2006

William Kent Krueger. Mercy Falls

Back on the beat as sheriff of Tamarack County, Cork O'Connor has already seen his beautiful Northwoods jurisdiction through an eventful summer. Now, as the chill of autumn sweeps through the countryside, he's about to face a season of murder, adultery, and deceit that will take him from seedy backwoods bars and humble reservation shanties to the highest and most corrupt echelons of Chicago society.

2005

William Kent Krueger. Blood Hollow

When the corpse of a beautiful high school student is discovered on a hillside four months after her disappearance on New Year's Eve, all evidence points to her boyfriend, local bad boy Solemn Winter Moon. Despite Solemn's self-incriminating decision to go into hiding, Cork O'Connor, Aurora's former sheriff, isn't about to hang the crime on the kid, whom O'Connor is convinced is innocent. In an uphill battle to clear Solemn's name, Cork encounters no shortage of adversity. Some he knows all too well - small-town bigotry and bureaucracy foremost among them. What Cork isn't prepared for is the emergence of a long-held resentment hailing from his own childhood. And when Solemn reappears, claiming to have seen a vision of Jesus Christ in Blood Hollow, the mystery becomes thornier than Cork could ever have anticipated. And that's when the miracles start happening.

2004

Laura Lippman. Every Secret Thing

On a July afternoon two little girls, banished from a birthday party, take a wrong turn onto an unfamiliar Baltimore street - and encounter an abandoned stroller with a baby inside it. Dutiful Alice Manning and unpredictable Ronnie Fuller only want to be helpful, to be good. People like children who are good, Alice thinks. But whatever the girls' real intentions, things go horribly awry and three families are destroyed.

2003

Michael Connelly. City of Bones

The bones of a 12-year-old boy are found scattered in a remote canyon in the Hollywood Hills. For Harry Bosch, the City of Angels becomes the City of Bones. The case awakens police and political machinations, delves into a family's dark history, and opens-up Bosch's own childhood memories.

2002

Dennis Lehane. Mystic River

When Jimmy Marcus's daughter is found dead, his childhood friend Sean Devine is assigned the case. Sean's personal life begins to unravel as his investigation takes him back into a world of violence and pain he thought he'd left behind. His quest also leads him on a collision course with Marcus--a man with his own dark past--and David Boyle, a man who hides monstrous secrets beneath a bland facade.

2001

Val McDermid. A Place of Execution

Winter 1963: two children have disappeared off the streets of Manchester.  In December, another child goes missing. For the young George Bennett, a newly promoted inspector, it is the beginning of his most difficult and harrowing case. Decades later, Journalist Catherine Heathcote is forced to reinvestigate the past when Bennett pulls the plug on a book about the case. The results of her investigation turn the world upside down.

2000

Peter Robinson. In a Dry Season

A playful child wandering in remains unearths a human skeleton that forensics determine belonged to a woman who appears to have been murdered and hidden beneath the floor of an old building.

1999

Michael Connelly. Blood Work

Former FBI agent Terry McCaleb is enjoying a quiet retirement following his heart transplant operation, when he meets the sister of the woman whose heart now beats in his chest and learns that the donor wasn't killed in an accident, but was murdered, leading McCaleb to embark on an investigation of the donor's murder.

1998

S J Rozan. No Colder Place

When a Manhattan construction site is plagued by an escalating series of thefts and misfortunes, the contractors suspect that they've been targeted by one of their own subcontractors' employees. Brought in to investigate, P.I. Bill Smith goes undercover on the site as a bricklayer - a profession he hasn't practiced for more than twenty-years - to try to uncover the truth about the suspect as well as the troubles on the job site.

1997

Michael Connelly. The Poet

Jack is a reporter for the Rocky Mountain News. When his twin brother Sean, a homicide detective, kills himself, Jack begins to research cop suicides for a series of articles he plans to write. It's his way of dealing with the grief. As he delves into the phenomenon, however, a disturbing pattern emerges and he soon suspects a serial killer is at work--a devious cop killer who's left a trail of "suicide" notes drawn from the poems of Edgar Allan Poe.

1996

Mary Willis Walker. Under the Beetle's Cellar

An Austin school bus driver and eleven of his young charges are kidnapped by religious fanatics and held in their fortified compound for 46 days.

1995

Sharyn McCrumb. She Walks These Hills

The Appalachian community of Dark Hollow face two fears: a roaming ghost and a released convicted murderer returning to find his ex-wife.

1994

Marcia Muller. Wolf in the Shadows

Popular San Francisco private eye Sharon McCone discovers dangerous surprises when she searches for her secretive missing lover, who apparently has connections in the Mexican underworld.

1993

Margaret Maron. Bootlegger's Daughter

Unconventional, North Carolina attorney Deborah Knott has done the unthinkable: tossed her hat into the heated race for district judge of old-boy-ruled Colleton County. While she's defending indigent clients and reeling in voters, the young daughter of Janie Whitehead begs her to investigate her mother's never-solved eighteen-year-old murder. Deborah takes on the case: following twisted Southern bloodlines; turning up dangerous, decades-old secrets; and inspiring someone to go on an all-out campaign to derail her future . . .

1992

Peter Lovesey. The Last Detective

Irascible, corpulent, cynical Chief Superintendent Peter Diamond of the Avon and Somerset murder squad attributes Britain's decline as a world power to the abolition of capital punishment in 1964. Spurning computer gadgetry, he sticks to common sense, index cards and gumshoeing.

1991

Sue Grafton. "G" is for Gumshoe

A rich, complex, and gripping tale in which Kinsey's grit is tested to its utmost as she unearths the gruesome truth about a long-buried betrayal and, in the process, comes face-to-face with the grisly fact of her own mortality. "G" is for guilt and guile, for greed and grief and the Grim Reaper.

1990

Sarah Caudwell. The Siren's Sang of Murder

1989

Thomas Harris. The Silence of the Lambs

On the loose is a psychotic killer; locked away is a psychopathic madman. To catch one, the FBI needs the other.

1988

Tony Hillerman. Skinwalkers

Navajo Tribal Police Officer Jim Chee and Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn investigate murders that lead them into the mystical world of Navajo witchcraft.

1987

Sue Grafton. "C" is for Corpse

After a near-fatal car accident, a young man asks Kinsey to protect him. When he is promptly murdered, Kinsey vows to find the killer.

1986

Sue Grafton. "B" is for Burglar

A house destroyed by arson. A brutally murdered woman. A missing lynx coat. An apartment burgled of valueless papers, another ransacked in a melee of mindless destruction. And more murder. As Millhone digs deeper into the case, she find herself in a nightmarish hall of mirrors in which reality is distorted by illusion and nothing except danger is quite what it seems.

Best Novel of the Century (2000)

Daphne Du Maurier. Rebecca

Rebecca has been dead for several months, but her sinister influence is still very much alive at Manderley, as Maxim de Winter's second wife soon comes to realize.

Best Series of the Century (2000)

Agatha Christie. Hercule Poirot Mysteries

Best Writer of the Century (2000)

Agatha Christie