Honor roll:Agatha Award for Best Novel

From AwardAnnals

Jump to: navigation, search

Each of these books has been nominated for a Agatha Award for Best Novel. They are ranked by honors received.

You may also enjoy these honor rolls:

Bootlegger's Daughter

Margaret Maron

Unconventional, still unwed (at the ripe old age of 34) North Carolina attorney Deborah Knott has done the unthinkable: tossed her hat into the heated race for district judge of old boy-ruled Colleton County. The only female candidate, she’s busy defending indigent clients and reeling in voters. Then suddenly, the young daughter of Janie Whitehead begs her to help solve Janie’s senseless, never-solved, eighteen-year-old murder. Deborah takes on the case; following twisted, typically Southern bloodlines, turning up dangerous, decades-old secrets, and inspiring…

 

Butchers Hill: A Tess Monaghan Mystery

Laura Lippman

Tess Monaghan has finally made the move and hung out her shingle as a p.i.-for-hire, complete with an office in Butchers Hill. Maybe it’s not the best address in Baltimore, but you gotta start somewhere, and Tess’s greyhound Esskay has no trouble taking marathon naps anywhere there’s a roof. Then in walks Luther Beale, the notorious vigilante who five years ago shot a boy for vandalizing his car. Just out of prison, he says he wants to make reparations to the kids who witnessed his crime, so he needs Tess to find them. But once she starts snooping, the witnesses…

 

The Virgin of Small Plains: A Novel of Suspense

Nancy Pickard

Small Plains, Kansas, January 23, 1987: In the midst of a deadly blizzard, eighteen-year-old Rex Shellenberger makes a shocking discovery: the naked, frozen body of a teenage girl. Even dead, she is the most beautiful girl he’s ever seen. In the two decades following her death, strange miracles visit those who faithfully tend to her grave.

Seventeen years later, three families and three friends, their worlds inexorably altered in the course of one night, must confront the ever-unfolding consequences. Wonderfully written and utterly absorbing, The Virgin of Small Plains is about the loss of faith, trust, and innocence…and the possibility of redemption.

 

In Big Trouble: A Tess Monaghan Mystery

Laura Lippman

First as a reporter and then as a p.i., Tess Monaghan has learned how to survive and thrive on the streets of Baltimore. But a new case will force her to confront her own past, and a man she loved and lost. It starts when she gets a newspaper photograph of her old boyfriend with a tantalizing shard of headline attached: In Big Trouble. The answers lie far from Baltimore, deep in a world of good-time music, old-fashioned ambiiton, and rich people’s games. For Tess must find out what happened to a man she thought she knew, to a woman who may have changed him forever, and to the victims of a killer who dances to a different—and deadly—drummer.

 

She Walks These Hills

Sharyn McCrumb

Historian Jeremy Cobb is backpacking on the Appalachian Trail, attempting to retrace the tragic journey of eighteen-year-old Katie Wyler, who was captured by the Shawnee after the massacre of her pioneer family in Mitchell County, North Carolina. In late summer, Katie escaped from a Shawnee village on the banks of the Ohio, and followed the rivers through the wilderness to find her way home—a brave journey that ended in sorrow. Jeremy, a city-bred graduate student with no trail experience, is determined to complete his scholarly quest, unaware that his journey…

 

Dreaming of the Bones

Deborah Crombie

After twelve years, the last person Scotland Yard Superintendent Duncan Kincaid expects to hear from is his ex-wife Victoria. But this is no social call. In her biographical research on troubled poet Lydia Brooke, Vic’s uncovered reasons to believe Lydia’s death five years ago was not suicide.

Much to Kincaid’s surprise—and the unease of his partner and lover, Sergeant Gemma James—he finds he can’t refuse Vic’s request to look into the long-closed case. The police report raises questions, but not enough to reopen the investigation—until a second death occurs,…

 

I.O.U.

Nancy Pickard

When Jenny’s mother dies of pneumonia after years in a mental institution, an anonymous voice whispers in the crowded graveyard, “Forgive me. It was an accident…” And when Jenny asks too many questions, an attack on Jenny’s life is staged to look like a suicide attempt. “A compelling tale of sin, guilt, and the havoc human beings wreak upon one another…” —San Diego Union.

 

Hearts and Bones

Margaret Lawrence

Independent Hannah Trevor is a midwife in the small Maine town of Rufford several years after the end of the Revolutionary War. In the dead of a particularly brutal winter, an horrific act—the rape and murder of a young wife—draws Hannah into the constabulary’s investigation and threatens to destroy everything she holds dear. Now an honorable man has been accused of the crime—Hannah’s former lover, the father of her illegitimate daughter.

 

Something Wicked: A Death on Demand Mystery

Carolyn G. Hart

Something has poisoned a local summer stock production of Arsenic and Old Lace as cast members stab each other in the back and props are sabotaged. Worst of all, the star, an aging Hollywood beach-blanket hunk, butchers his lines—while getting top billing in bed with wives and teenage daughters around town. No wonder someone decides to draw his final curtain. A pompous prosecutor tries to pin the murder on Max, Annie Laurance’s own leading man. Unless Annie can prove Max’s innocence, their wedding date’s off. Annie checks the greasepaint and glitter of backstage…

 

All Mortal Flesh: A Clare Fergusson/Russ Van Alstyne Mystery

Julia Spencer-Fleming

Police Chief Russ Van Alstyne’s first encounter with the priest Clare Fergusson was the beginning of an attraction so fierce, so forbidden, that the only thing that could keep them safe from compromising their every belief was distance. He figures his wife kicking him out of their house is nobody’s business but his own until her body is discovered, gruesomely butchered, on the kitchen floor. To the state police, it’s an open-and-shut case of a disaffected husband, silencing first his wife, then the murder investigation he controls. To the townspeople, it’s proof that the whispered gossip about the police chief and the priest was true. To the powers-that-be in the church hierarchy, it’s a chance to control their wayward cleric once and for all.

 
Retrieved from "http://www.awardannals.com/wiki/Honor_roll:Agatha_Award_for_Best_Novel"
Personal tools