Award
Anthony Award
The Anthony Awards are a set of reader-driven honors celebrating excellence in mystery and crime fiction. They are presented each year at Bouchercon, one of the largest and most beloved conventions dedicated to mystery readers and writers.
Named after influential critic and editor Anthony Boucher, the awards reflect the voice of the mystery-reading community itself. Nominees and winners are chosen by attendees of Bouchercon, giving the Anthonys a uniquely fan-centered spirit.
Named after influential critic and editor Anthony Boucher, the awards reflect the voice of the mystery-reading community itself. Nominees and winners are chosen by attendees of Bouchercon, giving the Anthonys a uniquely fan-centered spirit.
2024
Best First Novel
Mother-Daughter Murder Night
High-powered businesswoman Lana Rubicon has a lot to be proud of: her keen intelligence, impeccable taste, and the L.A. real estate empire she’s built. But when she finds herself trapped 300 miles north of the city, convalescing in a sleepy coastal town with her adult daughter Beth and teenage...
Best Hardcover Novel
All the Sinners Bleed
After years of working as an FBI agent, Titus Crown returns home to Charon County, land of moonshine and corn bread, fistfights and honeysuckle. Seeing his hometown struggling with a bigoted police force inspires Titus to run for sheriff. He wins and becomes the first Black sheriff in the history of...
2023
Best First Novel
The Maid
Molly the Maid, Book 1
Molly Gray is not like everyone else. She struggles with social skills and misreads the intentions of others. Her gran used to interpret the world for her, codifying it into simple rules that Molly could live by. Since Gran died a few months ago, twenty-five-year-old Molly has been navigating life’s...
Best Hardcover Novel
Like a Sister
“I found out my sister was back in New York from Instagram. I found out she’d died from the New York Daily News.”
When the body of reality TV star Desiree Pierce is found on a playground in the Bronx the morning after her twenty-fifth birthday party, the police and the media are quick to declare...
2022
Best First Novel
Arsenic and Adobo
Tita Rosie's Kitchen, Book 1
When Lila Macapagal moves back home to recover from a horrible breakup, her life seems to be following all the typical rom-com tropes. She's tasked with saving her Tita Rosie's failing restaurant, and she has to deal with a group of matchmaking aunties who shower her with love and judgment.
But...
Best Hardcover Novel
Razorblade Tears
Ike Randolph has been out of jail for fifteen years, with not so much as a speeding ticket in all that time. But a Black man with cops at the door knows to be afraid. The last thing he expects to hear is that his son Isiah has been murdered, along with Isiah’s white husband Derek.
Isiah was a gay...
2021
Best First Novel
Winter Counts
Virgil Wounded Horse is the local enforcer on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota. When justice is denied by the American legal system or the tribal council, Virgil is hired to deliver his own punishment, the kind that’s hard to forget.
But when heroin makes its way into the reservation...
Best Hardcover Novel
Blacktop Wasteland
Beauregard “Bug” Montage is a man with many different titles: husband, father, friend, honest car mechanic. But before he gave it up, Bug used to be known from the hills of North Carolina to the beaches of Florida as the best Wheel Man on the East Coast.
After a series of financial calamities, Bug...
2020
Best First Novel
One Night Gone
It was the perfect place to disappear...
One sultry summer, Maureen Haddaway arrives in the wealthy town of Opal Beach to start her life anew—to achieve her destiny. There, she finds herself lured by the promise of friendship, love, starry skies, and wild parties. But Maureen’s new life just might...
Best Novel
The Murder List
Law student Rachel North will tell you, without hesitation, what she knows to be true. She's smart, she’s a hard worker, she does the right thing, she’s successfully married to a faithful and devoted husband, who is a lion of Boston's defense bar, and her internship with the Boston DA's office is...
2019
Best First Novel
My Sister, the Serial Killer
A short, darkly funny, hand grenade of a novel about a Nigerian woman whose younger sister has a very inconvenient habit of killing her boyfriends.
"Femi makes three, you know. Three and they label you a serial killer." Korede is bitter. How could she not be? Her sister, Ayoola, is many things: the...
Best Novel
November Road
In the aftermath of President Kennedy’s assassination, Frank Guidry—a trusted lieutenant for a New Orleans crime boss—realizes he may have been closer to the event than he understood, and that his proximity now makes him a liability. Sensing danger, he abandons his life and goes on the run, trying...
2018
Best First Novel
Hollywood Homicide
Detective by Day, Book 1
Actress Dayna Anderson's Deadly New Role: Homicide Detective
Dayna Anderson doesn't set out to solve a murder. All the semifamous, mega-broke actress wants is to help her parents keep their house. So after witnessing a deadly hit-and-run, she pursues the fifteen grand reward. But Dayna soon finds...
Best Novel
Bluebird, Bluebird
Highway 59, Book 1
When it comes to law and order, East Texas plays by its own rules -- a fact that Darren Mathews, a black Texas Ranger, knows all too well. Deeply ambivalent about growing up black in the Lone Star State, he was the first in his family to get as far away from Texas as he could. Until duty called him...
2017
Best First Novel
IQ
IQ, Book 1
A resident of one of LA's toughest neighborhoods uses his blistering intellect to solve the crimes the LAPD ignores. East Long Beach. The LAPD is barely keeping up with the neighborhood's high crime rate. Murders go unsolved, lost children unrecovered. But someone from the neighborhood has taken it...
Best Novel
A Great Reckoning
Chief Inspector Gamache, Book 12
When an intricate old map is found stuffed into the walls of the bistro in Three Pines, it at first seems no more than a curiosity. But the closer the villagers look, the stranger it becomes. Given to Armand Gamache as a gift the first day of his new job, the map eventually leads him to shattering...
2016
Best First Novel
Past Crimes
Van Shaw, Book 1
When his estranged grandfather is shot and left for dead, an Army Ranger must plunge into the criminal underworld of his youth to find a murderer and uncover a shocking family secret in this atmospheric and evocative debut thriller.
Van Shaw was raised to be a thief, but at eighteen he suddenly...
Best Novel
The Killing Kind
Michael Hendricks, Book 1
Michael Hendricks kills people for money. That aside, he's not so bad a guy. Once a covert operative for a false-flag unit of the US military, Hendricks was presumed dead after a mission in Afghanistan went sideways. He left behind his old life -- and beloved fiancée -- and set out on a path of...
2015
Best First Novel
The Black Hour
For Chicago sociology professor Amelia Emmet, violence was a research topic--until a student she'd never met shot her. He also shot himself. Now he's dead and she's back on campus, trying to keep up with her class schedule, a growing problem with painkillers, and a question she can't let go: Why?...
Best Novel
After I'm Gone
When Felix Brewer meets Bernadette “Bambi” Gottschalk at a Valentine’s Dance in 1959, he charms her with wild promises, some of which he actually keeps. Thanks to his lucrative—if not all legal—businesses, she and their three little girls live in luxury.
But on the Fourth of July, 1976, Bambi’s...
2014
Best First Novel
Yesterday's Echo
Rick Cahill, Book 1
A dishonored ex-cop’s desperate chance for redemption.
While never convicted of his wife’s murder, Rick was never exonerated either. Not by the police. Not by the media. Not even by himself. Eight years later, police suspicion and his own guilt remain over his responsibility in his wife’s...
Best Novel
Ordinary Grace
New Bremen, Minnesota, 1961. The Twins were playing their debut season, ice-cold root beers were selling out at the soda counter of Halderson’s Drugstore, and Hot Stuff comic books were a mainstay on every barbershop magazine rack. It was a time of innocence and hope for a country with a new, young...
2013
Best First Novel
The Expats
Can We Ever Escape Our Secrets?
Kate Moore is a working mother, struggling to make ends meet, to raise children, to keep a spark in her marriage... and to maintain an increasingly unbearable life-defining secret. So when her husband is offered a lucrative job in Luxembourg, she jumps at the chance...
Best Novel
The Beautiful Mystery
Chief Inspector Gamache, Book 8
No outsiders are ever admitted to the monastery of Saint-Gilbert-Entre-les-Loups, hidden deep in the wilderness of Quebec, where two dozen cloistered monks live in peace and prayer. They grow vegetables, they tend chickens, they make chocolate. And they sing. Ironically, for a community that has...
2012
Best First Novel
Learning to Swim
Troy Chance, Book 1
When she sees what looks like a child tumbling from a ferry into frigid Lake Champlain, Troy Chance dives in without thinking. When she gets the child to shore, she discovers that his name is Paul, he speaks only French—and no one is looking for him.
Her determination to protect Paul pulls Troy...
Best Novel
A Trick of the Light
Chief Inspector Gamache, Book 7
"Hearts are broken," Lillian Dyson carefully underlined in a book. "Sweet relationships are dead." But now Lillian herself is dead. Found among the bleeding hearts and lilacs of Clara Morrow's garden in Three Pines, shattering the celebrations of Clara's solo show at the famed Musée in...
2011
Best First Novel
The Damage Done
Lily Moore, Book 1
Lily Moore fled to Spain to get away from her troubled, drug-addicted younger sister, Claudia. When Claudia is found dead in a bathtub on the anniversary of their mother's suicide, Lily must return to New York to deal with the aftermath.
The situation shifts from tragic to baffling when the body at...
Best Novel
Bury Your Dead
Chief Inspector Gamache, Book 6
It is Winter Carnival in Quebec City, bitterly cold and surpassingly beautiful. Chief Inspector Armand Gamache has come not to join the revels but to recover from an investigation gone hauntingly wrong. But violent death is inescapable, even in the apparent sanctuary of the Literary and Historical...
2010
Best First Novel
A Bad Day for Sorry
Stella Hardesty, Book 1
Stella Hardesty dispatched her abusive husband with a wrench shortly before her fiftieth birthday. A few years later, she’s so busy delivering home-style justice, helping other women deal with their own abusive husbands and boyfriends, that she’s barely got time to run her sewing shop.
Since Stella...
Best Novel
The Brutal Telling
Chief Inspector Gamache, Book 5
Chaos is coming, old son. With those words the peace of Three Pines is shattered.
Everybody goes to Olivier's Bistro--including a stranger whose murdered body is found on the floor. When Chief Inspector Gamache is called to investigate, he is dismayed to discover that Olivier's story is full of...
2009
Best First Novel
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
Millennium, Book 1
Harriet Vanger, a scion of one of Sweden’s wealthiest families disappeared without a trace more than forty years ago. All these years later, her aged uncle continues to try to discover what happened to her. He hires Mikael Blomkvist, a journalist recently sidelined by a libel conviction, to...
Best Novel
The Brass Verdict
Lincoln Lawyer, Book 2
Things are finally looking up for defense attorney Mickey Haller. After two years of wrong turns, Haller is back in the courtroom.
When Hollywood lawyer Jerry Vincent is murdered, Haller inherits his biggest case yet: the defense of Walter Elliott, a prominent studio executive accused of murdering...
2008
Best First Novel
In the Woods
Dublin Murder Squad, Book 1
As dusk approaches a small Dublin suburb in the summer of 1984, mothers begin to call their children home. But on this warm evening, three children do not return from the dark and silent woods. When the police arrive, they find only one of the children gripping a tree trunk in terror, wearing...
Best Novel
What the Dead Know
When he’s called to the scene of an accident, detective Kevin Infante is drawn into a shocking and puzzling crime that still haunts the Baltimore P.D.
Twenty years ago, two little girls were kidnapped from a shopping mall, igniting fear and anger throughout the city. Now, a clearly disoriented...
2007
Best First Novel
Still Life
Chief Inspector Gamache, Book 1
Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Sûreté du Québec and his team of investigators are called in to the scene of a suspicious death in a rural village south of Montreal. Jane Neal, a local fixture in the tiny hamlet of Three Pines, just north of the U.S. border, has been found dead in the woods....
Best Novel
No Good Deeds
Tess Monaghan, Book 9
When Tess Monaghan begins her new gig as a consultant to the local newspaper, she’s handed the case of an unsolved homicide of a young federal prosecutor. But she never dreams the key to the sensational homicide will fall into her lap when her boyfriend, Crow, brings home a street kid—a juvenile con...
2006
Best First Mystery
Tilt A Whirl
John Ceepak, Book 1
On a quiet summer night in Sea Haven, New Jersey, what should have been a routine shift at a small amusement park turns deadly when a young woman is found murdered on the Tilt-A-Whirl ride. Officer John Ceepak, a former military policeman with an unshakable moral code, is called to the scene...
Best Mystery Novel
Mercy Falls
Cork O'connor, Book 5
Back in the saddle as sheriff of Tamarack County, Cork O’Connor is lured to the nearby Ojibwe reservation on what appears to be a routine call—only to become the target of sniper fire.
Soon after, he’s called to investigate a mutilated body found perched above the raging waters of Mercy Falls. The...
2005
Best First Novel
Dating Dead Men
Wollie Shelley, Book 1
Los Angeles greeting-card artist Wollie Shelley is dating forty men in sixty days as research for a radio talk show host's upcoming book, How to Avoid Getting Dumped All the Time. Wollie is meeting plenty of eligible bachelors but not falling in love, not until she stumbles over a dead body en route...
Best Novel
Blood Hollow
Cork O'connor, Book 4
When the body of a beautiful high school student is discovered on a hillside four months after her disappearance on New Year’s Eve, all evidence points to her boyfriend, local bad boy Solemn Winter Moon. Despite Solemn’s self-incriminating decision to go into hiding, Cork O’Connor isn’t about to...
2004
Best First Novel
Monkeewrench
Monkeewrench, Book 1
People are dying for the new computer game by the software company Monkeewrench. Literally. With *Serial Killer Detective* out in limited release, the real-life murders of a jogger and a young woman have already mimicked the first two scenarios in the game.
But Grace McBride and her eccentric...
Best Novel
Every Secret Thing
Years after serving time for a childhood crime, two young women—Alice and Ronnie—return to their Baltimore neighborhood, each trying to move forward under the weight of their past. Their lives remain closely watched, shaped by lingering suspicion and the uneasy presence of those who remember what...
2003
Best First Novel
In the Bleak Midwinter
It's a cold, snowy December in the upstate New York town of Millers Kill, and newly ordained Clare Fergusson is on thin ice as the first female priest of its small Episcopal church. The ancient regime running the parish covertly demands that she prove herself as a leader. However, her blunt manner,...
Best Novel
City of Bones
Harry Bosch, Book 8
On New Year's Day, a dog finds a bone in the Hollywood Hills—and unearths a murder committed more than twenty years earlier. It's a cold case, but for Detective Harry Bosch, it stirs up memories of his childhood as an orphan. He can't let it go.
As the investigation takes Bosch deeper into the...
2002
Best First Novel
Open Season
Joe Pickett, Book 1
Joe Pickett is the new game warden in Twelve Sleep, Wyoming, a town where nearly everyone hunts and the game warden—especially one like Joe who won't take bribes or look the other way—is far from popular.
When he finds a local hunting outfitter dead, splayed out on the woodpile behind his...
Best Novel
Mystic River
When they were children, Sean Devine, Jimmy Marcus, and Dave Boyle were friends. But then a strange car pulled up to their street, a moment of childhood trauma that would define their lives. One boy got into the car, two did not, and something terrible happened―something that ended their friendship...
2001
Best First Mystery
Death of a Red Heroine
Inspector Chen, Book 1
A young “national model worker,” renowned for her adherence to the principles of the Communist Party, turns up dead in a Shanghai canal.
As Inspector Chen Cao of the Shanghai Special Cases Bureau struggles to trace the hidden threads of her past, he finds himself challenging the very political...
Best Novel
A Place of Execution
On a freezing day in December 1963, Alison Carter vanishes from her rural village, an insular community that distrusts the outside world. For the young George Bennett, a newly promoted inspector, it is the beginning of his most difficult and harrowing case—a suspected murder with no body, an...
2000
Best First Novel
Murder With Peacocks
Meg Langslow Mysteries, Book 1
Meg Langslow arrives at her parents’ Virginia home expecting a brief visit, only to find herself caught in the chaos of multiple overlapping weddings, eccentric relatives, and a steadily growing to-do list she never agreed to manage. As preparations spiral out of control, the already hectic...
Best Novel
In a Dry Season
Inspector Banks, Book 10
In the blistering, dry summer, the waters of Thornfield Reservoir have been depleted, revealing the ruins of the small Yorkshire village that lay at its bottom, bringing with it the unidentified bones of a brutally murdered young woman.
Detective Chief Inspector Banks faces a daunting challenge: he...
1999
Best First Novel
Iron Lake
Cork O'connor, Book 1
Part Irish, part Anishinaabe Indian, Cork is having difficulty dealing with the marital meltdown that has separated him from his children, getting by on heavy doses of caffeine, nicotine, and guilt. Once a cop on Chicago’s South Side, there’s not much that can shock him.
But when the town’s judge...
Best Novel
Blood Work
When Graciella Rivers steps onto his boat, ex-FBI agent Terrell McCaleb has no idea he's about to come out of retirement. He's recuperating from a heart transplant and avoiding anything stressful. But when Graciella tells him the way her sister, Gloria, was murdered, Terry realizes he has no...
1998
Best First Novel
Killing Floor
Jack Reacher, Book 1
Jack Reacher, a former military policeman, arrives in the small town of Margrave, Georgia, expecting nothing more than a quiet stop on his travels. Instead, he is immediately arrested for murder, caught up in a case he has no connection to—at least at first. As he works to clear his name, he begins...
Best Novel
No Colder Place
Lydia Chin and Bill Smith, Book 4
Private investigator Bill Smith takes on what appears to be a simple case, but it quickly leads him into the guarded world of a withdrawn young girl and her fiercely protective mother. As he spends more time with them, Bill senses that something deeper lies beneath their isolation—an undercurrent of...
1997
Best First Novel
Somebody Else's Child
Theresa Galloway, Book 1
Private investigator Theresa Galloway takes on a case involving a missing child, expecting a difficult but straightforward search. As she begins to follow the trail, however, the situation quickly grows more complicated, revealing inconsistencies that suggest the disappearance is tied to deeper,...
Death in Little Tokyo
Ken Tanaka, Book 1
Ken Tanaka, a Japanese American investigator in Los Angeles, is drawn into a case when a murder disrupts the tight-knit community of Little Tokyo. What initially appears to be a localized crime soon reveals connections that extend beyond the neighborhood, pulling Tanaka into a more complex...
Best Novel
The Poet
Jack McEvoy, Book 1
Death is reporter Jack McEvoy's beat: his calling, his obsession. But this time, death brings McEvoy the story he never wanted to write—and the mystery he desperately needs to solve.
A serial killer of unprecedented savagery and cunning is at large. His targets: homicide cops, each haunted by a...
1996
Best First Mystery
Death in Bloodhound Red
Jo Beth Sidden raises and trains bloodhounds for search-and-rescue missions in the Okeefenokee Swamp. She is used to dealing with lost kids, prison escapes, snakes, bugs, macho deputies, and her abusive ex-husband. But now she is suspected of murder and has to choose between betraying a friend and...
Best Novel
Under the Beetle's Cellar
When a young girl is kidnapped and hidden away, the crime sends shockwaves through her Texas community. As investigators scramble to find her, the case quickly becomes a high-stakes race against time, shaped by limited clues and the growing fear that each passing hour narrows the chances of...
1995
Best First Novel
The Alienist
Dr. Lazlo Kreizler, Book 1
The year is 1896. The city is New York. Newspaper reporter John Schuyler Moore is summoned by his friend Dr. Laszlo Kreizler—a psychologist, or “alienist”—to view the horribly mutilated body of an adolescent boy abandoned on the unfinished Williamsburg Bridge. From there the two embark on a...
Best Novel
She Walks These Hills
Ballad, Book 3
In the Appalachian Mountains, a young hiker disappears along a remote trail, setting off a search that draws in local law enforcement and unsettles the surrounding community. At the same time, an escaped convict is believed to be moving through the same rugged terrain, heightening fear and urgency...
1994
Best First Novel
Track of the Cat
Anna Pigeon, Book 1
Patrolling the remote West Texas backcountry, Anna’s first job as a national park ranger is marred by violence she thought she had left behind: the brutal death of a fellow ranger. When the cause of death is chalked up to a mountain lion attack, Anna’s rage knows no bounds.
It’s up to her to save...
Best Novel
Wolf in the Shadows
Sharon Mccone, Book 13
Private investigator Sharon McCone is drawn into a case that begins with a missing person but quickly reveals deeper and more troubling connections. As she follows the trail, she uncovers links to past events that refuse to stay buried, suggesting that the disappearance is part of something far more...
1993
Best First Novel
Blanche on the Lam
Blanche White, Book 1
Blanche White, a domestic worker with a sharp mind and a deep understanding of people, goes on the run after a minor legal trouble threatens to land her in jail. To avoid arrest, she takes a job in a wealthy household in North Carolina, using the opportunity to stay hidden while keeping a close eye...
Best Novel
Bootlegger's Daughter
Deborah Knott, Book 1
Deborah Knott, a lawyer and the daughter of a former bootlegger turned local political figure, returns to her North Carolina hometown and becomes entangled in a murder case that strikes close to home. When a body is discovered on family land, the investigation quickly draws in people connected to...
1992
Best First Novel
Murder on the Iditarod Trail
Jessie Arnold, Book 1
It is an arduous sport, but not a deadly one. But suddenly the top Iditarod contestants are dying in bizarre ways: first a veteran musher smashes into a tree, then competitors begin turning up dead, with each murder more brutal than the last. State trooper Alex Jensen begins a homicide...
Best Novel
The Last Detective
Peter Diamond, Book 1
A woman's body has been found floating in a large reservoir just south of Bristol. In order to solve the mystery of the "Lady in the Lake," Detective Superintendent Peter Diamond must locate two missing letters attributed to Jane Austen and defy his superiors on the force to save a woman unjustly...
1991
Best First Novel
Postmortem
Kay Scarpetta, Book 1
Dr. Kay Scarpetta, chief medical examiner for Virginia, is called in to investigate a series of brutal murders that show disturbing similarities. As more victims are discovered, it becomes clear that a methodical killer is at work, leaving behind little evidence and staying just ahead of the...
Best Hardcover Novel
"G" Is for Gumshoe
Kinsey Millhone, Book 7
A rich, complex, and gripping tale in which Kinsey's grit is tested to its utmost as she unearths the gruesome truth about a long-buried betrayal and, in the process, comes face-to-face with the grisly fact of her own mortality.
"G" is for guilt and guile, for greed and grief and the Grim Reaper....
1990
Best First Novel
Katwalk
Kat Colorado, Book 1
Private investigator Kat Colorado is drawn into a case when she’s asked to look into the death of a young woman whose life may not have been what it seemed. What begins as a straightforward inquiry quickly becomes more complicated, pulling Kat into a world of hidden connections and uneasy...
Best Novel
The Sirens Sang of Murder
Hilary Tamar, Book 3
Young barrister Michael Cantrip has skipped off to the Channel Islands to take on a tax-law case that’s worth a fortune—if Cantrip’s tax-planning cronies can locate the missing heir. But Cantrip has waded in way over his head. Strange things are happening on these mysterious, isolated isles....
1989
Best First Novel
A Great Deliverance
Inspector Lynley, Book 1
To this day, the low, thin wail of an infant can be heard in Keldale’s lush green valleys. Three hundred years ago, as legend goes, the frightened Yorkshire villagers smothered a crying babe in Keldale Abbey, where they’d hidden to escape the ravages of Cromwell’s raiders.
Now into Keldale’s...
Best Novel
The Silence of the Lambs
Hannibal Lecter, Book 2
FBI trainee Clarice Starling is assigned to assist in the hunt for a serial killer known as “Buffalo Bill,” whose crimes have left investigators with few leads. To gain insight into the killer’s mind, she is sent to interview Dr. Hannibal Lecter, a brilliant psychiatrist and imprisoned murderer...
1988
Best First Novel
Caught Dead in Philadelphia
Amanda Pepper, Book 1
When an unexpected death draws attention in Philadelphia, those connected to the victim find themselves pulled into a web of questions, secrets, and shifting loyalties. What initially appears to be an isolated incident begins to reveal deeper connections, as investigators and those closest to the...
Best Novel
Skinwalkers
Leaphorn, Chee & Manuelito, Book 7
Three shotgun blasts rip through the side of Officer Jim Chee’s trailer as the Navajo Tribal Policeman sleeps. He survives, but the inexplicable attack has raised disturbing questions about a lawman once beyond reproach.
Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn wonders why Chee was a target and what connection the...
1987
Best First Novel
Too Late to Die
Dan Rhodes, Book 1
When a local woman is found dead under suspicious circumstances, Sheriff Dan Rhodes is drawn into an investigation that unsettles the quiet routines of his small Texas county. What initially appears to be a straightforward case quickly becomes more complicated as inconsistencies emerge and the...
Best Novel
"C" Is for Corpse
Kinsey Millhone, Book 3
He was young—maybe twenty or so—and he must once have been a good-looking kid. Kinsey could see that. But now his body was covered in scars, his face half-collapsed. It saddened Kinsey and made her curious. She could see he was in a lot of pain. But for three weeks, as Kinsey'd watched him doggedly...
1986
Best First Novel
When the Bough Breaks
Alex Delaware, Book 1
Dr. Morton Hander practiced a strange brand of psychiatry. Among his specialties were fraud, extortion, and sexual manipulation. Hander paid for his sins when he was brutally murdered in his luxurious Pacific Palisades apartment. The police have no leads, but they do have one possible witness:...
Best Novel
"B" Is for Burglar
Kinsey Millhone, Book 2
Beverly Danziger looked like an expensive, carefully wrapped package from a good but conservative shop. Only her compulsive chatter hinted at the nervousness beneath her cool surface. It was a nervousness out of all proportion to the problem she placed before Kinsey Millhone. There was an absent...