Finally! I just posted the Agatha Award Nominees for 2008, and there are a lot of our favorite Cozy Mystery Authors on the lists of the wonderful nominated authors and books. I was surprised to see that I already had pages for all of the five Best First Novels‘ authors! (Wow! I had first heard of them from Cozy Mystery site readers’ recommendations.)

It didn’t surprise me that I already had pages for the five authors of the five Best Novels‘, though. They are some of the most popular authors in the Cozy Mystery genre.

Here is the complete list of the 2008 Agatha Award nominees. CONGRATULATIONS TO ALL!!!

(The winners will be announced at the 2009 Malice Domestic convention – at the beginning of May.)

Where has the time gone!? I can’t believe that I am this far behind on posting the 2008 Derringer Award Winners, the 2008 Nero Award Nominees and the 2008 Anthony Award Nominees. (I will be annotating the winners of the Anthony Awards after they are announced this weekend.)

I started working on all of these awards a while back, then put them on hold for a while, and just yesterday I decided that I really did have to get them posted on my Awards pages.

I saw a few authors who look familiar, and then of course, there are authors who are not yet familiar names for me. (I know that I have said this before, but the Malice Domestic Agatha Awards are really the awards that include most of our cozy authors… which makes perfect sense, since they are actually named for the woman with the name which is most synonymous with cozy mysteries.)

Whew! What a relief it is to finally get this done! I hope that you find some authors who you think that you might enjoy reading amongst all of them!

I finally got the 2008 Edgar Awards listed. The winners were announced the first week of May. I am sorry that this has taken me so long to post… It feels like I just posted the Agatha Awards! Well, I did… Since these awards are given (roughly) one month apart.

As the names of the awards imply, the Agatha Awards are for books that definitely lean more toward the Cozy Mystery Book genre… the Agatha Christie types of books. However, the Edgars should appeal to even the most devoted cozy readers. I think that if you take a look at the different Edgar Award categories, you will see that there are lots of really great mysteries, written by really terrific mystery authors.

I have tried to highlight all of the nominees and winners who have a page on the Cozy Mystery Site… If you do a comparison between the Agatha Award pages and the Edgar Award pages you will see that most of the Agatha winners and nominees have pages on this site. For example, a quick look at the Agatha Award Best Novel page and the Edgar Award Best Novel page will show you what I mean.

I wonder how many cozy mystery readers would be able to answer the "How was your weekend?" question with "Fantastic!" "Fabulous!" "Wonderful!" "Exciting!" "Interesting!" "Phenomenal!" "Cozy!"??? If you were lucky enough to have been in the Washington, D.C. area (Arlington, VA)… at the  Marriott Crystal Gateway April 25-27 (2008)… then you probably would be able to answer that question with just such words.

The Malice Domestic 2008 took place last weekend, and, for those of you who don’t know… it is "the cozy mystery book" convention of the year. All sorts of cozy mystery authors, publishers, and readers attend this particular convention, at which the yearly Agatha Awards are chosen. (Remember… the 2008 convention gave out awards for the 2007 year. I know that it’s confusing, but I have posted the winners as the 2007 winners, since that is the year their works were published, even though they had to wait until 2008 to receive the awards.)I have included the winners and nominees on my Agatha Awards pages… divided into the different categories:

Best Novel
Best First Novel
Best Short Story
Best Non-Fiction
Best Children’s/Young Adult
Malice Domestic Award for Lifetime Achievement
Malice Domestic Poirot Award

I think that you will recognize a lot of the names!

***Click here to go back to the Mystery Book Awards page.***