This award was given to 11 books.
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Blue Heaven
by C. J. Box
A twelve-year-old girl and her younger brother go on the run in the woods of North Idaho, pursued by four men they have just watched commit murder---four men who know exactly who William and Annie are, and who know exactly where their desperate mother is waiting for news of her children’s fate. Retired cops from Los Angeles, the killers easily persuade the inexperienced sheriff to let them lead the search for the missing children. William and Annie’s unexpected savior comes in the form of an old-school rancher teetering on the brink of foreclosure. But as one man against four who will stop at nothing to silence their witnesses, Jess Rawlins needs allies, and he knows that one word to the wrong person could seal the fate of the children or their mother. In a town where most of the ranches like his have turned into acres of ranchettes populated by strangers, finding someone to trust won’t be easy. With true-to-life, unforgettable characters and a ticking-clock plot that spans just over forty-eight hours, C.J. Box has created a thriller that delves into issues close to the heart: the ruthless power of greed over broken ideals, the healing power of community where unlikely heroes find themselves at the crossroads of duty and courage, and the truth about what constitutes a family. In a setting whose awesome beauty is threatened by those who want a piece of it, Blue Heaven delivers twists and turns until its last breathtaking page.
Year: 2009
Category: Best Novel
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Down River
by John Hart
2008 Edgar Winning Novel Down River . Everything that shaped him happened near that river…. Now its banks are filled with lies and greed, shame, and murder…. John Hart’s debut, The King of Lies , was compelling and lyrical, with Janet Maslin of The New York Times declaring, “There hasn’t been a thriller as showily literate since Scott Turow came along.” Now, in Down River, Hart makes a scorching return to Rowan County, where he drives his characters to the edge, explores the dark side of human nature, and questions the fundamental power of forgiveness. Adam hase has a violent streak, and not without reason. As a boy, he saw things that no child should see, suffered wounds that cut to the core and scarred thin. The trauma left him passionate and misunderstood---a fighter. After being narrowly acquitted of a murder charge, Adam is hounded out of the only home he’s ever known, exiled for a sin he did not commit. For five long years he disappears, fades into the faceless gray of New York City. Now he’s back and nobody knows why, not his family or the cops, not the enemies he left behind. But Adam has his reasons. Within hours of his return, he is beaten and accosted, confronted by his family and the women he still holds dear. No one knows what to make of Adam’s return, but when bodies start turning up, the small town rises against him and Adam again finds himself embroiled in the fight of his life, not just to prove his own innocence, but to reclaim the only life he’s ever wanted. Bestselling author John Hart holds nothing back as he strips his characters bare. Secrets explode, emotions tear, and more than one person crosses the brink into deadly behavior as he examines the lengths to which people will go for money, family, and revenge. A powerful, heart-pounding thriller, Down River will haunt your thoughts long after the last page is turned. Praise for John Hart and The King of Lies “Treat yourself to something new and truly out of the ordinary.” --- Rocky Mountain News “A top-notch debut. Hart’s prose is like Raymond Chandler’s, angular and hard.” -- Entertainment Weekly (grade A) “A gripping performance.” --- People magazine “A marriage of carefully crafted prose alongside have-to-keep-reading suspense.” --- The Denver Post “A masterful piece of writing.” --- The News & Observer (Raleigh, NC) “A gripping mystery/thriller and a fully fleshed, thoughtful work of literature.” --- Winston-Salem Journal “ The King of Lies moves and reads like a book on fire.” ---Pat Conroy “John Hart’s debut . . . is that most engrossing of rarities, a well-plotted mystery novel that is written in a beautifully poetic style.” ---Mark Childress, author of Crazy in Alabama “Grisham-style intrigue and Turow-style brooding.” ---The New York Times
Year: 2008
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The Janissary Tree: A Novel
by Jason Goodwin
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 1836. Europe is modernizing, and the Ottoman Empire must follow suit. But just before the Sultan announces sweeping changes, a wave of murders threatens the fragile balance of power in his court. Who is behind them? Only one intelligence agent can be trusted to find out: Yashim Lastname, a man both brilliant and near-invisible in this world. You see, Yashim is a eunuch. He leads us into the palace’s luxurious seraglios and Istanbul's teeming streets, and leans on the wisdom of a dyspeptic Polish ambassador, a transsexual dancer, and a Creole-born queen mother. And he introduces us to the Janissaries. For 400 years, they were the empire's elite soldiers, but they grew too powerful, and ten years ago, the Sultan had them crushed. Are the Janissaries staging a brutal comeback? The Janissary Tree is the first in a series featuring the most enchanting detective since Precious Ramotswe of The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency . Splendidly paced and illuminating, it belongs beside Caleb Carr's The Alienist and the historical thrillers of Arturo Perez-Reverte.
Year: 2007
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Citizen Vince
by Jess Walter
At 1:59 a.m. in Spokane, Washington—eight days before the 1980 presidential election—Vince Camden pockets his stash of stolen credit cards and drops by an all-night poker game before heading to his witness-protection job dusting crullers at Donut Make You Hungry. Along with a neurotic hooker girlfriend, this is the total sum of Vince's new life. But when a familiar face shows up in town, Vince realizes his sordid past is still too close behind him. During the next unforgettable week, he'll negotiate a coast-to-coast maze of obsessive cops, eager politicians, and assorted mobsters—only to find that redemption might exist, of all places, in the voting booth.
Year: 2006
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California Girl
by T. Jefferson Parker
The times, they are a-changin' . . . 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 brought about the end of the orange groves and the birth of suburban sprawl. It is the era of Johnson, hippies, John Birchers, and LSD. Clay becomes a casualty of a far-off jungle war. Nick becomes a cop, Andy a reporter, David a minister. And the decapitated corpse of teenage beauty queen Janelle Vonn is discovered in an abandoned warehouse. A hideous crime has touched the Beckers in ways that none of them could have anticipated, setting three brothers on a dangerous collision course that will change their family -- and their world -- forever. And no one will emerge from the wreckage unscathed.
Year: 2005
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Detective John Rebus: Book 13Resurrection Men
by Ian Rankin
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 group has been assigned an unsolved murder that may have resulted from Rebus's own mistake. Now Rebus can't determine if he's been set up for a fall or if his disgraced classmates are as ruthless as he suspects. When Detective Sergeant Siobhan Clarke discovers that her investigation of an art dealer's murder is tied to Rebus's inquiry, the two-protÈgÈ and mentor-join forces. Soon they find themselves in the midst of an even bigger scandal than they had imagined-a plot with conspirators in every corner of Scotland and deadly implications about their colleagues. With the brilliant eye for character and place that earned him the name "the Dickens of Edinburgh," Ian Rankin delivers a page-turning novel of intricate suspense.
Year: 2004
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Winter and Night
by S. J. Rozan
Private detective Bill Smith is hurtled headlong into the most provocative-and personal-case of his career when he receives a chilling late night telephone call from the NYPD, who are holding his fifteen-year-old nephew Gary. But before he can find out what's going on, Gary escapes Bill's custody and disappears into the dark and unfamiliar streets... Bill and his partner, Lydia Chin, try to find the missing teen and uncover what it is that has led him so far from home. Their search takes them to Gary's family in a small town in New Jersey, where they discover that one of Gary's classmates was murdered. Bill and Lydia delve into the crime-only to find it eerily similar to a decades-old murder-suicide... Now, with his nephew's future-and perhaps his very life-at stake, Bill must unravel a long-buried crime and confront the darkness of his own past...
Year: 2003
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Silent Joe
by T. Jefferson Parker
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 him from the Hillside Children's Home. An expert in firearms and the martial arts, Joe has been backing Will up for a long time. Still, his skill isn't enough to keep Will alive, and when his father is killed right in front of Joe's eyes, the young deputy vows to avenge him. But first he must find out how the kidnapping of a tycoon's daughter, a scam to line the pockets of Will Trona's political enemies, the murder of two Guatemalan immigrants, the unholy activities of a charismatic minister who's a close friend of the Trona family, and the strange alliance of two rival L.A. gangs are connected to Will's death. Every secret Joe uncovers leads deeper into his beloved father's murky past and ultimately his own. But the reader stays right with this extraordinary man as he battles his demons and ultimately vanquishes them. Author T. Jefferson Parker (The Blue Hour, Red Light, Laguna Heat) is one of the best thriller writers working today. Fans of Michael Connelly and DennisLehane--and Raymond Chandler, for that matter--will appreciate Parker's abilityto create a complex, fascinating, and fully realized hero whose inner reality is brilliantly revealed by his actions. Will Trona is an equally intriguing invention; while ultimately he is an enigma, we remain convinced that he is worthy of his son's devotion. Silent Joe is a mindful, intelligent novel you can't put down. It should break Parker out withthe really big boys of mystery fiction, the million-sellers with the marquee names. In fact, he's a much better writer than most of them, and unlike many, he never tells the same story twice. --Jane Adams
Year: 2002
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The Bottoms
by Joe R. Lansdale
Joe Lansdale, author of several horror novels, Westerns, andsome outrageous thrillers, is something of a cult writer. The Bottoms,which may be the breakout book that moves Lansdale beyond the genre category, isa resonant and moving novel. Though there is a mystery at its core, it is atheart a coming-of-age story, with a more literary bent than Lansdale usuallydemonstrates.Harry, an elderly man, tells the story of a series of events that occurred inhis 11th year, when the mutilated, murdered bodies of Negro prostitutes beganturning up in the county where his father was the local constable. Harry andTom, his younger sister, find the first one. Only their father, Jacob Crane,seems to care about finding justice for the victims, who are dismissed out ofhand as unimportant by the local branch of the Ku Klux Klan, which warns Jacoboff any further investigations. Harry and Tom think they know who'sresponsible: the Goat Man, a creature who's said to lurk beneath the swingingbridge that crosses the Sabine River, where the first body was found.In fact,the Goat Man has something to do with the murders, and the secret of who he isand what he really did is the key to the unsolved slayings. But that takessecond place to the artfully explicated character of Jacob and Harry's changingrelationship with him in the course of the loss of his boyish innocence. Thisis a masterfully told story and a very good read. --Jane Adams
Year: 2001
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Irene Kelly MysteriesBones
by Jan Burke
Irene Kelley bets her life on a deal she makes with a serial killer in the novel that "firmly ensconces <Burke> in the mystery pantheon with Patricia Cornwell, Sue Grafton, Robert B. Parker, and John Sandford."( The Tennessean )
Year: 2000
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Mr. White's Confession
by Robert Clark
St. Paul, Minnesota, 1939. The body of a beautiful dime-a-dance girl is found on a hillside, and Police Lieutenant Wesley Horner, struggling and alone after his wife's recent death, heads the investigation into her murder. His chief suspect is Herbert White, an eccentric recluse and hobby photographer who spends his days recording his life in detailed journal entries and scrapbooks. In Mr. White's Confession , Robert Clark illuminates the complex relationships between truth and fiction, past and present, faith and memory.
Year: 1999
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