Annal:2002 Edgar Allan Poe Award® for Best First Novel
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Edgar Allan Poe Award® in the year 2002. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 2002 Edgar-1st Novel winner
- Score: 10.52
A courtroom thriller about obsession, betrayal, and delicious revenge-all told by a mesmerizing and confident new writer of suspense.
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. We know he has a motive. We know he’s guilty of something. But is it murder? Everything we learn-about Marty as a man, his affair with…
- 2002 Edgar-1st Novel nominee
- Score: 6.52
Charlie Swift just pumped three .38-caliber bullets into a dead polar bear in his taxidermist girlfriend’s garage. But he’s a gun monkey, and no one can blame him for having an itchy trigger finger. Ever since he drove down the Florida Turnpike with a headless body in the trunk of a Chrysler, then took down four cops, Charlie’s been running hard through the sprawling sleaze of central Florida. And to make matters worse, he’s holding on to some crooked paperwork that a lot of people would like to take off his hands. Now, with his boss disappeared and his friends…
Open Season: A Joe Pickett Novel
- 2002 Anthony-1st Novel winner
- 2002 Barry-1st Novel winner
- 2002 Macavity-1st Novel winner
- 2002 Edgar-1st Novel nominee
- 2001 LATimes–Mystery finalist
- Score: 42.52
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…
- 2002 Edgar-1st Novel nominee
- Score: 6.52
It’s not the dead body—Jack Leightner has seen hundred of bodies in his tour with the NYPD. It’s not the dank setting—the narrow banks along Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal. So why does the sight of the fatally stabbed young man make the detective almost faint in the canal’s tangled weeds?
Jack doesn’t understand why he becomes obsessed with this low-priority case, why he allows it to jeopardize his career and even his life. Especially since the investigation draws him exactly where he doesn’t want to go: into the heart of Red Hook. The neighborhood is Leightner’s…
The Jasmine Trade: A Novel of Suspense Introducing Eve Diamond
- 2004 New Blood Dagger shortlist
- 2002 Anthony-1st Novel nominee
- 2002 Edgar-1st Novel nominee
- 2002 Macavity-1st Novel nominee
- Score: 24.54
Everything was set. Seventeen-year-old Marina Lu had even ordered custom-made gowns for the ten bridesmaids who, in several months’ time, would have preceded her down the aisle at her storybook wedding.
There isn’t going to be a wedding. Marina lies dead, alone in her shiny status car in a suburban shopping center parking lot, her two-carat diamond engagement ring refracting another abruptly shattered Los Angeles dream. Was her death merely a carjacking gone bad? Or is there more to the story?
Marina’s murder chillingly introduces Los Angeles Times…
