Annal:2002 Barry Award for Best First Novel

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Results of the Barry Award in the year 2002. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:

Open Season: A Joe Pickett Novel

C.J. Box

Few first mysteries have been welcomed as enthusiastically as Open Season, or with better cause.

“When a high-powered bullet hits living flesh, it makes a distinctive -pow-WHOP-sound that is unmistakable even at tremendous distance.” And so it begins for Joe Pickett, a Wyoming game warden who, with the shot of a rifle, is thrust into a race to save not only an endangered species, but also the life and family he loves.

C. J. Box knows the wilderness and he knows how to create a wonderfully authentic, vividly alive sense of place. Most of all, he knows…

 

Third Person Singular

K.J. Erickson

Set against the black backdrop of a ruthless Minnesota winter, KJ Erickson’s debut novel is bursting with masterfully plotted suspense and intricately rendered characters.

Prickly but gifted Minneapolis Special Detective Marshall “Mars” Bahr is a man whose devotion to his eight-year-old son is eclipsed only by his love of the hunt. Mars hasn’t won any popularity contests among his fellow officers, but his commitment to his job and his investigative talents have gotten him a plumb assignment: Special Detective in charge of the First Response Unit, reporting…

 

Chasing the Devil's Tail: A Mystery of Storyville, New Orleans

David Fulmer

Not New Orleans—but Storyville—noir…and all that jazz! 1907 Storyville. Cultures, races, and religions more often blend than clash in a rich gumbo only New Orleans could serve up. But trouble brews. In this red light district, prostitutes ply their trade whether in cramped cribs or elegant houses of French ancestry, while music surges through its streets and helps harmonize the light and dark elements. King Bolden rules the Storyville brass with his golden coronet and his gift—jasser—to blow a riff on the city’s music that pulses with new rhythms and notes. But…

 

Perhaps She'll Die: A Chantalene Mystery

M.K. Preston

Chantalene has terrible nightmares from when she was a child: a dark barn in a wind-swept moonlit field. Her mother is inside, screaming; her father is hanging from the rafters for a crime he didn’t commit. She hides in the field, watching as four hooded figures emerge, their faces hidden in shadow. But deep in the recesses of her memory, she knows who they are.

Returning to her hometown of Tetumka in rural Oklahoma, Chantalene vows to learn the identity of her father’s killers. One man claims to have answers for her, but when she finds him slain on the floor…

 

Blindsighted

Karin Slaughter

Interweaving knife-edge tension, superb characterization, and an evocative milieu, this thrilling novel of dark suspense, set in rural Grant County, Georgia, introduces engaging pediatrician and coroner Dr. Sara Linton.

The sleepy town of Heartsdale, Georgia, is jolted into panic when Sara Linton, the town’s pediatrician and coroner, finds Sibyl Adams, a young college professor, dead in the local diner. As well as being viciously raped, Sibyl has been cut: two deep knife wounds form a lethal cross over her stomach. But it’s only once Sara starts to perform the…

 

Bubbles Unbound

Sarah Strohmeyer

Meet Bubbles, the irrepressible heroine of this irresistibly entertaining new mystery series-a tall, blond, and gorgeous, local bleach-blonde with a wacky family, a hot potential lover, and a bad case of murder.

Convinced there’s more to life than giving blue dye jobs at Sandy’s House of Beauty, Bubbles Yablonsky has done what few in Lehigh, PA, would dare: she’s gone back to school. And if her day gig, journalism classes, and on-the-job training at a local paper aren’t enough, there’s always her family to liven things up-from her bottom-feeding,…

 
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