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This is the second installment of the 2009 Edgar Award Nominations, brought to you by the RATS of the Cleveland Heights-University Heights Public Library.
The Edgar Awards are given out at the Annual Edgar Awards Banquet. This year is the 63rd Annual Edgar Awards Banquet which is held at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in New York City on Thursday April 30, 2009.
Click the mouse on the book covers to order these books from the Cleveland Heights-University Heights Public Library.
Best First Novel By An American Author
 The Kind One |
The Kind OneAuthor: Epperson, Tom |
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Nominated for the 2009 Edgar Award for Best First Novel By An American Author In the kill-or-be-killed criminal underworld of 1930s Los Angeles, “Two Gun Danny” Landon has a distinct disadvantage. According to the fellas, he used to pull all kinds of shoot-ups and shenanigans . . . but damned if he can’t remember a thing from before last year, when he got hit over the head with a lead pipe. Sadistic mobster Bud Seitz — known to friends and enemies alike as “The Kind One” — seems to have big plans for him, but truthfully, Danny can’t stomach the dirty work. His aim is off, the other wiseguys laugh at him, and he’d gladly trade in the drunken parties and the endless broads for a day at the movies with his colorful and mysterious neighbor Dulwich and eleven-year-old Sophie, whose deadbeat mother delivers an endless stream of emotional and physical abuse. But when Bud’s beautiful girlfriend Darla begs Danny to help her escape the Kind One’s dark, brutal world, Danny must confront a dangerous test of loyalty that could irrevocably change his future — and his past — forever. |
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 Sweetsmoke |
SweetsmokeAuthor: Fuller, David |
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Nominated for the 2009 Edgar Award for Best First Novel By An American Author The year is 1862, and the Civil War rages through the South. On a Virginia tobacco plantation, another kind of battle soon begins. There, Cassius Howard, a skilled carpenter and slave, risks everything — punishment, sale to a cotton plantation, even his life — to learn the truth concerning the murder of Emoline, a freed black woman, a woman who secretly taught him to read and once saved his life. It is clear that no one cares about her death in the midst of a brutal and hellish war. No one but Cassius, who braves horrific dangers to escape the plantation and avenge her loss. As Cassius seeks answers about Emoline’s murder, he finds an unexpected friend and ally in Quashee, a new woman brought over from another plantation; and a formidable adversary in Hoke Howard, the master he has always obeyed. With subtlety and beauty, Sweetsmoke captures the daily indignities and harrowing losses suffered by slaves, the turmoil of a country waging countless wars within its own borders, and the lives of those people fighting for identity, for salvation, and for freedom. |
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 The Foreigner |
The ForeignerAuthor: Lin, Francie |
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Nominated for the 2009 Edgar Award for Best First Novel By An American Author Set against the Taiwanese criminal underworld, The Foreigner is Francie Lin’s audacious debut novel. A noirish tale about family, fraternity, conscience, and the curious gulf between a man’s culture and his deepest self. Emerson Chang is a mild mannered bachelor on the cusp of forty, a financial analyst in a neatly pressed suit, a child of Taiwanese immigrants who doesn’t speak a word of Chinese, and, well, a virgin. His only real family is his mother, whose subtle manipulations have kept him close — all in the name of preserving an obscure idea of family and culture. But when his mother suddenly dies, Emerson sets out for Taipei to scatter her ashes, and to convey a surprising inheritance to his younger brother, Little P. Now enmeshed in the Taiwanese criminal underworld, Little P seems to be running some very shady business out of his uncle’s karaoke bar, and he conceals a secret — a crime that has not only severed him from his family, but may have annihilated his conscience. Hoping to appease both the living and the dead, Emerson isn’t about to give up the inheritance until he uncovers Little P’s past, and saves what is left of his family. The Foreigner is a darkly comic tale of crime and contrition, and a riveting story about what it means to be a foreigner — even in one’s own family. |
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 Calumet City |
Calumet CityAuthor: Newton, Charlie |
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Nominated for the 2009 Edgar Award for Best First Novel By An American Author Meet Patti Black, the most decorated cop in Chicago. On her ghetto beat, Patti Black redefines the word badass. But her steel-plated exterior — solitary, stoic, loveless — belies the wrenching legacy of her orphan childhood. Haunted by the horrifying abuse she suffered at the hands of her foster parents, Patti Black sublimates past torments into a meticulously maintained tough-gal persona. When a series of unrelated cases — a drug bust gone bad, a mayoral assassination attempt, the murder of a state attorney, the exhumation of a long-concealed body from a tenement basement wall — all point in Patti Black’s direction, she finds herself facing the dark truth: You can’t hide from your history, no matter how far into the fog you run. For Patti Black, that history didn’t die in the tenement wall; it’s alive — and riding her down. In researching this electrifying thriller, Charlie Newton rode in the squad car with real-life street cop Patti Black. The result is a powerful fiction debut that captures the precise emotional landscape of one cop’s hard-bitten life in the trenches. This first-time author joins that rare breed whose fiction is suffused with profound authenticity. |
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 A_Cure for Night |
A Cure for NightAuthor: Peacock, Justin |
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Nominated for the 2009 Edgar Award for Best First Novel By An American Author In Brooklyn’s criminal courts, justice often depends on who has the better story to tell. After a drug-related scandal ejects Joel Deveraux from his job at a white-shoe law firm, he slides down the corporate ladder to the Public Defenders’ office in Brooklyn, where he defends the innocent and the guilty alike, a cog in the great clanking machine that is the New York City justice system. When his boss offers him the second chair to the savvy Myra Goldstein in a high-profile murder case, he eagerly takes it. The defendant is Lorenzo Tate, a black pot dealer from the projects who is charged with the murder of a white college student in a street shooting; and the tabloids have sunk their teeth into the racially tinged trial. In this twisty and overwhelmingly authentic journey through the real Brooklyn, Justin Peacock paints a portrait of the law as a form of combat where the best story wins — but who’s telling the truth and who’s lying are matters of interpretation. And of life and death. This compelling debut novel announces Justin Peacock as a writer who enters the territory of Richard Price and Scott Turow with a fresh new take on urban crime and punishment. |
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The 2009 Edgar Award Nominations Series:
Part 1 — Best Novel
Part 2 — Best First Novel By An American Author
Part 3 — Best Paperback Original
Part 4 — Best Best Critical/Biographical
Part 5 — Best Fact Crime
Part 6 — Best Short Story
Part 7 — Best Young Adult
Part 8 — Best Juvenile
Part 9 — The Rest of the Awards
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