Using Awards Lists As A RA Tool: Edgar Awards Edition

 This is part of my ongoing series on using Awards Lists as a RA tool. Click here for all posts in the series in reverse chronological order. Click here for the first post which outlines the details how to use awards lists as a RA tool.

The Mystery Writers of America have announced the nominees of the 2023 Edgar Awards here. These are awards for Mystery and Crime, Fiction and Nonfiction, as well as television, all produced in 2022.

The Edgar awards are an EXCELLENT resource, for all of the reasons I normally discuss [see link in the intro], but also because 3 of their awards are straight up readalike awards-- The Mary Higgins Clark Award, the Lillian Jackson BraunAaward, and the Sue Grafton Memorial Award. I rely on these awards to help fans of these authors find new titles and authors.

The Edgar Awards also have a WONDERFUL database. You can easily search back 77 years [!] and because mysteries are so popular in our libraries, there are endless display and suggestion possibilities held in that database. You can search by category, author, year, basically anyway you might want to look for titles, they have you covered.

Explore the database for yourself.

And click here or on the image below to access the full color, PDF press release for this year's nominees.

But before I go and let you get lost down a rabbit hole of amazing suggestions for a wide range of mystery readers, I would like to give a special shout out (and an I told you so) to Gabino Iglesias who is nominated for BEST NOVEL for The Devil Takes You Home. Congrats to him, but again, may I remind you that I was on this book early. I gave it a STAR review in Library Journal in the June 2022 issue. I also did this interview with Iglesias so that all of you could get to know him better because I knew this book was AMAZING. This book was also in my person best of the year list AND I have now begun using The Devil Takes You Home in my general RA training program as the example of a book where the language matters and is in fact, a major appeal factor. You can see some of that discussion in my review of the book. 

All of the nominees are great (and there are more than a few which cross over with Horror). Please take some time to explore this year's nominees and the robust, searchable, backlist.

Click here to access the PDF