Annal:2006 Edgar Allan Poe Award® for Best Fact Crime
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Edgar Allan Poe Award® in the year 2006. 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.
The Rescue Artist: A True Story of Art, Thieves, and the Hunt for a Missing Masterpiece
- 2006 Edgar-Fact Crime winner
- Score: 10.56
In the predawn gloom of a February day in 1994, two thieves entered the National Gallery in Oslo. They snatched one of the world’s most famous paintings, Edvard Munch’s The Scream, and fled with their $72 million trophy. The thieves made sure the world was watching: the Winter Olympics, in Lillehammer, began that same morning. Baffled and humiliated, the Norwegian police called on the world’s greatest art detective, a half-English, half-American undercover cop named Charley Hill.
In this rollicking narrative, Edward Dolnick takes us inside the art…
The Elements of Murder: A History of Poison
- 2006 Edgar-Fact Crime nominee
- Score: 6.56
Was Napoleon killed by the arsenic in his wallpaper? How did Rasputin survive cyanide poisoning? Which chemicals in our environment pose the biggest threat to our health today? In The Elements of Murder, John Emsley offers a fascinating account of five of the most toxic elements—arsenic, antimony, lead, mercury, and thallium—describing their lethal chemical properties and highlighting their use in some of the most famous murder cases in history. Indeed, we meet in this book a who’s who of heartless murderers. Mary Ann Cotton, who used arsenic to murder her…
Written in Blood: A True Story of Murder
- 2006 Edgar-Fact Crime nominee
- Score: 6.56
An army brat-turned-marine, he saw combat in Vietnam, and returned a decorated soldier. An avid reader, his dreams of being an acclaimed novelist came true. His desire to find love was fulfilled when he married brilliant executive Kathleen Atwater, the first female student accepted at Duke University’s School of Engineering. The Petersons seemed the ideal academic couple—well-respected, prosperous, and happy.
All that came crashing down in December of 2001, when Kathleen apparently fell to her death in their secluded home in an exclusive area of Durham, North…
True Story: Murder, Memoir, Mea Culpa
- 2006 Edgar-Fact Crime nominee
- Score: 6.56
The story begins in February of 2002, when a reporter in Oregon contacts New York Times Magazine writer Michael Finkel with a startling piece of news. A young, highly intelligent man named Christian Longo, on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list for killing his entire family, has recently been captured in Mexico, where he’d taken on a new identity—Michael Finkel of the New York Times.
The next day, on page A-3 of the Times, comes another bit of troubling news: a note, written by the paper’s editors, explaining that Finkel has falsified…
Desire Street: A True Story of Death and Deliverance in New Orleans
- 2006 Edgar-Fact Crime nominee
- Score: 6.56
In a New Orleans supermarket parking lot in the fall of 1984, two disparate lives become inextricably bound for the next fourteen years. The first, the life of Delores Dye, a white housewife and grandmother. The second, a young black man with a gun in hand. Moments following their maybe not so chance encounter, Mrs. Dye lay dead on the sunbaked macadam, and the killer had made off with her purse, her groceries, and her car. Four days later, following a tip, authorities arrested a known drug dealer and father of five named Curtis Kyles. Kyles would then be tried…
