtle manipulations have kept him close--all in the name...
Best Novel
Blue Heaven
A twelve-year-old girl and her younger brother are on the run in the Idaho woods, pursued by four men they have just watched commit murder—four men who know exactly who William and Annie are. And where their mother lives.
Retired policemen from Los Angeles, the killers easily persuade the local...
2008
Best First 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 Novel
Down River
Adam Chase has a violent streak, and for good reason. As a boy, he saw things no child should witness, suffered wounds that left him misunderstood—a fighter. Even grown, he remains dangerous and unpredictable, so that when he narrowly beats a murder charge, he’s hounded out of town, exiled for a sin...
2007
Best First Novel
The Faithful Spy
John Wells, Book 1
Years ago, John Wells was an all-American boy from Montana. Now, he is roaming the mountains of Pakistan as a member of al Qaeda. After a decade away from home, he despises the United States for its decadence. He hates America’s shallow, mindless culture of vice and violence. He is a devout Muslim....
Best Novel
The Janissary Tree
Investigator Yashim, Book 1
When Jason Goodwin explored the Ottoman Empire in Lords of the Horizons, The New York Times Book Review hailed it as "a work of dazzling beauty…the rare coming together of historical scholarship…with luminous writing."
Now he returns to Istanbul, with a delicious mystery—The Janissary Tree. It is...
2006
Best First Novel
Officer Down
The Chicago Police Department says Samantha Mack shot her partner, Fred, during the confusion of a bungled pursuit. Mack says it was their quarry, a violent pedophile named Marco Trovic, who fired the deadly round in that darkened room. But Mack was knocked out and can’t really say what happened.
...
Best Novel
Citizen Vince
It’s the fall of 1980, the last week before the presidential election that pits the downtrodden Jimmy Carter against the suspiciously sunny Ronald Reagan. In a seedy suburban house in Spokane, a small-time crook formerly from New York, Vince Camden, pockets his weekly allotment of stolen credit...
2005
Best First Novel
Country of Origin
Lisa Countryman is a woman of complex origins. Half-Japanese, adopted by African American parents, she returns to Tokyo, ostensibly to research her thesis on Japan's "sad, brutal reign of conformity." When she vanishes, Tom Hurley, who is half-Korean and half-white, is assigned to her case at the...
Best Novel
California Girl
The Orange County, California, that the Becker brothers knew as boys is no more—unrecognizably altered since the afternoon in 1954 when Nick, Clay, David, and Andy rumbled with the lowlife Vonns, while five-year-old Janelle Vonn watched from the sidelines.
The new decade has ushered in the era of...
2004
Best First Novel
Death of a Nationalist
Sergeant Tejada, Book 1
Madrid 1939. Carlos Tejada Alonso y León 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...
Best Novel
Resurrection Men
Inspector Rebus, Book 13
Inspector John Rebus has messed up badly this time, so badly that he's been sent to a kind of reform school for damaged cops. While there among the last-chancers known as "resurrection men," he joins a covert mission to gain evidence of a drug heist orchestrated by three of his classmates.
But the...
2003
Best First Novel
The Blue Edge of Midnight
Max Freeman, Book 1
After a shootout during a convenience store holdup led to the accidental death of a twelve-year-old, Max Freeman left behind the Philadelphia police department for a life in exile in the Florida Everglades. Since then, he has lived in seclusion, haunted by guilt, with the humid night and the...
Best 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 Novel
Line of Vision
Marty Kalish is a young man suffocating in the heat of an affair with a married woman named Rachel. When Rachel’s husband disappears one night, Marty is one of the first to be questioned. With few likely suspects, the police arrest him for murder.
We know Marty was outside their home that night....
Best Novel
Silent Joe
Scarred for life by a brutal father, Joe Trona found a safe haven and a loving childhood in the home of the couple who adopted him. Now he spends his days as a deputy for the Orange County sheriff's department and his nights as a driver and aide to Will Trona, the influential politician who rescued...
2001
Best First 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 Novel
The Bottoms
It's 1933 in East Texas and the Depression lingers in the air like a slow moving storm. When a young Harry Collins and his little sister stumble across the body of a black woman who has been savagely mutilated and left to die in the bottoms of the Sabine River, their small town is instantly charged...
2000
Best First Novel
The Skull Mantra
Inspector Shan, Book 1
The corpse is missing its head and is dressed in American clothes. Found by a Tibetan prison work gang on a windy cliff, the grisly remains clearly belong to someone too important for Chinese authorities to bury and forget. So the case is handed to veteran police inspector Shan Tao Yun. Methodical,...
Best Novel
Bones
Irene Kelly, Book 7
Only one person knows where Julia Sayre is: her killer. Four years ago, the young mother of two disappeared, a story that soon became a personal mission for Irene Kelly. But the search for Julia proved fruitless.
Now on death row for unimaginable acts of torture and murder, inmate Nick Parrish is...
1999
Best First Novel
A Cold Day in Paradise
Alex Mcknight, Book 1
Other than the bullet lodged near his heart, former Detroit cop Alex McKnight thought he had put the nightmare of his partner’s death and his own near-fatal injury behind him. After all, the man convicted of the crimes has been locked away for years.
But in the small town of Paradise, Michigan,...
Best Novel
Mr. White's Confession
St. Paul, Minnesota, 1939.
A grisly discovery is made. On a hillside, the dead body of a beautiful dime-a-dance girl is found, and an investigation opens. Assigned to the case is Police Lieutenant Wesley Horner, a man troubled and alone after his wife's recent death, a man with his own demons. He...
1998
Best First Novel
Los Alamos
In a dusty, remote community of secretly constructed buildings and awesome possibility, the world's most brilliant minds have come together. Their mission: to split an atom and end a war. But among those who have come to Robert Oppenheimer's "enchanted campus" of foreign-born scientists, baffled...
Best Novel
Cimarron Rose
Billy Bob Holland, Book 1
Texas attorney Billy Bob Holland must confront the past in order to save his illegitimate son from a murder conviction in this brilliant, fast-paced thriller from beloved New York Times bestselling author James Lee Burke.
Lucas Smothers, nineteen and from the wrong end of town, has been arrested...
1997
Best First Novel
Simple Justice
Benjamin Justice, Book 1
Following the death of his lover and a scandal involving his Pulitzer Prize-winning article, crime reporter Benjamin Justice has fallen into a hazy, alcoholic life, hiding out in the West Hollywood neighborhood known as the Norma Triangle. He is called back to the world of the living by an...
Best Novel
The Chatham School Affair
Attorney Henry Griswald has a secret: the truth behind the tragic events the world knew as the Chatham School Affair, the controversial tragedy that destroyed five lives, shattered a quiet community, and forever scarred the young boy.
Layer by layer, in The Chatham School Affair, Cook paints a...
1996
Best First Novel
Penance
Holland Taylor, Book 1
For years the cold dark cells of the St. Paul Police Department homicide squad were his turf, and with the help of his partner he wrung confessions out of countless killers. But that was long ago.
Tonight Taylor is on the other side of the desk. Tonight he is the suspect. Taylor's career in the...
Best Novel
Come to Grief
Sid Halley, Book 3
When ex-jockey Sid Halley uncovers a shocking web of violence, he becomes convinced that one of his closest friends—and one of the racing world's most beloved figures—is behind it.
Shocked and in disbelief, Halley faces the most troubling case of his career.
1995
Best First Novel
The Caveman's Valentine
Romulus Ledbetter wasn't always homeless. He once was a devoted husband, father, and musician with a bright future. He now forages for food in the trash cans of the city's better neighborhoods and wages a strenuous one-man war against Cornelius Gould Stuyvesant, an evil -- and imaginary -- power...
Best Novel
The Red Scream
Texas-based crime reporter Molly Cates has just published her first book, describing the blood-curdling exploits of serial killer Louie Bronk. Now on death row, Louie's sentence is about to be carried out. Molly will be there as a witness, and she wants to write about it, the final coda to Louie's...
1994
Best First Novel
A Grave Talent
Kate Martinelli, Book 1
The unthinkable has happened in a small community outside of San Francisco. A series of shocking murders has occurred. For Detective Kate Martinelli, just promoted to homicide and paired with a seasoned cop who's less than thrilled to be handed a green partner, it's a difficult case that just keeps...
Best 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 Novel
The Black Echo
Harry Bosch, Book 1
For maverick LAPD homicide detective Harry Bosch, the body in the drainpipe at Mulholland Dam is more than another anonymous statistic. This one is personal... because the murdered man was a fellow Vietnam "tunnel rat" who had fought side by side with him in a hellish underground war.
Now Bosch is...
Best 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 Novel
Slow Motion Riot
On an urban battleground dangerously divided along racial lines, probation officer Steve Baum is desperately struggling to hold on to the last remaining shreds of his idealism - until Darryl King invades his world. A deranged young sociopath, one of the most bloodthirsty creations of a diseased...
Best Novel
A Dance at the Slaughterhouse
Matthew Scudder, Book 9
In Matt Scudder's mind, money, power, and position elevate nobody above morality and the law. Now the ex-cop and unlicensed P.I. has been hired to prove that socialite Richard Thurman orchestrated the brutal murder of his beautiful, pregnant wife.
During Scudder's hard drinking years, he left a...
1991
Best First Novel
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 Novel
New Orleans Mourning
Skip Langdon, Book 1
t's Mardi Gras in New Orleans, and civic leader and socialite Chauncey St. Amant has been crowned Rex, King of Carnival. But his day of glory comes to an abrupt and bloody end when a parade-goer dressed as Dolly Parton guns him down. Is the killer his aimless, promiscuous daughter Marcelle?...
1990
Best First Novel
The Last Billable Hour
T&S is a hot firm making a bid to be a major national player when Leo Slyde—the company's chief rainmaker, its king of the “billable hour”—is found stabbed to death in his corner office. It falls to T&S's brightest, most unjustifiably insecure young associate Howard Rickover to conduct a...
Best Novel
Black Cherry Blues
Dave Robicheaux, Book 3
Black Cherry Blues follows former Louisiana homicide detective Dave Robicheaux as he tries to build a quieter life running a fishing business and caring for his adopted daughter, Alafair. Still haunted by the murder of his wife and struggling to stay sober, Robicheaux is pulled back into violence...
1989
Best First Novel
Carolina Skeletons
In 1944, Linus Bragg, a 14-year-old black student, is accused of killing two white girls and condemned to the electric chair. Forty-four years later, Bragg's nephew travels to South Carolina to discover the truth--and finds himself on the Wanted List and fighting for his own freedom!
Best Novel
A Cold Red Sunrise
Inspector Rostnikov, Book 5
When forced to choose between the law and the party line, Police Inspector Porfiry Rostnikov has a disturbing tendency to fight for justice, and that has won him no friends at the Kremlin. Now his enemies in the KGB have arranged a transfer to the lowest rungs of Moscow law enforcement, a backwater...
1988
Best First Novel
Death Among Strangers
While police lieutenant George Murphy investigates the murder of an unknown teenage girl, whose battered body is discovered in the cemetary of the small town of Bakersville, New York, social worker Elizabeth Kern succumbs to an obsessive attraction to a potential psychopath.
Best Novel
Old Bones
Gideon Oliver, Book 4
“With the roar of thunder and the speed of a galloping horse comes the tide to Mont St. Michel,” goes the old nursery song. So when the aged patriarch of the du Rocher family falls victim to the perilous tide, even the old man’s family accepts the verdict of accidental drowning.
But too quickly,...
1987
Best First Novel
No One Rides for Free
After being hired by Christina Woods to investigate the circumstances of the death of her father, a Wall Street lawyer, private detective Tony Cassella finds himself again confronting the world of drugs he thought he had left behind.
Best Novel
A Dark-Adapted Eye
Faith Severn has grown up with the dark cloud of murder looming over her family. Her aunt Vera Hillyard, a rigidly respectable woman, was convicted and hanged for the crime, but the reason for her desperate deed died with her. Thirty years later, a probing journalist pushes Faith to look back to the...
1986
Best First Novel
When the Bough Breaks
Alex Delaware, Book 1
Dr. Morton Hander practiced a strange brand of psychiatry. Among his specialties were fraud, extortion, and sexual manipulation. Hander paid for his sins when he was brutally murdered in his luxurious Pacific Palisades apartment. The police have no leads, but they do have one possible witness:...
Best Novel
The Suspect
Karl Alberg, Book 1
To Karl Alberg, a small town on Canada's 'Sunshine Coast' looks like the perfect place to soothe a psyche that's been battered by too much big-city police work. Bees buzz among the roses, and the local librarian is attractive, intelligent, and unattached. Perhaps he has at last come in from the...
1985
Best First Novel
Strike Three You're Dead
Harvey Blissberg, Book 1
A slugger struggles with an empty ballpark and a murdered teammate in this Edgar Award–winning mystery.
The Providence Jewels, an American League expansion team, have been taking a beating all season. Worse, relief pitcher Rudy Furth has just suffered a beating of a more lethal kind—and been left...
Best Novel
Briarpatch
A long-distance call from a Texas city on his birthday gives Benjamin Dill the news that his sister—it's her birthday, too, they were born exactly ten years apart—has died in a car bomb explosion. It's the chief of police calling—Felicity Dill worked for him; she was a homicide detective. Dill is...
1984
Best First Novel
The Bay Psalm Book Murder
The Bay Psalm Book Murder begins when a Los Angeles university librarian is found dead in his garage, clutching a priceless Bay Psalm Book, one of the rarest books in American history. While the authorities see little reason to question the circumstances of his death, former English professor Cliff...
Best Novel
LaBrava
Joe LaBrava first fell in love with femme fatale movie queen Jean Shaw in a darkened theater when he was twelve. Now he's finally meeting his dream woman in the flesh, albeit in a rundown Miami crisis center. Cleaned up and sober, though, she still makes LaBrava's heart race. And now that Jean's...
1983
Best First Novel
The Butcher's Boy
Butcher's Boy, Book 1
Murder has always been easy for the Butcher’s Boy—it’s what he was raised to do. But when he kills the senior senator from Colorado and arrives in Las Vegas to pick up his fee, he learns that he has become a liability to his shadowy employers.
His actions attract the attention of police specialists...
Best Novel
Billingsgate Shoal
Doc Adams, Book 1
First, a fishing trawler runs aground on the Massachusetts shore. Then a young scuba diver sent to investigate the wreck is found dead in the water. Doc Adams, a friend of the dead diver, sets out through the stormy seas and blood-flecked sands of Cape Cod to plumb a murder he should have prevented....
1982
Best First Novel
Chiefs
Will Lee, Book 1
In the winter of 1920, the first body is found in Delano, Georgie—the naked, brutalized corpse of a young boy. It is a crime too horrific to be ignored, the first of many that will span four decades—embroiling three police chiefs in a remarkable manhunt that will expose the hatreds, fear, and...
Best Novel
Peregrine
Circling high over Rockefeller Center is a peregrine falcon, the most awesome of the flying predators. She awaits a signal from her falconer. It is given: the bird attacks, plummeting from the sky at nearly 200 miles an hour, striking a young woman and killing her instantly.
So begins Peregrine, a...
1981
Best First Novel
Watcher
Humanitarian and social critic Dr. Martin Granger is dead. Was it a tragic accident, or a horrible murder? The principle witness in the case is Astrid Cain, a journalist out to expose him as a monster hiding under the sackcloth of sainthood. But there is another witness, an unknown lurker in the...
Best Novel
Whip Hand
Sid Halley, Book 2
Sid Halley's glory days as a jockey are over, but he still finds a certain satisfaction in successfully solving a case. His latest one, though, could prove to be his undoing.
1980
Best First Novel
The Lasko Tangent
Christopher Paget, Book 1
The investigation of a politically powerful industrialist; the death of a key witness; the corruption of a federal agency. These are the explosive elements facing cynical young government lawyer Christopher Paget as he embarks on a mission that will hurl him into a brutal world of murder,...
Best Novel
The Rheingold Route
John Cochrane was an American living in London. Once upon a time his name had been Steve Donner and he'd worked for the U.S. Treasury Department. That had been some time ago. But these days his work required all the knowledge he had acquired while he'd been working for the Treasury. It was very...
1979
Best First Novel
Killed in the Ratings
Matt Cobb, Book 1
Cobb's no stranger to following mysterious orders, so when he receives a telephone call asking him to visit a hotel room he obliges. The invitation, however, means a dead body, a sharp blow to the head, and suspicion from the police that he committed the crime. And while one of the detectives put on...
Best Novel
Eye of the Needle
One enemy spy knows the secret to the Allies' greatest deception, a brilliant aristocrat and ruthless assassin -- code name: "The Needle" -- who holds the key to ultimate Nazi victory. Only one person stands in his way: a lonely Englishwoman on an isolated island, who is beginning to love the killer...
1978
Best First Novel
A French Finish
A retired Harvard art historian, Professor Emeritus Lewis Tewkesbury, with time on his hands, agrees to a crazy caper dreamt up by one of his former students, Nick Otter. Their audacious scheme: Create a perfect replica of King Louis XVI’s writing desk from the 18th century, build a bullet-proof...
Best Novel
Catch Me
Russian poet Boris Kotlikoff defected to the United States two years ago. He left with no state secrets; he is no threat to the Soviets in anyway; yet now he has become their prize hostage, buried alive somewhere in New York City.
The US government, on the defensive as always, treads on cat feet....
1977
Best First Novel
The Thomas Berryman Number
When an up-and-coming politician is murdered in a small Southern town, reporter Ochs Jones suspects that racism and prejudice had something to do with it—and when he learns about two other murders, tracking down the killer becomes more important than ever.
Best Novel
Promised Land
Spenser, Book 4
Spenser is good at finding things. But this time he has a client out on Cape Cod who is in over his head. Harvey Shepard has lost his pretty wife -- and a very pretty quarter million bucks in real estate. Now a loan shark is putting on the bite.
Spenser finds himself doing a slow burn in the Cape...
1976
Best First Novel
The Alvarez Journal
Gabe Wager, Book 1
Detective Gabe Wager and his rookie partner spend their nights trailing dealers, making buys, and acquiring informants. After months picking up scraps, a stray piece of information is about to put Wager on to the biggest bust of his career. A letter from the Seattle DEA puts him on the hunt for...
Best Novel
Hopscotch
Since being forced into retirement by the CIA, Miles Kendig had tried everything in an effort to satisfy his hunger for excitement. But he could not recreate the ultimate conflict of life or death with no rules, the experience of pitting himself against the enemy with no holds barred.
Despite his...
1975
Best First Novel
Fletch
Fletch, Book 1
Fletch is an investigative reporter whose methods are a little unorthodox. Currently he’s living on the beach with the strung-out trying to find the source of the drugs they live for. He’s taking more than a little flack from his editor. She doesn’t appreciate his style. Or the expense account items...
Best Novel
Peter's Pence
Peter's Pence follows Fergus McBride, an Irish-American journalist working as the Vatican's press spokesman in Rome. Drawn into an IRA plot to steal priceless treasures from the Vatican, McBride helps provide access for a scheme intended to raise money for political purposes in Northern Ireland. The...
1974
Best First Novel
The Billion Dollar Sure Thing
The Billion Dollar Sure Thing begins when the U.S. government launches a secret billion-dollar operation designed to protect the dollar during a period of international monetary instability. The plan hinges on manipulating the price of gold and strengthening confidence in the American currency, but...
Best Novel
Dance Hall of the Dead
Leaphorn & Chee, Book 2
Two Native American boys have vanished into thin air, leaving a pool of blood behind them. Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn of the Navajo Tribal Police has no choice but to suspect the very worst, since the blood that stains the parched New Mexico ground once flowed through the veins of one of the missing, a...
1973
Best First Novel
Squaw Point
Set in Alaska, Squaw Point follows Dr. "Volcano" Haney as he becomes involved in a mystery centered on the remote community of Squaw Point. The novel unfolds against the isolated landscape of the Alaskan wilderness, where Haney must confront events that disturb the fragile balance of life in the...
Best Novel
The Lingala Code
The Lingala Code follows Michael Vernon, a CIA operative stationed at the American embassy in Leopoldville (now Kinshasa) during the turmoil that followed Congolese independence in the early 1960s. When his closest friend and fellow embassy employee, Ted Stearns, is murdered in what appears to be a...
1972
Best First Novel
Finding Maubee
A calypso, a favorite of St. Caro's street bands, went as follows:
Let us tell you the story of David Maubee,
Who sought for a life of tranquilitee.
He had to pay money to eight different women,
SO now he robs tourists wile they are swimmin'.
He have found the way of life which is safest and...
Best Novel
The Day of the Jackal
The Jackal. A tall, blond Englishman with opaque, gray eyes. A killer at the top of his profession. A man unknown to any secret service in the world. An assassin with a contract to kill the world's most heavily guarded man. One man with a rifle who can change the course of history. One man whose...
1971
Best First Novel
The Anderson Tapes
Edward X. Delaney, Book 1
New York City. Summer 1968.
Newly sprung from prison, professional burglar John Anderson is preparing for the biggest heist of his criminal career. The mark is a Manhattan luxury apartment building with the tony address of 535 East Seventy-Third Street. Enlisting a crew of scouts, con artists, and...
Best Novel
The Laughing Policeman
Martin Beck, Book 4
On a cold and rainy Stockholm night, nine bus riders are gunned down by a mysterious assassin. The press portrays it as a freak attack and dubs the killer a madman. But Superintendent Martin Beck thinks otherwise—one of his most ambitious young detectives was among those killed—and he suspects it...
1970
Best First Novel
A Time of Predators
The gang was restless, just looking for idle fun. They roughed up a man they thought was a homosexual--but their game got out of hand and their victim was blinded.
It was Paula Halstead's bad luck to witness the attack and catch a glimpse of one of the boys. After they got through with her, she...
Best Novel
Forfeit
When reporter Bert Checkov falls to his death, his colleague James Tyrone thinks he can prove it was murder. But there's no such thing as a sure thing.
1969
Best First Novel
Silver Street
For Silver Street, there is enough information to build a concrete synopsis from reviews and discussions of the novel. The central character is Detective Tony Lonto, a homicide cop who grew up in the slums of an unnamed Midwestern city and now works the same neighborhood he once tried to escape....
The Bait
Christie Opara, Book 1
It begins when New York Police Department Detective Second-Grade Christie Opara arrests a man on the subway for indecent exposure. Within hours, Murray Rogoff, a burly giant, his crazed stare concealed behind thick glasses, is out on bail.
Soon after, the body of a young dancer is found stashed...
Best Novel
A Case of Need
In the tightly knit world of Boston medicine, the Randall family reigns supreme. When heart surgeon J. D. Randall’s teenage daughter dies during a botched abortion, the medical community threatens to explode. Was it malpractice? A violation of the Hippocratic Oath? Or was Karen Randall murdered in...
1968
Best First Novel
Act of Fear
Dan Fortune, Book 1
Since fate forced him to go straight, he has become the resident private eye of this run-down part of Manhattan, chiseling out a career of divorce work and subpoena delivery. But a big case is coming his way. A beat cop is mugged in broad daylight and the only possible witness disappears the next...
Best Novel
God Save the Mark
mark n. An easy victim; a ready subject for the practices of a confidence man, thief, beggar, etc.; a sucker.
That’s the long definition. The short one is:
mark n. Fred Fitch.
Fred Fitch is the kind of man every grifter in New York remembers fondly. He buys money machines, collects fake...
1967
Best First Novel
The Cold War Swap
At the height of the Cold War, two Americans are running a bar in the West German capital, called Mac's Place. One of the pair, Michael Padillo, isn't around a lot; he keeps disappearing on "business trips." McCorkle, his partner, wisely doesn't ask questions; he knows Padillo has a second job —...
Best Novel
The King of the Rainy Country
Van der Valk, Book 6
Inspector Van der Valk investigates the murder of a Dutch businessman whose life was tied to questionable financial dealings and complicated personal relationships stretching across postwar Europe. As he traces the victim’s movements and associations, the case leads him through a web of political...
1966
Best First Novel
In the Heat of the Night
A small southern town in the 1960s. A musician found dead on the highway. It’s no surprise when white detectives arrest a black man for the murder. What is a surprise is that the black man—Virgil Tibbs—is not the killer but a skilled homicide detective, passing through racially tense Wells, South...
Best Novel
The Quiller Memorandum
Quiller, Book 1
You are a secret agent working for the British in Berlin. You are due to go home on leave, but you are being followed-by your own people, or by the enemy. A man meets you in the theater and briefs you on a plot to revive the power of Nazi Germany. You do not believe him, but you remember that one of...
1965
Best First Novel
Friday The Rabbi Slept Late
Friday the Rabbi Slept Late follows Rabbi David Small of the small Jewish community in Barnard’s Crossing, Massachusetts, after the body of a young woman is discovered near the synagogue. Because the woman had recently been seen speaking with the rabbi, suspicion and gossip quickly begin spreading...
Best Novel
The Spy Who Came in From the Cold
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold follows Alec Leamas, a weary British intelligence agent nearing the end of his career after years spent operating in the shadows of the Cold War. Disillusioned and exhausted by the moral compromises of espionage, Leamas is offered one final assignment against East...
1964
Best First Novel
Florentine Finish
Hardy is a small-time diamond salesman and ex-cop who knows private deals mean trouble. Against his better judgment, he decides to help a rich acquaintance find a special diamond for his wife.
Saul finds the perfect gem, but the deal turns deadly when the diamond is revealed to be part of the haul...
Best Novel
The Light of Day
The Light of Day was the basis for Jules Dassin’s classic film, Topkapi.
When Arthur Abdel Simpson first spots Harper in the Athens airport, he recognizes him as a tourist unfamiliar with the city and in need of a private driver. In other words, the perfect mark for Simpson’s brand of...
1963
Best First Novel
The Fugitive
Captain José Da Silva, Book 1
In 1939 Erick Von Roesler was spreading Hitler's gospel in Brazil when duty to the Reich called him home. After distinguishing himself during the war, in 1945 he felt it necessary to return to South America to remake the continent in the image of the fallen Reich.
For help, he calls on Hans Busch,...
Best Novel
Death and the Joyful Woman
The Felse Investigations, Book 2
Death and the Joyful Woman begins when sixteen-year-old Dominic Felse falls in love with Kitty Norris, a young heiress he meets in his English hometown. Soon afterward, wealthy businessman Alfred Armiger is found murdered. When Inspector George Felse investigates the crime, the evidence leads him to...
1962
Best First Novel
The Green Stone
The Green Stone follows Inspector Miguel Menendes as he investigates a murder connected to a mysterious green stone in Mexico. As Menendes examines the circumstances surrounding the crime, the case draws him into a web of personal relationships, conflicting interests, and local tensions, where...
Best Novel
Gideon's Fire
Gideon's Fire follows Commander George Gideon of Scotland Yard during a period when multiple major crimes erupt across London at once. The crisis begins when Police Constable Jarvis discovers a tenement fire while on patrol near the Old Kent Road. Jarvis rescues a young girl from the burning...
1961
Best First Novel
The Man in the Cage
The Man in the Cage follows Darrell Hutson, an MIT graduate who travels to Tangier after receiving a troubling letter from his younger brother Noel. Noel had been working as a gun-runner in Morocco during the Algerian revolution and vanished after becoming involved in a smuggling operation that...
Best Novel
The Progress of a Crime
The murder, a brutal stabbing, definitely took place on Guy Fawkes’s (bonfire) night. It was definitely by the bonfire on the village green, and there were definitely a number of witnesses. And yet, nobody is clear on what exactly happened and what they saw. In the writhing, violent shadows, it...
1960
Best First Novel
The Grey Flannel Shroud
The Grey Flannel Shroud follows Dave Robbins, a young Madison Avenue advertising executive who unexpectedly finds himself in charge of the lucrative Burke Baby Foods account after its manager suffers a heart attack. As Dave takes over the campaign, he begins noticing a series of disturbing...
Best Novel
The Hours Before Dawn
Louise Henderson is trapped in a nightmare: the baby cries almost all night, every night, and the other children must be gotten off to school. . . .
Louise is so tired that she is afraid she is becoming psychotic; why does she have this feeling of apprehension, almost of terror? Is it connected...
1959
Best First Novel
The Bright Road to Fear
The Bright Road to Fear follows Alan Stewart, an American engineer working in South America who becomes trapped in a deadly political crisis after agreeing to transport a mysterious cargo across a dangerous jungle region. What begins as a difficult but straightforward assignment quickly turns into a...
Best Novel
The Eighth Circle
The Eighth Circle follows Murray Kirk, a successful advertising executive whose carefully controlled life begins to unravel after he becomes involved with a troubled young woman named Laura. What starts as an attempt to help her gradually pulls him into a dangerous emotional and criminal situation...
1958
Best First Novel
Knock and Wait a While
Knock and Wait a While follows an American intelligence officer who arrives in Frankfurt on what is supposed to be a routine assignment during the Cold War. Instead, he becomes drawn into a dangerous espionage operation involving secret agents, divided loyalties, and violent political intrigue...
Best Novel
Room to Swing
Toussaint Moore is a college-educated, decorated war veteran. Because he’s also a Black man, his employment options are limited, so he ekes out a living as a private eye serving Black clients in and around Harlem where he lives.
When he’s hired by producers of a television reality show called...
1957
Best First Novel
Rebecca's Pride
Rebecca's Pride is set on the Caribbean island of Saint Martin and follows Captain Bolivar Manchenil, the island's chief police officer, as he investigates the murder of Fordyce Wales, a wealthy outsider whose purchase of Rebecca's Pride, the ancestral estate of the influential Von Schook family,...
Best Novel
A Dram of Poison
A Dram of Poison follows Tobias Garrison, a mild and respectable history professor whose quiet life is shattered after he secretly poisons his wealthy and overbearing wife. Believing he has carried out the perfect crime, Tobias carefully plans to establish an alibi and avoid suspicion. But almost...
1956
Best First Novel
The Perfectionist
Martin Pryor is a perfectionist who stages a meticulously-plotted accident to kill his wife...and just when it seems like he's committed a flawless crime, he gets a note from a blackmailer demanding money not to expose the details of the murder . He's not frightened or concerned, instead he's...
Best Novel
Beast in View
Thirty-year-old Helen Clarvoe is scared and all alone. The heiress of a small fortune, she is resented by her mother and, to a lesser degree, her brother. The only person who seemingly cares for her is the family’s attorney, Paul Blackshear. A shut-in, Helen maintains her residence in an upscale...
1955
Best First Novel
Go, Lovely Rose
Go, Lovely Rose follows Jane Marsh as she returns to a wealthy household connected to her family and becomes caught in a growing web of suspicion after the sudden death of an older woman. As tensions rise within the household, Jane begins noticing strained relationships, hidden resentments, and...
Best Novel
The Long Goodbye
Philip Marlowe, Book 6
The Long Goodbye follows private detective Philip Marlowe after he befriends Terry Lennox, a troubled and wealthy war veteran drifting through Los Angeles with a glamorous but destructive wife. When Lennox suddenly asks Marlowe for help escaping to Mexico, Marlowe agrees without fully understanding...
1954
Best First Novel
A Kiss Before Dying
Known for his looks and charm, a young man obsessed with wealth and status will stop at nothing to get what he wants. He sets his sights on a beautiful and innocent college student named Dorothy, intent on marrying her for her family’s money. But when Dorothy becomes pregnant, his careful plans...
Best Novel
Beat Not the Bones
A young Australian woman comes alone to Marapai on the island of New Guinea to find out why her husband committed suicide. It is hard to believe that drink and debt could have affected David Warwick, a distinguished anthropologist in charge of protecting the natives from exploitation. Stella must...
1953
Best First Novel
Don't Cry For Me
He was a heel . . . a blue-blood gone bad, a low-brow with class, a bum with an income. He liked low-slung cars and top-heavy girls, and he took his pleasure where he found it. He was the consort of bookies, dope-peddlers, crooks; the buddy of has-beens, tough guys, and junkies. He dreamed the big...
1952
Best First Novel
Strangle Hold
Strangle Hold follows Eve Fitzsimmons, a young woman working at a New York advertising agency where appearances, ambition, and office politics shape everyday life. When the body of an unidentified woman is discovered strangled in the agency’s conference room, the polished atmosphere of the office...
1951
Best First Novel
Nightmare in Manhattan
Nightmare in Manhattan follows the kidnapping of a young boy in New York City after he is separated from his mother in the crowded confusion surrounding Grand Central Terminal. As the kidnappers move the child through the city while attempting to avoid detection, police and investigators launch a...
1948
Best First Novel
The Fabulous Clipjoint
In the rough edges of 1940s Chicago, the discovery of a corpse in an alleyway isn't always enough to cause a big stir—especially when the victim is killed in the midst of a night-long bender, caught between barrooms in what appears to be a mugging gone awry. Which is why the police don't take a huge...
1947
Best First Novel
The Horizontal Man
The Horizontal Man is a literary mystery set within the atmosphere of an elite New England women’s college, where wit, rivalry, and intellectual ambition shape everyday life. The story follows a young instructor who becomes drawn into the investigation of a murder after the body of a charismatic...