Agatha Award Winners

The Agatha Awards honor the traditional mystery – books best typified by the works of Agatha Christie. The genre is generally characterized by mysteries that contain no explicit sex, excessive gore or gratuitous violence. They usually feature an amateur detective, a confined setting and characters who know one another. They are chosen and presented by members of the mystery fan organization Malice Domestic, Ltd., in the following categories: Best Novel, Best First Mystery, Best Short Story, Best Non-Fiction and Best Children’s/Young Adult. For more information, please visist: www.MaliceDomestic.org Here are the winners for Best Novel:

2007 - A Fatal Grace by Louise Penny
Welcome to winter in Three Pines, a picturesque village in Quebec, where the villagers are preparing for a traditional country Christmas, and someone is preparing for murder. No one liked CC de Poitiers. Not her quiet husband, not her spineless lover, not her pathetic daughter—and certainly none of the residents of Three Pines. CC de Poitiers managed to alienate everyone, right up until the moment of her death. When Chief Inspector Armand Gamache is called to investigate, he quickly realizes he's dealing with someone quite extraordinary. CC de Poitiers was electrocuted in the middle of a frozen lake, in front of the entire village, as she watched the annual curling tournament. And yet no one saw anything. With his trademark compassion and courage, Gamache digs beneath the idyllic surface of village life to find the dangerous secrets long buried there. But other dangers are becoming clear to Gamache. As a bitter wind blows into the village, something even more chilling is coming for Gamache himself.

2006 - The Virgin of Small Plains by Nancy Pickard
Small Plains, Kansas, January 23, 1987: In the midst of a deadly blizzard, 18-year-old Rex Shellenberger scours his father's pasture, looking for helpless newborn calves. Then he makes a shocking discovery: the naked, frozen body of a teenage girl, her skin as white as the snow around her. Even dead, she is the most beautiful girl he's ever seen. The mysterious dead girl – the "Virgin of Small Plains" – inspires local reverence: In the two decades following her death, strange miracles visit those who faithfully tend to her grave; some even believe that her spirit can cure deadly illnesses. But what really happened in that snow-covered field?

2005 – The Body In the Snowdrift by Katherine Hall Page
Faith, an upscale caterer, and Tom, her minister husband, join the extended Fairchild clan to celebrate the birthday of Tom's father, Dick, at the struggling Vermont ski resort of Pine Slopes. The death of an old friend of Dick's, local lawyer Boyd Harrison, from an apparent heart attack while skiing, throws a pall over the reunion. The plot thickens as the family gathers. Faith must get to the bottom of the crime spree if she wants to salvage the reunion, prevent the closing of Pine Slopes – and save her own life.

2004 – Birds of a Feather by Jacqueline Winspear
When Maisie Dobbs is hired to find the missing daughter of a wealthy grocery magnate, she discovers that three of the heiress's friends have died violently, leading her to investigate the connection between the disappearance and the murders.

2003 – Letter From Home by Carolyn G. Hart
Working at the local newspaper during the summer of 1944, Gretchen Gilman investigates the mysterious death of Faye Tatum, found dead in her own living room, supposedly murdered by her husband, a World War II veteran.

2002 – You've Got Murder by Donna Andrews
When Zack, a workaholic computer expert, suddenly disappears, his friend Turing, a sentient artificial intelligence personality created by Zack, begins to suspect foul play and turns sleuth to find out what happened to her creator.

2001 – Murphy's Law by Rhys Bowen
Fleeing a false accusation of murder in Ireland, Molly Murphy becomes involved in another murder case when the man who was harassing her on the boat to America turns up dead.

2000 – Storm Track by Margaret Maron
When the embittered wife of a local attorney is found strangled in a motel by her own skimpy undergarments, Judge Deborah Knott searches for clues as a deadly hurricane bears down on the coastal town.

1999 – Mariner's Compass by Earlene Fowler
Benni Harper journeys to Morro Bay to claim an inheritance from Jacob Chandler, a man she does not know, and embarks on a baffling hunt for clues to the mysteries of the past.

1998 – Butchers Hill by Laura Lippman
When Luther Beale, a vigilante who shot a boy, appeals to Baltimore detective Tess Monaghan to help him atone for his crime, she finds herself on a trail of money, mendacity and murder that leads straight to Butchers Hill.

1997 – The Devil in Music by Kate Ross
Julian Kestrel goes to Italy with a friend where he learns about the four-year-old unsolved murder of famed music lover Lodovico Malvezzi, and he decides to try his detecting skills in Milan.

1996 – Up Jumps the Devil by Margaret Maron
Colleton County, North Carolina, judge Deborah Knott embarks on a Thanksgiving Day investigation into the murder of a man from her father's moonshine-making past.

1995 – If I'd Killed Him When I Met Him by Sharyn McCrumb
Donna Jean Morgan's decision to poison her husband in Danville, Virginia, is only one of several murders that occur in the town, and after Donna Jean tells her lawyer Bill MacPherson that her mother was the famous Lethal Lucy Todhunter, Bill calls in his sister Elizabeth to investigate how Lucy poisoned her husband.

1994 – She Walks These Hills by Sharyn McCrumb
Mystery and folklore are skillfully blended in this contemporary Appalachian tale. In the Appalachian wilderness, a pioneer woman murdered in the 18th century meets a present-day escaped convict.

1993 – Dead Man's Island by Carolyn G. Hart
Retired reporter Henrietta O'Dwyer Collins, better known as "Henrie O," is called in by an old lover, arrogant media tycoon Chase Prescott, to investigate a murder plot against him.

1992 – Bootlegger's Daughter by Margaret Maron
Deborah Knott, an attorney attempting to infiltrate the old-boy network of tobacco country by running for district judge, is distracted from the race, and almost eliminated, when she finds new evidence to an old small-town murder.

1991 – I.O.U. by Nancy Pickard
The layered plot of the latest in the Jenny Cain series finds the Port Frederick, Mass., sleuth probing the cause of her recently deceased mother's insanity. Cain discovers that her mother's mental collapse many years before coincided with the bankruptcy of the family business.

1990 – Bum Steer by Nancy Pickard
When a cattle baron leaves a huge ranch in his will to the Port Frederick Civic Foundation, amateur sleuth Jenny Cain leaves Massachusetts for the wilds of Kansas to investigate the bizarre bequest and finds herself probing the brutal murder of the foundation's benefactor.

1989 – Naked Once More by Elizabeth Peters
Selected to write the sequel to a blockbuster novel when its author disappears, Jacqueline Kirby finds herself more absorbed by the mystery of the missing writer than she is by her writing assignment.

1988 – Something Wicked by Carolyn G. Hart
Something has poisoned a local summer stock production of "Arsenic and Old Lace" as cast members stab each other in the back and props are sabotaged. After the lead actor is murdered, Annie Laurence must prove the killer is not her own leading man, Max, and find the real killer.