Annal:2008 Edgar Allan Poe Award® for Best Juvenile

The Night Tourist

Katherine Marsh

• 2008 Edgar-Juvenile winner
• Score: 10.58

Jack Perdu, a ninth grade classics prodigy, lives his with father on the Yale University campus. Smart and introverted, Jack spends most of his time alone, his nose buried in a book. But one winter evening, a near-fatal accident changes Jack’s life forever. His father sends him to see a mysterious doctor in New York City—a place Jack hasn’t visited since his mother died there eight years ago. In Grand Central Terminal, he meets Euri, a girl who offers to show him the train station’s hidden places—the ones only true urban explorers really know about. Eight flights below the train station, however, Jack discovers more than just hidden tracks and mysterious staircases. He has stumbled upon New York’s ghostly underworld. This, Jack believes, is his chance to see his mother again. But as secrets about Euri’s past are revealed, so are the true reasons for Jack’s visit to the underworld.

Masterfully told, The Night Tourist weaves Classical mythology together with New York’s secret history and modern-day landscape to create a magical adventure, full of unexpected twists and page-turning action.

Deep and Dark and Dangerous: A Ghost Story

Mary Downing Hahn

• 2008 Edgar-Juvenile nominee
• Score: 6.58

Just before summer begins, 13-year-old Ali finds an odd photograph in the attic. She knows the two children in it are her mother, Claire, and her aunt Dulcie. But who’s the third person, the one who’s been torn out of the picture?

Ali figures she’ll find out while she’s vacationing in Maine with Dulcie and her four-year-old daughter, Emma, in the house where Ali’s mother’s family used to spend summers. All hopes for relaxation are quashed shortly after their arrival, though, when the girls meet Sissy, a kid who’s mean and spiteful and a bad influence on Emma.

Strangest of all, Sissy keeps talking about a girl named Teresa who drowned under mysterious circumstances back when Claire and Dulcie were kids, and whose body was never found. At first Ali thinks Sissy’s just trying to scare her with a ghost story, but soon she discovers the real reason why Sissy is so angry…. Mary Downing Hahn is at her chilling best in this new supernatural tale that’s certain to send shivers down her readers’ spines.

The Name of This Book is Secret

Pseudonymous Bosch

• 2008 Edgar-Juvenile nominee
• Score: 6.58

Warning: this description has not been authorized by Pseudonymous Bosch. As much as he’d love to sing the praises of his book (he is very vain), he wouldn’t want you to hear about his brave 11-year old heroes, Cass and Max-Ernest. Or about how a mysterious box of vials, the Symphony of Smells, sends them on the trail of a magician who has vanished under strange (and stinky) circumstances. And he certainly wouldn’t want you to know about the hair-raising adventures that follow and the nefarious villains they face. You see, not only is the name of this book secret, the story inside is, too. For it concerns a secret. A Big Secret.

Sammy Keyes and the Wild Things

Wendelin Van Draanen

• 2008 Edgar-Juvenile nominee
• Score: 6.58

Sammy Keyes trades in her hightops for hiking boots—and winds up with blisters.

This is not the summer camping trip of Sammy’s dreams. She imagined shady glades, meandering streams, a deer or two. What she gets are scrubby shrubs, blazing sun, rattlesnakes, ticks, and scorpions. Her fellow campers are desperate to catch a rare glimpse of an endangered condor. To Sammy, the trip is nothing more than the painful in pursuit of the unspeakably ugly.

But when she and two other girls find an injured condor, Sammy’s intrigued at last. As they track down a clue, they stumble onto two classmates and wind up lost. Which leaves three girls and two boys in a canyon with one tent and six billion biting flies. Oh—and an armed and dangerous highstakes poacher.

S’mores anyone?

Shadows on Society Hill: An Addy Mystery

Evelyn Coleman

• 2008 Edgar-Juvenile nominee
• Score: 6.58

In the winter of 1866, Addy’s poppa gets a new job. His employer, Mr. Radisson, even offers the Walker family a home of their own on the grounds of his fine house in Society Hill. Addy’s delight quickly evaporates as she realizes that Mr. Radisson’s house holds frightening secrets—one of which leads straight back to the plantation where Addy’s family was held in slavery only two years before. You will enjoy solving the mystery, right along with Addy. An illustrated “Looking Back” section provides historical context.