The Best in Mystery: Our 2026 Edgar Awards Winners
Mystery Writers of America recently announced the winners of the 2026 Edgar Allen Poe Awards, honoring outstanding mystery fiction, nonfiction and television published or produced in 2025. We’re proud to share that three Penguin Random House titles were recognized across six categories!
Held at the Mariott Marquis Times Square Hotel, this year’s ceremony marked the 80th Edgar Awards and the 217th anniversary of the birth of Edgar Allan Poe. The Edgar® Awards are judged by volunteer committees of professional writers, who dedicate many hours to the process.
These recognitions celebrate the breadth and impact of our authors’ storytelling across the mystery genre. Congratulations to our nominees, winners, and the teams who worked on the titles for this well-deserved honor!
Our 2026 Edgar Allen Poe Awards
BEST NOVEL
Private investigator Elvis Cole and his enigmatic partner, Joe Pike, face a cryptic case and a terrifying, unpredictable killer in this twisty, satisfying thriller from #1 New York Times bestselling author Robert Crais.
Traci Beller was thirteen when her father disappeared in the sleepy town of Rancha, not far from Los Angeles. The evidence says Tommy Beller abandoned his family, but Traci never believed it. The police couldn’t find her dad and neither could the detectives her mother hired, but now, ten years later, Traci is a super-popular influencer with millions of followers and the money to hire a new detective: Elvis Cole.
BEST FIRST NOVEL BY AN AMERICAN AUTHOR
As the unofficial “problem solver” for Silicon Valley’s most ruthless venture capitalist, Mackenzie Clyde’s an expert at wrangling tech bros and their multimillions—even as her own shot at a windfall remains just out of reach.
But now she’s playing for higher stakes. Because the lightning-rod CEO of tech’s hottest startup has just been murdered, leaving behind billions in “dead money” frozen in his will—and Mackenzie’s boss is the company’s chief investor.
BEST FACT CRIME
From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Prairie Fires comes a terrifying true-crime history of serial killers in the Pacific Northwest and beyond
Caroline Fraser grew up in the shadow of Ted Bundy, the most notorious serial murderer of women in American history, surrounded by his hunting grounds and mountain body dumps, in the brooding landscape of the Pacific Northwest. But in the 1970s and ’80s, Bundy was just one perpetrator amid an uncanny explosion of serial rape and murder across the region. Why so many? Why so weirdly and nightmarishly gruesome? Why the senseless rise and then sudden fall of an epidemic of serial killing?