Annal:2007 Agatha Award for Best First Novel

Prime Time

Hank Phillippi Ryan

• 2007 Agatha–1st Novel winner
• Score: 10.57

Think that annoying Spam clogging your computer is just so much cyber junk mail? Top notch TV reporter Charlotte McNally suspects it may be much more than that—in fact, she thinks some of it may be carrying secret big money messages to the group of insiders with the key to decode it. Problem is, the last outsider who deciphered the truth now resides in the local morgue.

Is this the biggest story of Charlie’s life? Or the one that will end it?

Charlie’s also facing another dilemma: what happens when a top-notch TV reporter is married to her job—but begins to worry that the camera doesn’t love her anymore?

A Beautiful Blue Death: A Mystery

Charles Finch

• 2007 Agatha–1st Novel nominee
• Score: 6.57

When a maid in Mayfair drinks an exotic poison, is it suicide? Or a case for Charles Lenox?

London, 1865. On a gray evening late in autumn, amateur detective Charles Lenox’s closest friend needs help. A former servant of her house, Prudence Smith, is beautiful, a flirt, and dead. Was it an accident? A suicide? Or does the pile of gold in the house have something to do with it? As Lenox begins to uncover the truth another body falls at the most fashionable ball at the season, and the chase is on before the killer strikes again…dangerously close to home.

A Real Basket Case

Beth Groundwater

• 2007 Agatha–1st Novel nominee
• Score: 6.57

The best friend of Claire Hanover, 46-year-old proprietor of a Colorado Springs gift basket business, arranges for a handsome young massage therapist to give Claire a massage. When he’s shot and killed in her bedroom and police arrest her husband, Roger, for the crime, Claire must convince Roger she wasn’t having an affair and, with advice from a PI friend, find the real killer before Roger loses his job and goes to trial.

Claire confronts the victim’s fiery ex-girlfriend, his drug-dealing cohorts, and the gym ladies he supplied with cocaine or seduced for money. She must extricate herself from under a drug dealer’s bed while he seduces his girlfriend, from jail—charged with breaking and entering, from a drug boss’s limousine while he berates her for “messin’ in his business,” and from her angry aerobics classmates when they discover she suspects them. She makes mistakes at every turn, but she perseveres.

Will she find the real murderer before Roger loses his job and goes to trial? Can she convince her husband to come back to her? Or will the killer get to her first?

Silent in the Grave

Deanna Raybourn

• 2007 Agatha–1st Novel nominee
• Score: 6.57

“Let the wicked be ashamed, and let them be silent in the grave.”

These ominous words, slashed from the pages of a book of Psalms, are the last threat that the darling of London society, Sir Edward Grey, receives from his killer. Before he can show them to Nicholas Brisbane, the private inquiry agent he has retained for his protection, Sir Edward collapses and dies at his London home, in the presence of his wife, Julia, and a roomful of dinner guests.

Julia is outraged when Brisbane visits and suggests that Sir Edward has been murdered. It is a reaction she comes to regret when she discovers the damning paper for herself, and realizes the truth.

Determined to bring her husband’s murderer to justice, Julia engages the enigmatic Brisbane to help her investigate Edward’s demise. Julia presses forward, following a trail of clues that lead her to even more unpleasant truths, and ever closer to a killer who waits expectantly for her arrival.