2009 Edgar Award Nominations pt. 9

“Buckner’s Error”

Author: Guglielmelli, Joseph
Format: Print Anthology
Type: Short Story
Pub. Date: June 2008
Published in: Queens Noir

Nominated for the 2009 Robert L. Fish Memorial Award

“Buckner’s Error” is a short story by Joseph Guglielmelli published in the anthology called Queens Noir edited by Robert Knightly.

Sacrifice

Author: Bolton, S. J.
Format: Hardcover
Type: Novel
Page Count: 384pp.
Pub. Date: May 2008
Publisher: St. Martin’s/Minotaur

Nominated for the 2009 Mary Higgins Clark Award

In this masterful debut that starts off as a mystery and becomes much more, Tora Hamilton is an outsider at her new home on the rocky, windswept Shetland Islands, a hundred miles from the northeastern tip of Scotland. Though her husband grew up here, it’s the first time he’s been back in twenty years.

Digging in the peat on their new property, Tora unearths a human body, at first glance a centuries-old bog body, interesting but not uncommon. But realizing that the body is in fact much newer, that the woman’s heart has been cut out, and that she was killed within a few days of bearing a child, Tora, herself an obstetrician, becomes obsessed with finding out what happened to her — even when the police, her colleagues, and eventually her husband warn her against getting involved.

Sacrifice is a bone-chilling, spellbinding debut about secrets worth killing for that will grip readers from its beginning to its startling end.

The Killer’s Wife: A Novel

Author: Floyd, Bill
Format: Hardcover
Type: Novel
Page Count: 304pp.
Pub. Date: March 2008
Publisher: St. Martin’s/Minotaur

Nominated for the 2009 Mary Higgins Clark Award

Six years after her courageous testimony helped put her husband on death row for a string of gruesome murders, Leigh Wren has almost succeeded in putting her past to rest. She has moved from the West Coast to North Carolina with her young son, adopting a new name and a new life. But the world that she has created for herself is shattered when the father of one of her ex-husband’s victims begins stalking her, then confronts her late one night. In the days that follow, he exposes Leigh, in newspapers and on television, to a startled North Carolina community. And just as her marriage to Randall Mosley, a man who became known to the world as a deviant serial killer, is brought back to light, a more deadly game of cat and mouse ensues.

A new killer has emerged, one whose methods are frighteningly similar to those used by Mosley, who is awaiting execution thousands of miles away. Leigh and her son appear to be in the assailant’s scope, and it becomes clear that he is more than a copycat killer — his targets are all tied to Leigh’s former life. With the clock ticking down and the victims of a new killer mounting, Leigh is forced to probe the darkest corridors of her past to protect her life and her son’s. She must also confront her own feelings of responsibility: Leigh has always professed her ignorance, but how complicit was she in her husband’s horrific murder spree, as it was taking place?

From a major new voice in suspense, The Killer’s Wife is a story driven by psychological insight and harrowing revelations, asking how well you can ever really know the person sleeping beside you.

Stalking Susan: A Novel

Author: Julie Kramer, Julie Kramer
Format: Hardcover
Type: Novel
Page Count: 240pp.
Pub. Date: July 2008
Publisher: Random House/Doubleday

Nominated for the 2009 Mary Higgins Clark Award

Introducing Riley Spartz, a spunky, clever, and endearing investigative reporter on the trail of a serial killer targeting women named Susan, murdering one on the same day each year.

Riley Spartz, TV news reporter for Channel 3 in Minneapolis, is recovering from a heartbreaking, headline-making catastrophe of her own when a longtime police source drops two homicide files in her lap. Both cold cases involve women named Susan strangled on the same day, one year apart. Riley senses a pattern between those murders and others pulled from old death records. She must broadcast a warning soon, especially to viewers named Susan, because the deadly anniversary is fast approaching.

A Song for You: A Mystery

Author: Thornton, Betsy
Format: Hardcover
Type: Novel
Page Count: 304pp.
Pub. Date: September 2008
Publisher: St. Martin’s/Minotaur

Nominated for the 2009 Mary Higgins Clark Award

In A Song for You, Betsy Thornton returns to her dynamic character Chloe Newcombe, victim advocate at the Cochise County Attorney’s Office.

A heavy storm hits Dudley, Arizona, wreaking havoc. A local woman drowns in a flash flood. A heavy drinker falls into the draining system and is finally found a few days later. The Barnetts, who moved into town six months ago, are unhappy to learn that a retaining wall on their property will need immediate fixing. And they’re even more dismayed when the workers’ digging unearths a dead body.

The man’s body has obviously been there a long time. When Rachel Macabee reads about it in the local paper, she is convinced that the dead man was a member of the band that her mom sang with when Rachel was a little girl. He had disappeared just a few days before her mother was killed. The band members assumed that he had left in search of a better job, but Rachel had never believed that — and now she knows she was right.

She doesn’t trust the police — they were wrong the first time. So she approaches private detective Brian Flynn, a former police officer as well as Chloe Newcombe’s former lover. He agrees to try to discover what really happened. And after all these years, Rachel may finally find her mother’s killer.

Betsy Thornton pens the stories about the inhabitants of this very real-life mountain town with great style. A Song for You promises more atmosphere, likable characters, and another entertaining puzzle.

The Fault Tree

Author: Ure, Louise
Format: Hardcover
Type: Novel
Page Count: 352pp.
Pub. Date: January 2008
Publisher: St. Martin’s/Minotaur

Nominated for the 2009 Mary Higgins Clark Award

Arizona auto mechanic Cadence Moran is no stranger to darkness. She was blinded in a horrific car accident eight years ago that also took the life of her three-year old niece. She knows she was only partially to blame, but that doesn’t make the loss any easier to bear. She’s learned to get by, but there are still painful memories.

When she is almost run down by a speeding car on the way home from work, Cadence at first thinks that she is the victim of road rage or a bad driver. But that’s not the case. In fact, she is the only witness to the murder of her elderly neighbor, and now the killer believes that she’s seen the getaway car. Louise Ure paints the glare of a Southwestern summer with the brush of a blind woman’s darkness in this novel of jeopardy and courage . . . and the fine line between them — as Cadence fights to stop a killer she can’t see.