2013 Edgar Award Winners Announced

The Mystery Writers of America announced the winners of the Edgar Award on May 2.  Three of the categories were Best Novel, Best First Novel, and Best Fact Crime.  You may also enjoy the nominees, so check out the list and place your requests.

The winners are:

Best Novel

Live by Night by Dennis Lehane
Prohibition has given rise to an endless network of underground distilleries, speakeasies, gangsters, and corrupt cops. Joe Coughlin, the youngest son of a prominent Boston police captain, has long since turned his back on his strict and proper upbringing. Now having graduated from a childhood of petty theft to a career in the pay of the city's most fearsome mobsters, Joe enjoys the spoils, thrills, and notoriety of being an outlaw.  

Best First Novel

The Expats by Chris Pavone
When expat Kate begins to travel around Europe, she finds herself buried in layers of deceit so thick they threaten her family, her marriage, and her life. Intricate, riveting, and surprising, this thriller is of the highest caliber. 
This was a title discussed at the Wellesley Free Library Monday Night Book Group in May.

Best Fact Crime

Midnight in Peking: how the murder of a young Englishwoman haunted the last days of old China
by Paul French
Peking in 1937 is a heady mix of privilege and scandal, opulence and opium dens, rumors and superstition. The Japanese are encircling the city, and the discovery of Pamela Werner's body sends a shiver through already nervous Peking.  Two detectives—one British and one Chinese—race against the clock to solve the crime before the Japanese invade and Peking as they know it is gone forever. Can they find the killer in time, before the Japanese invade?

SH