Annal:1998 Edgar Allan Poe Award® for Best Paperback Original

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Results of the Edgar Allan Poe Award® in the year 1998. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:

Charm City: A Tess Monaghan Mystery

Laura Lippman

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

Now the Blight wants to nail the unknown computer hacker who planted the lethal story, and the assignment is right up the alley of a former newshound like Tess. But it doesn’t take long for her to discover deeper, darker secrets, and to realize that this situation is really more about whacking than hacking.…
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Home Again, Home Again: An E. J. Pugh Mystery

Susan Rogers Cooper

What Happened to Willis?

E. J. and Willis Pugh aren’t one of the more ordinary married couples in Black Cat Ridge, Texas. E. J. writes romance novels, Willis washes the dishes. Willis works on the cars, E. J. solves local homicides. But the latest murderous mystery strikes much too close to home when Willis himself vanishes.

E. J. isn’t sure if her couch potato hubby’s disappearance is some kind of mid-life crisis romp or something far, far worse. But she won’t rest until she knows for certain the fate of her missing spouse-following Willis’s tracks to a corpse, a lovelorn redneck turkey trucker…and a nasty mess of family secrets that could turn very deadly indeed.
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Sunset and Santiago: A Ronnie Ventana Mystery

Gloria White

Private investigator Ronnie Ventana is sitting alone on a bench in the middle of the night, at the San Francisco intersection of Sunset and Santiago. she is there to observe the grim anniversary of her parents’ fatal car crash twenty years earlier—an “accident” that has never seemed entirely accidental to her. But then, there in the darkness, she notices two men dumping a body in the shrubs. and a young witness, who’s also a friend, wants to get involved in solving the case, What had started as a midnight vigil—personal and poignant—turns into a public investigation of a very different crime, Now, without warning, Ronnie is up to her ears in a new case that snakes through a tunnel of civic corruption and brings her fresh revelations about her parents’ long-ago double murder.
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Tarnished Icons: An Inspector Porfiry Rostnikov Novel

Stuart M. Kaminsky

In the topsy-turvy world of post-communist Russia, Inspector Porfiry Rostnikov’s work is never done. Three congregants from a local synagogue, gunned down in the night, are the latest victims in the seemingly systematic execution of Jews in Moscow. But the shocking identity of one of the murdered men leads Rostnikov to suspect that, rather than simple intolerance, a more calculated motive lies behind the slaughter.

Meanwhile, the city’s women are under siege by The Shy One—a knife-wielding rapist who strikes without being seen. And as the last vestiges of order spin wildly out of control, a rabid antinuclear crusader plans to send a message to the New Russia via an “explosive” special delivery. It’s up to Rostnikov and his fellow cops to stop the madness before it stops Russia—for good….
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The Prioress' Tale: A Sister Frevisse Medieval Mystery

Margaret Frazer

After Domina Alys was made prioress, St. Frideswide became nothing more than a guest house for her relatives. But when a long-standing family rivalry ends with murder, it is up to Frevisse to rid the nunnery of its unwelcome—and deadly—guests.
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