This is the fourth installment of the 2010 Edgar Award Nominations.
The Edgar Awards are decided by a jury system. You can read about it on the Mystery Writers of American website: The Edgar Awards — Judging Process — An Overview.
Best Paperback Original
Click the mouse on the book covers to order these books from the Cleveland Heights-University Heights Public Library.
 |
Bury Me DeepAuthor: Abbott, Megan |
|
Nominated for the 2010 Edgar Award for Best Paperback Original In October 1931, a station agent found two large trunks abandoned in Los Angeles’s Southern Pacific Station. What he found inside ignited one of the most scandalous tabloid sensations of the decade. Inspired by this notorious true crime, Edgar®-winning author Megan Abbott’s novel Bury Me Deep is the story of Marion Seeley, a young woman abandoned in Phoenix by her doctor husband. At the medical clinic where she finds a job, Marion becomes fast friends with Louise, a vivacious nurse, and her roommate, Ginny, a tubercular blonde. Before long, the demure Marion is swept up in the exuberant life of the girls, who supplement their scant income by entertaining the town’s most powerful men with wild parties. At one of these events, Marion meets — and falls hard for — the charming Joe Lanigan, a local rogue and politician on the rise, whose ties to all three women bring events to a dangerous collision. A story born of Jazz Age decadence and Depression-era desperation, Bury Me Deep — with its hothouse of jealousy, illicit sex and shifting loyalties — is a timeless portrait of the dark side of desire and the glimmer of redemption. |
|
 |
Havana LunarAuthor: Arellano, Robert |
|
Nominated for the 2010 Edgar Award for Best Paperback Original Inspired by fifty years of Cuban literary noir, from Cold Tales by Virgilio Pinera to Reinaldo Arenas’ Before Night Falls, Robert Arellano’s Havana Lunar intertwines an insider testimony on the collapse of socialist Cuba with a psychological mystery. Robert Arellano’s parents fled Havana in 1960. He has been working on Havana Lunar since 1992, when, as a student in Brown University’s graduate writing program, he visited Cuba on a research fellowship. He has returned ten times, chronicling the Revolution in journalism, essay, and song. He is the author of two novels, Fast Eddie: King of the Bees and Don Dimaio of La Plata, both published by Akashic Books. |
|
 |
The Lord God Bird: A NovellaAuthor: Hill, Russell |
|
Nominated for the 2010 Edgar Award for Best Paperback Original The Lord God Bird is a startling novella filled with dark images of America in the South in 1949. Jake Hamrick, a 19-year-old who has been obsessed since childhood with the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, a bird that is on the verge of extinction, leaves Illinois for Louisiana to find the creature, accompanied by Robin, his diminutive girlfriend. They search in the bayous where the bird was last reported, and Robin, as obsessed as Jake, dresses like the bird, smearing her naked body with white clay, wearing a cloak of black crow feathers, her hair in a red crest. She is discovered by local hunters and Robin and Jake are pursued deep into the bayous, where they are harbored by Robert, an ancient black man. It is a cinematic novella of obsession, passion, violence, love and loss that you won’t forget. |
|
 |
Body Blows (The Joe Grundy Mystery Series #2)Author: Marc Strange, Marc Strange |
|
Nominated for the 2010 Edgar Award for Best Paperback Original Ex-boxer Joe Grundy is embroiled in the intrigues of his own boss, millionaire Leo Alexander, the owner of Vancouver’s Lord Douglas Hotel. Somebody has murdered Leo’s live-in servant and not-so-secret lover, and Grundy has to get to the bottom of the incident in order to clear the man he’s forged a bond with since first coming to work for him as security for the hotel. But Leo’s past serves up more surprises than Grundy bargained for. It seems Leo has had a life full of death, jilted mistresses, spurned spouses, sharp business deals, and explosive relationships with estranged children. Another corpse pops up, Leo is arrested and jailed, and Grundy takes more hits to his body and psyche than perhaps even he can handle. Thoughts of real and imagined death are stalking the corridors of the Lord Douglas, and Joe Grundy has to keep swinging to stay alive and remain sane. |
|
 |
The Herring-Seller’s ApprenticeAuthor: Tyler, L. C. |
|
Nominated for the 2010 Edgar Award for Best Paperback Original Ethelred Tressider is a mystery writer with problems, not the least of which is his incurably nosy, chocolate-chomping agent, who couldn’t give two toffees for mystery novels. She does, however, have a passion for real-life mysteries, and that passion gets stirred up when Ethelred’s ex-wife goes missing and Ethelred — none too tightly wound at the best of times — starts behaving in an extremely peculiar fashion. |
|
The 2010 Edgar Award Nominations Series:
Part 1 — Best Novel
Part 2 — Best First Novel By An American Author
Part 3 — Best Short Story
Part 4 — Best Paperback Original
Part 5 — Best Best Critical/Biographical
Part 6 — Best Juvenile
Part 7 — Best Fact Crime
Part 8 — Best Young Adult
Comments on this entry are closed.
{ 6 trackbacks }