Annal:2003 Edgar Allan Poe Award® for Best Fact Crime
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Edgar Allan Poe Award® in the year 2003. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- Edgar Allan Poe Award® for Best Fact Crime
- Nonfiction books
- Nonfiction authors
- Mystery/Suspense books
- Mystery/Suspense authors.
- 2003 Edgar-Fact Crime winner
- Score: 10.53
From master crime writer Joseph Wambaugh, the acclaimed author of such classics as The Onion Field and The Choirboys, comes the extraordinary true story of a firefighter who may have been, according to U.S. government profilers, “the most prolific American arsonist of the twentieth century.”
Growing up in Los Angeles, John Orr would watch in awe as firefighters scrambled to put out blazes with seeming disregard for their own lives. One day he would become a fireman himself, and a good one. As a member of the Glendale Fire Department, he rose…
Blood and Ink: An International Guide to Fact-Based Crime Literature
- 2003 Edgar-Fact Crime nominee
- Score: 6.53
Death at the Priory: Sex, Love, and Murder in Victorian England
- 2003 Edgar-Fact Crime nominee
- Score: 6.53
In 1875 the beautiful widow Florence Ricardo married the handsome and successful young attorney Charles Bravo, hoping to escape the scandals of her past. But Bravo proved to be a brutal and conniving man, and the marriage was far from happy. Then one night he suddenly collapsed, and three days later died an agonizing death. His doctors immediately determined that he had been poisoned. The graphic and sensational details of the case would capture the public imagination of Victorian England as the investigation dominated the press for weeks, and the list of…
Takedown: The Fall of the Last Mafia Empire
- 2003 Edgar-Fact Crime nominee
- Score: 6.53
Seldom has the netherworld of the mafia been revealed with such fascinating detail and sheer suspense. Like the classics of the genre-from The Godfather to The French Connection to Wise Guy-Takedown leads us to the inner ring of a conspiracy of corruption and terror that held the city in its grip for nearly fifty years.
Rick Cowan was a young NYPD detective in 1992 when he dropped by a Brooklyn waterfront warehouse to investigate a recent fire bombing-only one in a string of interviews he considered routine. But what he found there was far…
The Count and the Confession: A True Mystery
- 2003 Edgar-Fact Crime nominee
- Score: 6.53
Do you believe that the gentlest and most courteous person you know is capable of murder?
The count in John Taylor’s beguiling true story is Roger de la Burde, a wealthy scientist and art collector, who wore ascots, claimed he was a Polish nobleman, bowed to women—and then routinely propositioned them. In 1992, Burde was found dead on his Virginia estate, with a single bullet wound in his forehead. The Count and the Confession explores the layers of mystery surrounding this strange man’s death. Did he, as the local deputies at first assumed, commit suicide? Or…
