Edgar Award Winners for 2014

The Edgar awards are chosen by the Mystery Writers of America and the winners were announced on May 1, 2014. This year the Grandmaster awards went to Carolyn Hart and Robert Crais.

This year the award for best book went to: Ordinary Grace by William Kent Krueger 

Looking back at a tragic event that occurred during his thirteenth year, Frank Drum explores how a complicated web of secrets, adultery, and betrayal shattered his Methodist family and their small 1961 Minnesota community.

The award for best paperback original went to: The Wicked Girls by Alex Marwood

A gritty, psychological thriller that asks the question: How well can you know anyone? On a fateful summer morning in 1986, two eleven-year-old girls meet for the first time. By the end of the day, they will both be charged with murder. Twenty-five years later, journalist Kirsty Lindsay is reporting on a series of sickening attacks on young female tourists in a seaside vacation town when her investigation leads her to interview carnival cleaner Amber Gordon. For Kirsty and Amber, it's the first time they've seen each other since that dark day so many years ago. Now with new, vastly different lives--and unknowing families to protect--will they really be able to keep their wicked secret hidden? 

Best first novel by an American author: Red Sparrow by Jason Matthews

Russian state intelligence officer Dominika Egorova struggles to survive in the bureaucracy of post-Soviet intelligence. Drafted against her will to become a trained seductress in the service, Dominika is assigned to operate against Nathaniel Nash, a CIA officer who handles the CIA's most sensitive penetration of Russian intelligence. The two young intelligence officers collide in an atmosphere of tradecraft, deception, and a forbidden spiral of carnal attraction that threatens their careers. 

Best fact crime award went to: The Hour of Peril: The Secret Plot to Murder Lincoln Before the Civil War  by Daniel Stashower  

Two-time Edgar award-winning author Daniel Stashower uncovers the riveting true story of the "Baltimore Plot," an audacious conspiracy to assassinate Abraham Lincoln on the eve of the Civil War. 

For the full list of the Edgar winners and nominees for each category, click here.