The Best in Mystery: Our 2025 Edgar Award Winners
On May 1 in New York City, The Mystery Writers of America (MWA) recognized the 2025 Edgar Allen Poe Award winners, honoring the best in mystery, fiction, nonfiction and television published or produced in 2024.
This year, 3 Penguin Random House titles received awards!
Best Novel
THE IN CROWD by Charlotte Vassell (Doubleday)
An electrifying, whip-smart whodunit about the dastardly misbehavior of London’s high society—where being “in” or “out” can be a life-and-death matter
In the garden of a large Georgian villa in Southwest London, socialites and politicos swap gossip and sip Pimm’s while making snide remarks at each other. Not far from this frivolity, though, a body has been discovered in the River Thames. At first, it appears to be an unfortunate accident, but the death is connected to this gathering of who’s who in a way that may spell scandal.
Best Fact Crime
THE INFERNAL MACHINE: A True Story of Dynamite, Terror, and the Rise of the Modern Detective by Steven Johnson (Crown)
A sweeping account of the anarchists who terrorized the streets of New York and the detective duo who transformed policing to meet the threat—a tale of fanaticism, forensic science, and dynamite from the bestselling author of THE GHOST MAP.
Steven Johnson’s engrossing account of the epic struggle between the anarchist movement and the emerging surveillance state stretches around the world and between two centuries—from Alfred Nobel’s invention of dynamite and the assassination of Czar Alexander II to New York City in the shadow of World War I.
The G.P. Putnam’s Sons Sue Grafton Memorial Award (Presented on behalf of G.P. Putnam’s Sons)
THE COMFORT OF GHOSTS by Jacqueline Winspear (Soho Crime)
Psychologist and investigator Maisie Dobbs unravels a profound mystery from her past in a war-torn nation grappling with its future.
London, 1945: Four adolescent orphans with a dark wartime history are squatting in a vacant Belgravia mansion—the owners having fled London under heavy Luftwaffe bombing. Psychologist and Investigator Maisie Dobbs visits the mansion on behalf of the owners and discovers that a demobilized soldier, gravely ill and reeling from his experiences overseas, has taken shelter with the group.
Congratulations to the winners and their publishers on this outstanding literary accomplishment!