Annal:2003 Edgar Allan Poe Award® for Best First Novel
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Edgar Allan Poe Award® in the year 2003. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 2003 Edgar-1st Novel winner
- 2003 Anthony-1st Novel nominee
- 2003 Barry-1st Novel nominee
- 2003 Macavity-1st Novel nominee
- Score: 28.53
Featuring ex-cop Max Freeman, The Blue Edge of Midnight marks the debut of a powerful new crime series.
Max Freeman’s old life ended on a night that will haunt him forever. The night he killed a twelve-year-old child in self-defense in a Philadelphia shootout. The night he stopped being a cop. Now he lives an existence of solitary confinement on the edge of the Florida Everglades, where he answers to no one but the demons that eat away at his conscience.
Until the night he finds the corpse of a child beside an ancient river. The night Max Freeman’s past explodes into the present.
Suddenly, Freeman is thrust into the center of the search for a killer responsible for a string of grisly slayings that is baffling both local authorities and the F.B.I. Distrusted as an outsider by the longtime residents of the Glades and pulled into the case as suspect by the police, Freeman must walk a tenuous tightrope of distrust on both sides of the law. When another child goes missing, all eyes turn to Freeman-and the ex-cop, driven by his old habits and the memories of that long-ago Philadelphia…
Buck Fever: A Blanco County Texas Novel
- 2003 Barry-1st Novel nominee
- 2003 Edgar-1st Novel nominee
- Score: 12.53
Blanco County, Texas: It’s the week before deer hunting season, as close to a statewide holiday you get in Texas, and the locals are getting restless. Red O’Brien and Billy Don Craddock aren’t the only good ol’ boys out at night spotlighting deer from their pickups, trying to get a jump on the hundreds of hunters that will be out come Saturday. Game Warden John Marlin has his hands full with poaching complaints coming in faster than he can write out-of-season tickets. Then a call of a different sort comes in. A man dressed up in some sort of deer costume has been shot at the Circle S ranch, and witnesses are reporting a massive wild-eyed buck deer prancing about the pasture in a lovesick frenzy.
Marlin’s seen a lot in his years, but this is wilder than he could have imagined: the man in the deer suit is a good friend, and the whacked-out whitetail isn’t exactly a stranger either. It’s the beginning of a mad, frantic weekend in Blanco County, one that will see a few more men shot, an invasion by Colombians with more than hunting on their minds, and damn near the end of Marlin’s…
- 2003 Edgar-1st Novel nominee
- Score: 6.53
A woman stands accused but the cost to prove her innocence… may just be her life.
Captain Kate Gallagher has a plane to land and a daughter to get home to. But first, she’s got to contend with a confrontational co-pilot, blizzard conditions, and something far more treacherous–a plane contaminated with a lethal virus. When the controls refuse to respond to her commands, she’s got two choices: Turn the plane around or trust her instinct.
One day later, the world’s press is picking through the mangled remains of Flight 394 and crying pilot error. To clear her name and find out what really happened, Kate must uncover a shocking conspiracy that has already zeroed in on a new target: another plane, another deadly disaster.
With only seconds to save the 262 passengers on board, Kate Gallagher will fight her way back into the pilot’s seat and up into the air–in a life-and-death race against time, a madman, and a computer code that is wired, running, and ready to kill again….And the price for saving all those lives may be only one…hers.
Open and Shut: A Novel
- 2003 Edgar-1st Novel nominee
- 2003 Shamus-1st Novel nominee
- Score: 12.53
Attorney Andy Carpenter’s legal maneuvers are legion in and out of the courtrooms of Paterson, New Jersey. A talented lawyer who knows how to play all the cards, he is torn between mending a marriage that no longer works and growing attached to a beautiful, no-nonsense private investigator. Besides his love for sports, Andy also adores Tara, a golden retriever clearly smarter than half the lawyers who clog the courts of Passaic County.
Then one day the fun stops.
It all begins when Andy’s father, venerated ex-district attorney Nelson Carpenter, asks him to take the appeals case of Willie Miller, a young black man on death row for the murder of a white woman. Nelson himself had prosecuted Miller but refuses to disclose why he wants Andy to represent the convicted man. A few days later, Nelson drops dead in front of his son at a game in Yankee Stadium.
Suddenly Andy finds himself the inheritor of a staggering fortune he never knew his father had. The astonished advocate soon unearths a mysterious old photograph of a much younger Nelson, a picture that may have a sinister connection…
- 2003 Edgar-1st Novel nominee
- Score: 6.53
