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Friday, April 29, 2016

2016 Edgars Awards Winners



Yesterday, the Mystery Writers of America announced the winners of the 2016 Edgar Allan Poe Awards honouring the best in mystery fiction, non-fiction and television published or produced in 2015.





The winner in the Best Mystery Novel category is Let Me Die in His Footsteps by Lori Roy.


Everyone knows Hollerans don’t go near the Baines family.  It’s been that way since Joseph Carl Baine was hanged in 1936.  But on a dark Kentucky night in 1952 Annie Holleran crosses over into forbidden territory because local superstition says that Annie can see her future in the Baines’ well. What she sees instead, there in the moonlight, is a dead woman. And suddenly the events of 1936, events that have twisted and shaped the lives of Annie and all her kin, are brought back into the present. And if Annie is to save herself, her family and this small Kentucky town, she must face the terrible reality of what happened all those years ago (http://www.amazon.ca/Let-Me-Die-His-Footsteps-ebook/dp/B00OZ0TNEU?ie=UTF8&keywords=let%20me%20die%20in%20his%20footsteps&qid=1461938103&ref_=sr_1_1&s=books&sr=1-1).

I highlighted the other nominees in my January 23 blog entry:  http://schatjesshelves.blogspot.ca/2016/01/nominees-for-2016-edgar-awards.html.


The Best First Novel is The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen which recently won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
The Sympathizer is the story of a man of two minds, someone whose political beliefs clash with his individual loyalties. In dialogue with but diametrically opposed to the narratives of the Vietnam War that have preceded it, this novel offers an important and unfamiliar new perspective on the war: that of a conflicted communist sympathizer.
“It is April 1975, and Saigon is in chaos. At his villa, a general of the South Vietnamese army is drinking whiskey and, with the help of his trusted captain, drawing up a list of those who will be given passage aboard the last flights out of the country. The general and his compatriots start a new life in Los Angeles, unaware that one among their number, the captain, is secretly observing and reporting on the group to a higher-up in the Viet Cong. The Sympathizer is the story of this captain: a man brought up by an absent French father and a poor Vietnamese mother, a man who went to university in America, but returned to Vietnam to fight for the Communist cause. Viet Thanh Nguyen’s astonishing novel takes us inside the mind of this double agent, a man whose lofty ideals necessitate his betrayal of the people closest to him” (http://www.pulitzer.org/winners/viet-thanh-nguyen).

In total, prizes for fifteen categories were awarded.  For the complete list, see http://www.theedgars.com/nominees.html.

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