Alibi
Joseph Kanon
Dashiell Hammett Award Winner 2006. In The Good German (2001), Kanon superbly evoked the post-apocalyptic, pockmarked moonscape of 1946 Germany. Now he turns to postwar Venice, where there are no pockmarks but the survivors are equally shell-shocked by the nearness of evil.
F/Kanon. Also available on CD.
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All mortal flesh
Julia Spencer-Fleming
Gumshoe Award, Best Mystery 2007 and the Nero Award 2007. Anglican priest Clare Ferguson has become a problem: her relationship with the sheriff of Miller's Kill, Russ van Alstyne, a married man, has become the stuff of gossipmongers and church officials alike. The last thing Clare wants is to lose her parish; the last thing Russ wants is to end his marriage with Linda. Then Linda's disfigured body is discovered in the van Alstyne home, and guess who comes under suspicion? Why was she murdered? The latest entry in Spencer-Fleming's intelligently written series puts the relationship between Clare and Russ on a new track while once again broaching some thoughtful questions about religion, relationships, and morality in the modern world.
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Birds of a feather
Jacqueline Winspear
Agatha Award Winner 2005. Maisie Dobbs is back and this time she has been hired to find a wealthy grocery magnate's missing daughter. The case is complicated by the violent deaths of three of the heiress' friends. Maisie discovers that the answers lie in the unforgettable agony of The Great War.
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The body in the snowdrift : a Faith Fairchild mystery
Katherine Hall Page
Agatha Award Winner 2006. While vacationing in Vermont, caterer Faith Fairchild (The Body in the Attic) and family run into trouble. Faith discovers the body of a local lawyer, the hotel chef disappears, and a bloody corpse stains snow on the slopes. A perfect puzzler for the popular sleuth.
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The Broken shore
Peter Temple
Duncan Lawrie Dagger 2007. Shaken by a scrape with death, big-city detective Joe Cashin is posted away from the Homicide Squad to a quiet town on the South Australian coast. Carrying physical scars and not a little guilt, he spends his time playing the country cop, walking his dogs, and thinking about how it all was before. When a prominent local is attacked and left for dead in his own home, Cashin is thrust into a murder investigation. The evidence points to three boys from the nearby aboriginal community, whom everyone wants to blame. Cashin is unconvinced, and soon begins to see the outlines of something far more terrible than a simple robbery gone wrong.
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California girl
T. Jefferson Parker
Edgar Allan Poe Award Winner 2005. Besides telling a killer story, Parker's latest thriller hauntingly evokes a time (the 1960s) and a place (Southern California). The Becker boys (Andy the homicide reporter, Nick the cop, and David the minister; Clay was killed in Vietnam) grew up near the Vonns, a troubled, abusive family burdened with more than its share of tragedy.
F/Parker. Also available as e-Book.
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Citizen Vince
Jess Walter
Edgar Allan Poe Award Winner 2006. It's October 1980, and laid-back loner Vince Camden never misses a morning making maple bars at the doughnut shop he manages in Spokane, Washington. And he rarely misses a night relieving locals of their bankrolls at an after-hours poker game, selling his hooker pals pot at cost, and running a lucrative credit-card theft ring. Vince has landed in eastern Washington via the witness-protection plan, and he is starting to like the simple pleasures, including receiving his first voter-registration card. So even when a hit man, a local cop, and Mob-boss-in-waiting John Gotti get Vince in their crosshairs, he keeps trying to figure out if he should pull the lever for Reagan or Carter.
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The faithful spy
Alex. Berenson
Edgar Award for Best First Novel 2007. Larsen's competent debut has many of the right ingredients for a successful spy thriller: plenty of action, technical detail that would do Tom Clancy proud, and a hero with almost superhuman skills. When Christine Palmer, an American doctor sailing solo across the Atlantic, retrieves the almost lifeless body of David Slaton in the middle of the ocean, Slaton commandeers her small boat and demands she deliver him to England. A member of Kidon (Mossad's special assassination team), Slaton is the sole survivor of a ship that sank with a super-secret cargo-a pair of unaccounted for nuclear weapons.
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The guards
Ken Bruen
Shamus Award Winner, Best Private Eye Novel 2004. Jack Galway's life is spiraling downward. Dumped from the Garda Siochana ("the Guards"), Ireland's elite police force, he now passes his days drinking in a friend's bar. Enter Ann Henderson, a woman searching for her missing daughter. Jack agrees to take on her case, learning about Ann's daughter as well as other young women who have recently disappeared. Soon, he becomes personally involved with his client and her plight and works toward resolving it despite a strange sense of hopelessness that hangs over the action.
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Hard, hard city
Jim Fusilli
Gumshoe Award, Best Mystery 2004. In Fusilli's fourth entry in this complex, character-driven crime series, Terry Orr, single parent and occasional private detective, is more analytical and less self-absorbed than he was in 2003's Tribeca Blues. Daniel Wu, the appealing friend of Orr's precocious teenage daughter, Bella, asks him to find the missing Allie Powell, a student at Manhattan's Fashion Institute of Technology.
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Letter from home
Carolyn Hart
Agatha Award Winner 2004. Hart has created a fabulous two-in-one: an excellent mystery and the poignant memoirs of her heroine, Gretchen Grace Gilman. A letter received by the now elderly newshound extraordinaire returns her physically, mentally and emotionally to her past and to her hometown in northeastern Oklahoma.
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The Lincoln lawyer
Michael Connelly
Shamus Award Winner, Best Private Eye Novel 2006. Mickey Haller defends low-life criminals who seem to offend habitually. With no actual office in which to hang his law degree, he works out of the backseat of his car. When a wealthy client lands in Mickey's lap, he thinks he has found a dream case.
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Mistress of the art of death
Ariana. Franklin
Ellis Peters Historical Crime Award 2007. Had Ellis Peters's Brother Cadfael been born a few decades later, he might have found a worthy associate and friend in Dr. Vesuvia Adelia Rachel Ortese Aguilar of Salerno, a short and short-tempered medieval coroner hired in secret by King Henry II to find out who's behind the horrific murders of Christian children in Cambridge, England. Prominent local Jews stand accused; Henry wants them freed, mostly for the sake of their tax revenue. As Adelia examines the children's bodies and gets to know the people of Cambridge, she has no trouble assembling a long list of suspects, but she encounters considerable difficulty trying to narrow it down, a struggle in which the reader gladly joins her.
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Officer down
Theresa Schwegel
Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best First Novel 2006. Schwegel's instantly engrossing debut crime novel begins with the bungled bust of child molester Marko Trovic: after Samantha "Smack" Mack, a chain-smoking, hard-drinking Chicago police officer, and her partner and ex-lover, Fred, storm a pitch-dark tenement house, Smack wakes later with a nasty concussion, but Fred, shot during the attempted arrest, never does.
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The power of three
Laura Lippman
Gumshoe Award, Best Mystery 2006. "The three girls have been inseparable best friends since the third grade - Josie, the athletic one; Perri, the brilliant, acerbic drama queen; and Kat, the beauty, who also has brains, grace, and a heart open to all around her. But their last day of high school becomes their final day together after one of them brings a gun to school to resolve a mysterious feud. When the police arrive, they discover two wounded girls, one so critically that she is not expected to recover. The third girl is dead, killed instantly by a shot to the heart." "What transpired that morning at Glendale High rocks the foundation of an affluent community in Baltimore's distant suburbs, a place that has barely recovered from an earlier, more comprehensible tragedy.
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Prince of thieves
Chuck Hogan
Dashiell Hammett Award 2004. The men wear masks. Their guns are drawn on the bank manager. She nervously recites the alarm code, and the tumblers within the huge vault fall. The timing and execution are brilliant. It could be the perfect heist. But as the huge sum of cash is stolen, so too is one man's heart -- and that man is the Prince of Thieves...
F/Hogan. Also available as e-Audiobook.
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The prisoner of Guantánamo
Dan Fesperman
Dashiell Hammett Award 2007.
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Raven black
Ann Cleeves
Duncan Lawrie Dagger 2006. It is a cold January morning, and Shetland lies buried beneath a deep layer of snow. Trudging home, Fran Hunter's eye is drawn to a splash of colour on the frozen ground, ravens circling above. It is the strangled body of her teenage neighbour, Catherine Ross. As Fran opens her mouth to scream, the ravens continue their deadly dance. Raven Black is the eighteenth of Ann's full-length novels and is the first of her Shetland Quartet.
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Resurrection men
Ian Rankin
Edgar Allan Poe Award Winner 2004. In his latest Inspector Rebus outing, Rankin (The Falls) demonstrates once again his mastery of intricate plotting and complex characterizations. This time, the heart of moral darkness that he explores lies not in the city of Edinburgh but in the Scottish police department itself.
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The seduction of water
Carol Goodman
Dashiell Hammett Award 2003. Goodman's gripping follow-up to her debut, The Lake of Dead Languages (2002), is an entrancing story of a daughter hunting down the truth about her mother's death.
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Silence of the grave
Indrioason Arnaldur
Duncan Lawrie International Dagger Winner 2005. In Indridason's excellent second mystery (after 2005's Jar City), a skeleton, buried for more than 50 years, is uncovered at a building site on the outskirts of Reykjavík. Who is it? How did he or she die? And was it murder? The police wonder, chief among them the tortured, introspective Inspector Erlendur, introduced in Jar City.
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Virgin of Small Plains
Nancy Pickard
Agatha Award Winner 2007. "Small Plains, Kansas, January 23, 1987: In the midst of a deadly blizzard, eighteen-year-old Rex Shellenberger scours his father's pasture, looking for helpless newborn calves. Then he makes a shocking discovery: the naked, frozen body of a teenage girl, her skin as white as the snow around her. Even dead, she is the most beautiful girl he's ever seen. It is a moment that will forever change his life and the lives of everyone around him. The mysterious dead girl - the "Virgin of Small Plains" - inspires local reverence: In the two decades following her death, strange miracles visit those who faithfully tend to her grave; some even believe that her spirit can cure deadly illnesses. Slowly, word of the legend spreads." "But what really happened in that snow-covered field? Why did young Mitch Newquist disappear the day after the Virgin's body was found, leaving behind his distraught girlfriend, Abby Reynolds? Why do the town's three most powerful men - Dr. Quentin Reynolds, former sheriff Nathan Shellenberger, and Judge Tom Newquist - all seem to be hiding the details of that night?" "Seventeen years later, when Mitch suddenly returns to Small Plains, simmering tensions come to a head, ghosts that had long slumbered whisper anew, and the secrets that some wish would stay buried rise again from the grave of the Virgin. Abby - never having resolved her feelings for Mitch - is now determined to uncover exactly what happened so many years ago to tear their lives apart."--BOOK JACKET.
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Wash this blood clean from my hand
Fred Vargas
Duncan Lawrie International Dagger Winner 2007. In this remarkable addition to the Commissaire Adamsberg series, a serial killer has followed Adamsberg to Canada on his training mission in a novel that will keep readers spellbound until the very end.
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