Reading List · Crime fiction
The Edgar Allan Poe Awards, known as the Edgars, are presented each spring by the Mystery Writers of America, founded in 1945. The Best Novel category was added in 1953 and first went to Charlotte Jay's Beat Not the Bones in 1954. Eligible books are mysteries first published in the United States in the previous year. The 2026 ceremony in New York was the 80th annual Edgar Awards, and Best Novel went to Robert Crais.
By Lisanne Swart · 73 winners since 1954 · Crime fiction · All literary prizes · Last reviewed 28 October 2026
Click a title to read about it further down ↓
The 80th Edgar Awards were presented in New York on 29 April 2026, when The Big Empty by Robert Crais won Best Novel. Dates for the 2027 nominations and ceremony were not found in the sources consulted.
Quick answer
The Edgar Award for Best Novel is the top novel prize of the Mystery Writers of America, given every year since 1954 and named after Edgar Allan Poe. The latest winner is The Big Empty by Robert Crais, chosen at the 80th Edgar Awards in New York in April 2026.
How this page chooses
The timeline at the top lists every winner for Best Novel, all 73 of them. The latest fifteen have their own entry further down, oldest first; the titles in the timeline that you can click are those.
Under each book is a line of plain fact about the book or its author, and nothing that cannot be checked.
Oldest first. The line in red is a fact about the book or its author, not an opinion about it.
The shop links on this page go straight to the shop. They are not affiliate links and I earn nothing if you buy.
A carjacker drives off with a child in the back seat, and Detective Inspector Jack Caffery comes to realise that the child, not the car, was the real target.
Mo Hayder, a British novelist who died in 2021, sold more than 6.5 million copies of her novels.
Joe Coughlin, a small-time Boston criminal, rises through the Prohibition-era underworld, a climb that takes him to Tampa, Florida, and on to Cuba, where he builds a criminal empire.
Adapted as a 2016 Warner Bros. film written and directed by Ben Affleck, who also played Joe Coughlin.
Thirteen-year-old Frank Drum, son of the town's pastor, narrates a summer in his small Minnesota town after a boy's body is found near a railway trestle, the first of several deaths that strain his family.
A stand-alone novel outside Krueger's Cork O'Connor series; it also won the 2013 Midwest Booksellers Choice Award.
Retired detective Bill Hodges is drawn back into an unsolved case when he receives taunting letters from Brady Hartsfield, the man who drove a stolen Mercedes into a crowd at a job fair.
First book of King's Bill Hodges trilogy, later adapted as a television series.
In 1952 Kentucky, Annie Holleran is caught up in a local superstition and a long feud between her family and the Baines family, rooted in a 1936 hanging for murder.
Lori Roy had already won the Edgar for Best First Novel by an American Author in 2012 with Bent Road.
Struggling painter Scott Burroughs survives a private plane crash off Martha's Vineyard and rescues the young son of a television network owner, while investigators try to establish what caused the crash.
Noah Hawley created and wrote the FX television series Fargo.
Darren Matthews, an African-American Texas Ranger from East Texas, investigates the death of a Chicago lawyer in the small town of Lark, along Highway 59.
Followed in 2019 by a second Highway 59 novel, Heaven, My Home.
Joe King Oliver, a former NYPD investigator who was framed and jailed, now runs a small Brooklyn detective agency and takes on a death-row case while trying to find out who set him up.
Walter Mosley was named a Mystery Writers of America Grand Master in 2016.
English teacher Clare Cassidy, who is researching the long-dead writer R. M. Holland, is drawn into a murder investigation when a colleague is found dead beside a note reading “Hell is empty”.
The novel embeds a complete short story, “The Stranger”, by its fictional author R. M. Holland.
Nine-year-old Jai, a fan of television crime shows, lives in a Delhi slum near the end of the Purple Line and sets out with two friends to find a classmate who has vanished.
Deepa Anappara's debut novel; it was also longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction.
In November 1941 Honolulu detective Joe McGrady is assigned a brutal double murder linked to a well-connected family, a case that is overtaken by the attack on Pearl Harbor.
The story moves from Honolulu to Hong Kong and Japan during the Second World War.
Ansel Packer, a serial killer on death row, has twelve hours left to live; his final day alternates with the stories of his mother, his former wife's twin sister and a state police investigator.
Structured around the last twelve hours before an execution, told largely through the women connected to the killer.
In wartime New Iberia, Louisiana, an enslaved woman named Hannah Laveau and a schoolmistress go into hiding after the death of a man who abused Hannah, while officers on both sides of the war are drawn into the violence.
Burke's third Edgar for Best Novel, after Black Cherry Blues (1990) and Cimarron Rose (1998).
DI Caius Beauchamp of the Metropolitan Police reopens two cold cases: a decades-old pension-fund theft, revived when a woman is found drowned in the Thames, and a teenager's disappearance from a boarding school.
The second Caius Beauchamp novel, after The Other Half (2023).
Private investigator Elvis Cole and his partner Joe Pike take on a cryptic case that brings them up against an unpredictable killer, in a thriller published by G. P. Putnam's Sons in 2025.
Crais, an MWA Grand Master since 2014, had earlier Edgar nominations for The Monkey's Raincoat, Free Fall and L.A. Requiem.
Mystery Writers of America was established in 1945, and its first Edgar Awards dinner was held in 1946, when the Best First Novel award went to Watchful at Night by Julian Fast. Winners that first year received a leather-bound edition of Poe; the small ceramic Poe statuettes, designed by Peter Williams, arrived in the third year.
A Best Novel category was added only after debate over whether one book a year could fairly be singled out. Charlotte Jay, the pen name of Geraldine Halls, won the first award in 1954 for Beat Not the Bones, set in post-war New Guinea. Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye followed in 1955.
The Edgar for Best Novel is open to mysteries first published in the United States in the previous calendar year, and the list of winners includes many non-American writers, from John le Carré and Dick Francis to Ian Rankin and Charlotte Vassell. Debut novels by American authors compete in a separate category, Best First Novel by an American Author, and paperback originals have their own award.
Dick Francis won Best Novel three times (1970, 1981, 1996), as did James Lee Burke (1990, 1998, 2024). T. Jefferson Parker and John Hart have each won twice. The Mystery Writers of America also names Grand Masters for lifetime achievement; Agatha Christie was the first in 1955, and the 2026 honorees were Donna Andrews and Lee Child.
The Edgar Allan Poe Awards are the annual prizes of the Mystery Writers of America, covering crime fiction, non-fiction and television. Best Novel, first given in 1954, is the flagship category.
The Big Empty by Robert Crais, an Elvis Cole and Joe Pike novel, won at the 80th Edgar Awards in New York on 29 April 2026.
The In Crowd by the British writer Charlotte Vassell won in 2025.
Charlotte Jay won the first Best Novel award in 1954 for Beat Not the Bones, set in post-war New Guinea.
Dick Francis and James Lee Burke have each won three times. T. Jefferson Parker and John Hart have each won twice.
The award is named after Edgar Allan Poe, whom the Mystery Writers of America calls the father of the detective story. Winners receive a small ceramic statuette of Poe.
Mystery novels first published in the United States during the previous calendar year. Writers of any nationality have won.
Nominees are usually announced in January; the 2026 list appeared on 20 January 2026, ahead of the April ceremony.
Winner list last verified 28 October 2026.
The notes on this page are all mine,
and the books are all theirs.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
If this shelf interested you, the full bookshelf has more: reading lists by theme, author guides, and notes on what is actually worth your time.
Browse the full bookshelf Get book recommendationsThe Night Owl Book Finder
