Each year the
Mystery Writers of America honor the year's best in mystery fiction, non-fiction, theater, and television with awards named for an American master of the genre, Edgar Allan Poe. This year the awards, celebrating the two hundred and second anniversary of Poe's birth, will be handed out at a banquet at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in New York City on April 28th , 2011 - giving Kindle readers plenty of time to read the mysteries nominated and weigh in with their own picks before the awards are announced.
The nominees for best first novel by an American author and best paperback originals are:
Best First Novel by an American Author:
Rogue Island, by Bruce DeSilva. Forge Books, 2010. Print Length: 304 p. Amazon customer rating: 5 stars (26 reviews). Kindle edition $11.99; Hardcover $16.49. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"Born and raised in the Mount Hope section of Providence, Rhode Island, journalist Liam Mulligan won’t simply report on the rash of arsons killing lifelong friends and loved ones in his old neighborhood. He wants to know more and launches an investigation, discovering a heavy-handed plot to own Mount Hope in order to redevelop it. Along the way, he’s threatened, beaten, arrested on suspicion of arson and murder, suspended from his newspaper, and targeted with a Mob contract on his life. Mulligan must turn to some unlikely allies to save his tired old neighborhood and secure justice. Rogue Island has everything a crime fan could want: a stubborn, street-smart hero with a snarky sense of humor; more than a baker’s dozen of engaging characters; a fast-paced plot; a noirish style; a realistic postmillennium newspaper setting; mean, pot-holed streets; and, best of all, a knowing portrait of a small city and a tiny state famous for inept government, jiggery-pokery, and corruption." - Thomas Gaughan for
Booklist.
The Serialist, by David Gordon. Simon & Schuster, 2010. Print Length: 352 p. Amazon customer rating: 4 stars (45 reviews). Kindle edition $9.99; Paperback $10.20. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"Harry Bloch is a serialist in spades. He ekes out a living in Queens by writing pseudonymous series novels, all in the pulp style: the Zorg SF series by T. R. L. Pangstrom; the inner-city black Jew detective series by J. Duke Johnson; and the vampire series by Sybilline Lorindo-Gold, Bloch’s mother’s full maiden name. In addition he 'tutors' rich high-school kids by writing their term papers. Bloch’s big break comes from a serial killer on death row: 88 days before his execution, Darian Clay offers a chapter of his life story for each piece of pornography Bloch writes based on the torrid letters Clay has received in prison. Bloch’s visits to three letter-writing women have unexpected consequences, raising the possibility of a retrial for Clay; meanwhile, Bloch is suspected of murder..." - Michele Leber for
Booklist.
Galveston, by Nic Pizzolatto. Scribner, 2010. Print Length: 288 p. Amazon customer rating: 4 1/2 stars (27 reviews). Kindle edition $11.99; Hardcover $16.50. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"On the same day in 1987 he's diagnosed with lung cancer, Roy Cady flees New Orleans, taking along Raquel Rocky Arceneaux, a pretty 18-year-old with a lurid past, whom he rescues from some hoods in the wake of a bloodbath. Rocky persuades him to stop in Orange, Tex., to pick up Tiffany, her three-year-old sister, and by the time they reach refuge in a rundown Galveston motel, 40-year-old Roy finds himself an unlikely father figure even as he struggles with a romantic attraction to Rocky. Pizzolatto's insightful portrayal of the heroic Roy, who takes a beating for trying to help the two girls, is rough and tumble real. As Pizzolatto switches smoothly between past and present, he vividly captures Galveston in all its desperate vulnerability as it faces the approach of Hurricane Ike..." -
Publishers Weekly.
The Poacher's Son, by Paul Doiron. Minotaur Books, 2010. Print Length: 336 p. Amazon customer rating: 4 stars (73 reviews). Kindle edition $11.99; Hardcover $16.49. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"Game warden Mike Bowditch returns home one evening to find an alarming voice from the past on his answering machine: his father, Jack, a hard-drinking womanizer who makes his living poaching illegal game. An even more frightening call comes the next morning from the police: They are searching for the man who killed a beloved local cop the night before - and his father is their prime suspect. Jack has escaped from police custody, and only Mike believes that his tormented father might not be guilty. Now, alienated from the woman he loves, shunned by colleagues who have no sympathy for the suspected cop killer, Mike must come to terms with his haunted past. He knows firsthand Jack’s brutality, but is the man capable of murder?" - Amazon.
Snow Angels, by James Thompson. Putnam, 2010. Print Length: 272 p. Amazon customer rating: 4 stars (45 reviews). Kindle edition $18.99; Hardcover, Bargain Price $9.25. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"American-born Thompson, who's lived in Finland for the past decade, offers a bleak look at the ravages of that country's long, dark winter as well as intriguing glimpses of Finnish culture in his solid U.S. debut, the first in a new crime series. Shortly before Christmas, Kari Vaara, the police chief of the Lapland town of Kittilä, gets a phone call informing him that the body of Sufia Elmi, a Somali refugee and minor film star, has been found in a snowfield on a reindeer farm. The victim has also been mutilated, perhaps raped, and a racial slur carved into her flesh. When Kari's ex-wife's lover becomes the prime suspect, Kari spurns the chance to recuse himself and presses on. The winter hazards of alcoholism, suicide and murder all play a part as Kari uncovers more suspects..." -
Publishers Weekly.
Best Paperback Original:
Expiration Date, by Duane Swierczynski. Minotaur Books, 2010. Print Length: 256 p. Amazon customer rating: 4 1/2 stars (17 reviews). Kindle edition $9.99; Paperback $11.19. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"Mickey Wade, an unemployed journalist, moves into his grandfather’s apartment in the family’s old Philadelphia neighborhood and, after gobbling a few aspirin to fight a hangover, finds himself beamed back to the day of his birth in 1972. Turns out those weren’t your garden-variety aspirin but, rather, the pills a crackpot scientist had created as part of a government-funded plan to investigate out-of-body travel. Only, in Mickey’s case, he can only go back to the early 1970s. But there’s plenty to do there: if he can somehow divert the young boy who will eventually murder Mickey’s father, he can change his family’s history. Swierczynski cleverly melds the thriller and fantasy elements (especially the notion of nonlinear time), producing a thoroughly readable, suspenseful romp that evokes John D. MacDonald’s pulp classic
The Girl, the Gold Watch and Everything." - Bill Ott for
Booklist.
Long Time Coming, by Robert Goddard. Bantam, 2010. Print Length: 432 p. Amazon customer rating: 4 stars (9 reviews). Kindle edition $8.25; Paperback $10.20. Text-to-Speech: Disabled.
"An ill-gotten family fortune culled from Congolese diamond mines, a forged Picasso, and a hellish Irish prison form the nexus of this eccentric thriller. There are two narrators: the first, speaking of events in 1976, is Stephen Swan, a geologist who has long worked in the booming Texas oil fields. On his return to England, he finds that an uncle, who he was told had lost his life during the Blitz, is alive but not well, having been just released from an extended stay in an Irish prison under suspicion of spying. The second narrator is the uncle himself, who tells his nephew about criminal plots hatched during the war that have taken on strength and danger through the decades. Goddard shuttles between 1976, when the forged Picasso and other stolen works are on public display and must be recovered for the wronged owners, and 1940, when the whole conspiracy began. Although the plot is complex, Goddard’s gift for suspense never flags. --Connie Fletcher for
Booklist.
The News Where You Are, by Catherine O'Flynn. Holt, 2010. Print Length: 272 p. Amazon customer rating: 4 stars (8 reviews). Kindle edition $9.99; Paperback $10.13. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"Frank Allcroft, a television news anchor in his hometown (where he reports on hard-hitting events, like the opening of canine gyms for overweight pets), is on the verge of a mid-life crisis. Beneath his famously corny on-screen persona, Frank is haunted by loss: the mysterious hit-and-run that killed his predecessor and friend, Phil, and the ongoing demolition of his architect father's monumental postwar buildings. And then there are the things he can't seem to lose, no matter how hard he tries: his home, for one, on the market for years; and the nagging sense that he will never quite be the son his mother - newly ensconced in an assisted-living center - wanted. As Frank uncovers the shocking truth behind Phil's death, and comes to terms with his domineering father's legacy, it is his beloved young daughter, Mo, who points him toward the future." - Amazon.
Vienna Secrets, by Frank Tallis. Random House, 2010. Print Length: 400 p. Amazon customer rating: 4 stars (59 reviews). Kindle edition $8.25; Paperback $10.20. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"In Freud’s dangerous, dazzling Vienna of 1903, an ingenious doctor and an intrepid detective again challenge psychotic criminals across a landscape teetering between the sophisticated and the savage, the thrilling future and the primitive past. On opposite sides of the city, two men are found beheaded on church grounds. Detective Inspector Oskar Reinhardt is baffled. Could the killer be mentally ill, someone the victims came into contact with? Some are even blaming the murders on the devil. But when psychoanalyst Dr. Max Liebermann learns that both victims were vocal members of a shadowy anti-Semitic group, he turns his gaze to the city’s close-knit Hasidic community. The doctor is drawn into an urban underworld that hosts and hides virulent racists on one side and followers of kabbalah on the other. And as the evidence - and bodies - pile up, Liebermann must reconsider his own path, the one that led him away from the miraculous and toward a life of the mind." - from the trade paperback edition.
Ten Little Herrings, by L. C. Tyler. Macmillan, 2010. Print Length: 304 p. Amazon customer rating: none yet. Kindle edition $9.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"When obscure crime writer Ethelred Tressider vanishes, his dogged literary agent, Elsie Thirkettle, is soon on his trail. Finding him (in a ramshackle hotel in the French Loire) proves surprisingly easy. Bringing him home proves more difficult than expected - but (as Elsie observes) who would have predicted that, in a hotel full of stamp collectors, the guests would suddenly start murdering each other? One guest is found fatally stabbed, apparently the victim of an intruder. But when a rich Russian oligarch also dies, in a hotel now swarming with policemen, suspicion falls on the remaining guests. Elsie is torn between her natural desire to interfere in the police investigation and her urgent need to escape to the town’s chocolaterie..." - Amazon.
Each week Entertainment Weekly reviews a small selection of popular new books. Titles available for the Kindle reviewed in the January 28th issue include:
"Needham worked more than 40 years in Hollywood as a stuntman who filled in for John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, Dustin Hoffman, and Burt Reynolds. Given the exciting and dangerous jobs he performed wrangling horses, staging fights, doing 'high falls,' and crashing cars, Needham has plenty of material, and he writes like a guy telling stories at a bar, laying out one anecdote after another about 1960s and '70s directors and big-time actors. Of course, as a thrice married, hard-living stuntman who was not only Reynolds's stunt-double but also his best friend, Needham has his share of fun and not-so-dirty little secrets that he doles out in a playful prose that makes it obvious that no matter how serious he took his job, he knew how to enjoy life." - Publishers Weekly.
