The 2011 Edgar Allan Poe Award Winners

The Lock Artist

Author: Hamilton, Steve
Format: Hardcover
Type: Mystery Novel
Page Count: 304pp.
Pub. Date: January 2010
Publisher: Minotaur/Thomas Dunne Books

Winner of the 2011 Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Novel

The audio book is available from the CLEVNET eMedia Collection.

Publisher’s Summary:
Marked by tragedy, traumatized at the age of eight, Michael, now eighteen, is no ordinary young man. Besides not uttering a single word in ten years, he discovers the one thing he can somehow do better than anyone else. Whether it’s a locked door without a key, a padlock with no combination, or even an eight hundred-pound safe . . . he can open them all.

It’s an unforgivable talent.

A talent that will make young Michael a hot commodity with the wrong people and, whether he likes it or not, push him ever closer to a life of crime. Until he finally sees his chance to escape, and with one desperate gamble risks everything to come back home to the only person he ever loved, and to unlock the secret that has kept him silent for so long.

Steve Hamilton steps away from his Edgar Award-winning Alex McKnight series to introduce a unique new character, unlike anyone you’ve ever seen in the world of crime fiction.

Rogue Island

Author: DeSilva, Bruce
Format: Hardcover
Type: Mystery Novel
Page Count: 304pp.
Pub. Date: October 2010
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates/Forge Books

Winner of the 2011 Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best First Novel by an American Author

Publisher’s Summary:
Liam Mulligan is as old school as a newspaper man gets. His beat is Providence, Rhode Island, and he knows every street and alley. He knows the priests and prostitutes, the cops and street thugs. He knows the mobsters and politicians — who are pretty much one and the same.

Someone is systematically burning down the neighborhood Mulligan grew up in, people he knows and loves are perishing in the flames, and the public is on the verge of panic.

With the whole city of Providence on his back, Mulligan must weed through a wildly colorful array of characters to find the truth.

Long Time Coming

Author: Goddard, Robert
Format: Trade Paperback
Type: Mystery Novel
Page Count: 432pp.
Pub. Date: March 2010
Publisher: Random House/Bantam

Winner of the 2011 Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Paperback Original

The audio book is available from the CLEVNET eMedia Collection.

Publisher’s Summary:
Stephen Swan is amazed when he hears that the uncle he thought had been killed in the Blitz is actually alive.

For nearly four decades, Eldritch Swan has been locked away in an Irish prison and now, at last, has been released.

Shocked and suspicious, Stephen listens to the old man’s story and is caught up in a tale that begins at the dawn of World War II, when Eldritch worked for an Antwerp diamond dealer with a trove of Picassos — highly valuable paintings that later disappeared.

Stephen, who finds his uncle by turns devious, charming, and brazen, then meets Rachel Banner, a beautiful American who may have inherited the Picassos — and is determined to see justice done for her family.

But in this tale of revenge and redemption, justice is the ultimate illusion. Eldritch, Stephen, and the woman Stephen has fallen in love with soon find themselves fighting for their lives — against sinister forces still guarding a secret that must never be revealed.

Scoreboard, Baby: A Story of College Football, Crime, and Complicity

Author: Armstrong, Ken and Nick Perry
Format: Trade Paperback
Type: Non-Fiction
Page Count: 400pp.
Pub. Date: September 2010
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press/Bison Original

Winner of the 2011 Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Fact Crime

The audio book is available from the CLEVNET eMedia Collection.

Publisher’s Summary:
The adjectives associated with the University of Washington’s 2000 football season-mystical, magical, miraculous-changed when Ken Armstrong and Nick Perry’s four-part expose of the 2000 Huskies hit the newspaper stands: “explosive . . . chilling” (Sports Illustrated), “blistering” (Baltimore Sun), “shocking . . . appalling” (Tacoma News Tribune), “astounding” (ESPN), “jaw-dropping” (Orlando Sentinel).

Now, in Scoreboard, Baby, Armstrong and Perry go behind the scenes of the Huskies’ Cinderella story to reveal a timeless morality tale about the price of obsession, the creep of fanaticism, and the ways in which a community can lose even when its team wins.

The authors unearth the true story from firsthand interviews and thousands of pages of documents: the forensic report on a bloody fingerprint; the notes of a detective investigating allegations of rape; confidential memoranda of prosecutors; and the criminal records of the dozen-plus players arrested that year with scant mention in the newspapers and minimal consequences in the courts.

The statement of a judge, sentencing one player to thirty days in jail, says it all: “To be served after football season”.

“The Scent of Lilacs”

Author: Allyn, Doug
Format: Print Magazine
Type: Short Story
Pub. Date: Sept./Oct. 2010
Published in: Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine

Winner of the 2011 Edgar Award for Best Short Story

“The Scent of Lilacs” is a short story by Doug Allyn published published in the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine.

Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History

Author: Huang, Yunte
Format: Hardcover
Type: Non-Fiction
Page Count: 384pp.
Pub. Date: August 2010
Publisher: W.W. Norton

Nominated for the 2011 Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Critical/Biographical

Publisher’s Summary:
On a balmy July night in 1904, a wiry figure sauntered alone through the dim alleys of Honolulu’s Chinatown. He strolled up a set of rickety steps and into a smoky gambling den ringing with jeers of card sharks and crapshooters. By the time anyone recognized the infamous bullwhip dangling from his hand, it was too late. Single-handedly, the feared, five-foot-tall Hawaiian cop, Chang Apana, had lined up forty gamblers and marched them down to the police station.

So begins Charlie Chan, Yunte Huang’s absorbing history of the legendary Cantonese detective, born in Hawaii around 1871, who inspired a series of fiction and movie doubles that long defined America’s distorted perceptions of Asians and Asian Americans.

In chronicling the real-life story and the fraught narrative of one of Hollywood’s most iconic detectives, Huang has fashioned a historical drama where none was known to exist, creating a work that will, in the words of Jonathan Spence, “permanently change the way we tell this troubled yet gripping story.”

Himself a literary sleuth, Huang has traced Charlie Chan’s evolution from island legend to pop culture icon to vilified, postmodern symbol, ingeniously juxtaposing Apana’s rough-and-tumble career against the larger backdrop of a territorial Hawaii torn apart by virulent racism.

Apana’s bravado prompted not only Earl Derr Biggers, a Harvard graduate turned author, to write six Charlie Chan mysteries but also Hollywood to manufacture over forty movies starring a grammatically challenged detective with a knack for turning Oriental wisdom into singsong Chinatown blues.

Examining hundreds of biographical, literary, and cinematic sources, in English and in his native Chinese, Huang has pursued the trail of Charlie Chan since the mid-1990s, searching for clues in places as improbable as Harvard Yard, an Ohio cornfield, a weathered Hawaiian cemetery, and the Shanghai Bund.

His efforts to refashion the Charlie Chan legend became a personal mission, as if the answers he sought would reshape his own identity — no longer a top Chinese student but an immigrant American eager to absorb the bewildering history of his adopted homeland.

“With rare personal intensity and capacious intelligence,” Huang has ascribed a starring role to “the honorable detective,” one far more enduring than any of his wisecracking movie parts. Huang presents American history in a way that it has never been told before.

The Buddy Files: The Case of the Lost Boy (Book #1)

Author: Butler, Dori Hillestad
Illustrator: Jeremy Tugeau
Format: Hardcover
Type: Mystery Novel
Page Count: 128pp.
Pub. Date: March 2010
Publisher: Whitman, Albert and Co.

Winner of the 2011 Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Juvenile

The e-book and audio book are available from the CLEVNET eMedia Collection.

Publisher’s Summary:
“My name is King. I am a dog. I am also a detective.”

King has a very big mystery to solve. His family is missing, and he’s been put in the P-O-U-N-D. Why doesn’t his beloved human (Kayla) come to get him?

When King is adopted by Connor and his mom, things get more confusing. The new family calls him Buddy!

And just as Connor and Buddy start to get acquainted, Connor disappears!

Buddy (aka King) has big problems to solve, but with some help from his friend Mouse (a very large dog) and the mysterious cat with no name, he shows what a smart, brave dog can do.

Mystery fans and dog lovers will be swept up in Dori Hillestad Butler’s funny, satisfying story . . . and left eager for Buddy’s next adventure.

The Interrogation of Gabriel James

Author: Price, Charlie
Format: Hardcover
Type: Mystery Novel
Page Count: 170pp.
Pub. Date: August 2010
Publisher: Farrar, Straus, Giroux Books

Winner of the 2011 Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Young Adult

Publisher’s Summary:
Eyewitness to two killings, fourteen-year-old Gabriel James relates the shocking story behind the murders in a police interrogation interspersed with flashbacks.

Step by step, this Montana teenager traces his discovery of a link between a troubled classmate’s disturbing home life and an outbreak of local crime.

In the process, however, Gabriel becomes increasingly confused about his own culpability for the explosive events that have unfolded.

“Skyler Hobbs and the Rabbit Man”

Author: Lewis, Evan
Format: Print Magazine
Type: Short Story
Pub. Date: February 2010
Published in: Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine

Winner of the 2011 Robert L. Fish Memorial Award

“Skyler Hobbs and the Rabbit Man” is a short story by Evan Lewis published in the print in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine.

The Crossing Places (Ruth Galloway Mystery Series #1)

Author: Griffiths, Elly
Format: Hardcover
Type: Thriller Novel
Page Count: 303pp.
Pub. Date: January 2010
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Winner of the 2011 Simon and Schuster — Mary Higgins Clark Award

The audio book is available from the CLEVNET eMedia Collection.

Publisher’s Summary:
When she’s not digging up bones or other ancient objects, quirky, tart-tongued archaeologist Ruth Galloway lives happily alone with her cats in a remote area of England called Saltmarsh, land that was sacred to its Iron Age inhabitants – not quite earth, not quite sea.

When a child’s bones are found on a desolate beach nearby, Detective Chief Inspector Harry Nelson calls Galloway for help. Nelson thinks he has found the remains of Lucy Downey, a little girl who went missing ten years ago. Since her disappearance he has been receiving bizarre letters about her, letters with references to ritual and sacrifice, some even including quotes from the Bible and Shakespeare.

The bones actually turn out to be two thousand years old, but Ruth is soon drawn into the Lucy Downey case and into the mind of the letter writer, who seems to have both archaeological knowledge and eerie psychic powers.

Then another child goes missing and the hunt is on to find her. As the letter writer moves closer and the windswept Norfolk landscape exerts its power, Ruth finds herself in completely new territory — and in serious danger.