Annal:2005 Edgar Allan Poe Award® for Best Fact Crime
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Edgar Allan Poe Award® in the year 2005. 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.
Conviction: Solving the Moxley Murder: A Reporter and a Detective's Twenty-Year Search for Justice
- 2005 Edgar-Fact Crime winner
- Score: 10.55
On October 30, 1975, fifteen-year-old Martha Moxley headed home from Halloween Eve antics with her Greenwich, Connecticut, neighbors Tommy and Michael Skakel. She never made it. Her brutal murder with a golf club in her own backyard made national headlines. But for years no one was arrested, despite troubling clues pointing to the Skakels, a rich and powerful family related to the Kennedys. After the police department’s first unsuccessful attempts to catch the killer, the case lay dormant, and the culprit remained free.
Enter Leonard Levitt. In 1982, the…
Ready for the People: My Most Chilling Cases as a Prosecutor
- 2005 Edgar-Fact Crime nominee
- Score: 6.55
For more than twenty-five years Marissa Batt has tried cases “for the People” in every one of the thirty-five courtrooms at the Criminal Courts Building in downtown Los Angeles, cases ranging from rape and sodomy to armed robbery and murder. Here is a side of life few ever see or hear about, the brutal street crime in the underbelly of the big city that doesn’t register anywhere except the police blotter. Despite her years immersed in violence and its concomitant pain and suffering, Marissa has never become hardened or jaded. She has an unshakable belief that…
- 2005 Macavity-Nonfiction winner
- 2005 Edgar-Fact Crime nominee
- Score: 16.55
A plain-English primer on crime scene investigation that’s a must for fans of CSI or Patricia Cornwell
Since the O. J. Simpson case, popular interest in forensic science has exploded: CBS’s CSI has 16 to 26 million viewers every week, and Patricia Cornwell’s novels featuring a medical examiner sleuth routinely top bestseller lists, to cite just a few examples. Now, everyone can get the lowdown on the science behind crime scene investigations. Using lots of fascinating case studies, forensics expert Dr. D. P. Lyle clues people in on everything from determining…
Are You There Alone? The Unspeakable Crime of Andrea Yates
- 2005 Edgar-Fact Crime nominee
- Score: 6.55
In the tradition of In Cold Blood, The Executioner’s Song, and A Civil Action, Suzanne O’Malley exposes the human mystery of the most horrifying crime in recent history and the legal drama surrounding it.
As a journalist, Suzanne O’Malley began covering the murders of Noah, John, Paul, Luke, and Mary Yates hours after their mother, Andrea Yates, drowned them in their suburban Houston home in June 2001. Over twenty-four months, O’Malley interviewed or witnessed the sworn testimony of more than a hundred participants in this drama, including Yates…
Ballad of the Whiskey Robber: A True Story of Bank Heists, Ice Hockey, Transylvanian Pelt Smuggling, Moonlighting Detectives, and Broken Hearts
- 2005 Anthony-Critical nominee
- 2005 Edgar-Fact Crime nominee
- Score: 12.55
Elmore Leonard meets Franz Kafka in the wild, improbably true story of the legendary outlaw of Budapest.
Attila Ambrus was a gentleman thief, a sort of Cary Grant—if only Grant came from Transylvania, was a terrible professional hockey goalkeeper, and preferred women in leopard-skin hot pants. During the 1990s, while playing for the biggest hockey team in Budapest, Ambrus took up bank robbery to make ends meet. Arrayed against him was perhaps the most incompetent team of crime investigators the Eastern Bloc had ever seen: a robbery chief who had learned how…
Green River, Running Red: The Real Story of the Green River Killer—America's Deadliest Serial Murderer
- 2005 Edgar-Fact Crime nominee
- Score: 6.55
In the most extraordinary book Ann Rule has ever undertaken, America’s master of true crime has spent more than two decades researching the story of the Green River Killer, who murdered more than forty-nine young women. The quest to discover the most prolific serial killer in American history has been an intimate part of Ann Rule’s life, with some of the corpses found only a mile or so from where she lived and raised her own daughters. She did not know the killer, but he apparently knew her and attended many of her book signings.
For twenty-one years, the…
