Annal:2004 Agatha Award for Best First Novel
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Agatha Award in the year 2004. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 2005 Anthony-1st Novel winner
- 2005 Macavity-1st Novel winner
- 2004 Agatha–1st Novel winner
- Score: 30.55
Los Angeles greeting-card artist and card-and-gift shop manager Wollie Shelley is dating forty men in sixty days as research for radio talk-show host and bestselling author Dr. Cookie Lahven’s upcoming book, How to Avoid Getting Dumped All the Time. Wollie is meeting plenty of eligible bachelors but not falling in love, not until she stumbles over a dead body en route to Rio Pescado–a state-run mental hospital–and is momentarily taken hostage by a charismatic “doctor” who is on the run from the Mob. Wollie fears that her beloved brother, a paranoid…
- 2005 Anthony-1st Novel nominee
- 2004 Agatha–1st Novel nominee
- Score: 12.55
Stella Crown works hard and loves her life. She runs her own dairy farm with the trusted help of longtime assistant Howie, rides her Harley on the weekends, and has enough friends to suit her just fine.
But on her twenty-ninth birthday, things start to change. A neighborhood child dies from a strange and threatening illness, a string of mysterious disasters place Stella and her farm in peril, not to mention her friend Abe showing up with a new woman on his arm, creating confusing emotions all around. Electrical outages, flooded barns, and cows running loose in…
Arson and Old Lace: A Far Wychwood Mystery
- 2004 Agatha–1st Novel nominee
- Score: 6.54
“You’re a librarian, not a detective,” Catherine Penny’s daughter reminds her. But Catherine, suddenly single in her sixties, finds it easy to slip into sleuthing mode when she leaves behind New York City and a failed marriage for a lovely 17th century cottage in the idyllic English village of Far Wychwood.
But behind the town’s quaint stone walls and lace-curtained windows lurk dark secrets and whispers of witchcraft. And when her crusty neighbor George Crocker dies in a tragic fire, Catherine alone suspects arson. Lacking hard evidence, the police pay little…
I Dreamed I Married Perry Mason: A Cece Caruso Mystery
- 2004 Agatha–1st Novel nominee
- Score: 6.54
All that writer Cece Caruso—a thirty-nine-year-old former beauty queen from New Jersey—really wants to do is finish her biography of Erle Stanley Gardner so that she can finally stop obsessing about Perry Mason. Well, that and find a 1970 silk chiffon Ossie Clark to add to her collection of vintage clothing. And fix the broken front doorknob on her West Hollywood bungalow. But first she has to help save her daughter’s foundering marriage, which is more than Cece could manage for her own.
Everybody’s got problems. In a last-ditch effort to kick a bad case of…
The Clovis Incident: A Mystery
- 2004 Agatha–1st Novel nominee
- Score: 6.54
Sasha Solomon is having a bad day. Fired from her job as PR director at an Albuquerque HMO, she is dealing with an ailing mother and trying to figure out the origins of hallucinations that include conversations with her cat.
Sasha heads for Clovis, a small town in southeastern New Mexico, where she’ll bid on a project for the Chamber of Commerce. While there, she will check in with her widowed friend Mae King. Mae, a local dairy farmer, is clearly out of sorts and shows Sasha the reason. There’s a body in one of her stock tanks—a Singaporean aviator stationed…
