2009 Edgar Award Nominations pt. 1

Missing

Author: Alvtegen, Karin
Format: Hardcover
Type: Novel
Page Count: 296pp.
Pub. Date: February 2008
Publisher: Answers and Insights Inc.

Nominated for the 2009 Edgar Award for Best Novel

“Sibylla Forsenstrom doesn’t exist. For fifteen years, she has been excluded from society. As one of the homeless in Stockholm, she takes each day as it comes and has all her possessions in her rucksack. To find food for the day and somewhere to sleep for the night demands all her time and effort. But it does not help her in keeping the thoughts away from the past — from the questions about why her life has turned out the way it did.

Then a catastrophe happens. One night, she is in the wrong place at the wrong time.

A man is brutally murdered and too many circumstances lead to Sibylla as being the murderer. For fifteen years nobody has asked for her, but suddenly she is the most wanted person in Sweden. She knows how to survive, but now she has to flee . . . “

Blue Heaven

Author: Box, C.J.
Format: Hardcover
Type: Novel
Page Count: 296pp.
Pub. Date: January 2008
Publisher: St. Martin’s Minotaur

Nominated for the 2009 Edgar Award for Best Novel

A twelve-year-old girl and her younger brother go on the run in the woods of northern Idaho, pursued by four men they have just watched commit murder — four men who know exactly who the children are, and where their desperate mother is waiting patiently by the phone for news of her children’s fate.

In a ranching community increasingly populated by L.A. transplants living in gaudy McMansions, the kids soon find they don’t know whom they can trust among the hundreds of retired Southern California cops who’ve given the area its nickname: “Blue Heaven.”

Sins of the Assassin

Author: Ferrigno, Robert
Format: Hardcover
Type: Novel
Page Count: 296pp.
Pub. Date: February 2008
Publisher: Simon and Schuster — Scribner

Nominated for the 2009 Edgar Award for Best Novel

In the second book of Ferrigno’s spectacular Assassin Trilogy, Rakkim Epps battles radical fundamentalist forces in a futuristic America, now a divided blood-soaked dystopia. Will he survive? Can America ever be unified again?

The year is 2043. New York and Washington, D.C., have been leveled by nuclear bombs. New Orleans is submerged beneath fifty feet of water and treasure hunters scavenge its watery ruins. The United States no longer exists, and in its place two new nations maintain an uneasy coexistence.

To the west stretches the Islamic Republic, seemingly governed by a moderate president but hollowed from within by the violent, repressive Black Robes, a shadowy fundamentalist group intent on crushing all those who do not follow Allah’s path. In this frightening world, freedom is controlled by the state, and non-Muslims are either second-class citizens, hidden underground, exiled, or executed.

To the east and south lies the Christian Bible Belt, itself torn by conflict from warring factions, each claiming to be more righteous than the others. Meanwhile the former United States is being nibbled away at the edges: South Florida, known as “Nuevo Florida,” is independent; the Aztlan Empire, formerly Mexico, encroaches from the south; and Canada has laid claim to huge swaths of territory along the United States’s former northern border.

What stability exists between the warring empires is threatened when the president of the Islamic Republic discovers that a Bible Beltwarlord, known simply as the Colonel, is searching for a superweapon hidden inside a remote mountain decades earlier by the old United States regime. Rakkim Epps, retired shadow warrior, is sent on a perilous mission to infiltrate the Belt and steal or destroy the weapon. Accompanying Rakkim is Leo, a naive nineteen-year-old whose technologically enhanced brain is crucial to their success.Together they sneak through the Belt, a lawless territory where a bloodthirsty, drug-addled militia prepares for the End-Times.

When Rakkim and Leo finally reach the Colonel’s mountain, Epps is forced to rely on his shadow warrior’s ability to kill any and all who would halt his quest. Opposing him is the Colonel’s enforcer, a sadistic, carbon-skinned killer named Gravenholtz, and the Colonel’s wife, the alluring, sexually rapacious Baby, who wants — and gets — more of everything. Meanwhile, the Old One, the ancient and immensely rich Muslim fanatic who seeks to rule both American nations, plots his attack from the safety of his ocean liner. Rakkim Epps, he realizes, must be stopped, controlled, or killed.

A terrific stand-alone read, Sins of the Assassin is a cinematic feast of action and plot, and verifies Robert Ferrigno’s Assassin Trilogy as a monumental imaginative work of suspense.

The Price of Blood

Author: Hughes, Declan
Format: Hardcover
Type: Novel
Page Count: 296pp.
Pub. Date: March 2008
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers

Nominated for the 2009 Edgar Award for Best Novel

What’s in a name? Apparently everything for Ed Loy, because that’s the only information Father Vincent Tyrrell, brother of prominent racehorse trainer F. X. Tyrrell, offers when he asks for Ed’s help in finding a missing person. Even the best private eye needs more than just a name, but hard times and a dwindling bank account make it difficult for Loy to say no.

He is not without luck, however. While working another case, Loy discovers a phone number that seems linked to F.X. found on an unidentified body. Thinking it more than a coincidence, he begins digging into the history of the Tyrrells — a history consumed with trading and dealing, gambling and horse breeding — and soon realizes there is more to the family than meets the eye, a suspicion confirmed when two more people with connections to the Tyrrells are killed.

On the eve of one of Ireland’s most anticipated sporting events, the four-day Leopardstown Race-course Christmas Festival, all bets are off as Loy pursues a twisted killer on the final leg of a reckless master plan.

In The Price of Blood, Declan Hughes once again paints an arresting portrait of an Ireland not found in any guidebooks. Deadly passions beget dark secrets in a chilling story that will have readers on edge right up to its shocking conclusion.

The Night Following

Author: Joss, Morag
Format: Hardcover
Type: Novel
Page Count: 368pp.
Pub. Date: February 2008
Publisher: Dell Publishing

Nominated for the 2009 Edgar Award for Best Novel

On a blustery April day, the quiet, rather private wife of a doctor discovers that her husband has been having an affair. Moments later, driving along a winding country road and distracted perhaps by her own thoughts, perhaps blinded by sunlight, she fails to see sixty-one-year-old Ruth Mitchell up ahead, riding her bicycle. She hits her, killing her instantly. And drives away.

The hit-and-run driver is never found. But the doctor’s wife, horrified by what she has done, begins to unravel. Soon she turns her attention to Ruth’s bereaved husband, a man staggering sleeplessly through each night, as unhinged by grief as the killer is by guilt.

Arthur Mitchell does not realize at first that someone has begun watching him through his windows, worrying over his disheveled appearance, his increasingly chaotic home. And when at last she steps through his doorway, secretly at first, then more boldly, he is ready to believe that, for reasons beyond his understanding, his wife has somehow been returned to him. . . .

A story of loss, lies, and wrongdoing, astonishingly complex and ingeniously inventive, The Night Following is also a love story and the extraordinarily moving tale of a killer’s journey from the shadows into the light. It confirms the mastery of a writer who is both tender and unflinching in her examination of human frailty — and of the shattering repercussions of deception.

Curse of the Spellmans (Spellman Files Series #2)

Author: Lutz, Lisa
Format: Hardcover
Type: Novel
Page Count: 416pp.
Pub. Date: March 2008
Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Nominated for the 2009 Edgar Award for Best Novel

THEY’RE BAAAAACK.

Their first caper, The Spellman Files, was a New York Times bestseller and earned comparisons to the books of Carl Hiaasen and Janet Evanovich. Now the Spellmans, a highly functioning yet supremely dysfunctional family of private investigators, return in a sidesplittingly funny story of suspicion, surveillance, and surprise.

When Izzy Spellman, PI, is arrested for the fourth time in three months, she writes it off as a job hazard. She’s been (obsessively) keeping surveillance on a suspicious next door neighbor (suspect’s name: John Brown), convinced he’s up to no good — even if her parents (the management at Spellman Investigations) are not.

When the (displeased) management refuses to bail Izzy out, it is Morty, Izzy’s octogenarian lawyer, who comes to her rescue. But before he can build a defense, he has to know the facts. Over weak coffee and diner sandwiches, Izzy unveils the whole truth and nothing but the truth — as only she, a thirty-year-old licensed professional, can.

When not compiling Suspicious Behavior Reports on all her family members, staking out her neighbor, or trying to keep her sister, Rae, from stalking her “best friend,” Inspector Henry Stone, Izzy has been busy attempting to apprehend the copycat vandal whose attacks on Mrs. Chandler’s holiday lawn tableaux perfectly and eerily match a series of crimes from 1991-92, when Izzy and her best friend, Petra, happened to be at their most rebellious and delinquent. As Curse of the Spellmans unfolds, it’s clear that Morty may be on retainer, but Izzy is still very much on the case . . . er, cases — her own and that of every other Spellman family member.

(Re)meet the Spellmans, a family in which eavesdropping is a mandatory skill, locks are meant to be picked, past missteps are never forgotten, and blackmail is the preferred form of negotiation — all in the name of unconditional love.