STO: Gold Dagger Award

"Savannah may appear to be "some town out of a fable," with its vine flowers, turreted mansions, and ghost tours that romanticize the city's history. But look deeper and you'll uncover secrets, past and present, that tell a more sinister tale. It's the story at the heart of George Dawes Green's chilling new novel, The Kingdoms of Savannah. It begins quietly on a balmy Southern night as some locals gather at Bo Peep's, one of the town's favorite watering...

"Thirty years ago, a teenage Vincent King was sent to prison. But now, he's served his sentence and is returning to his hometown. The hometown where his childhood best friend, Walk, is now the chief of police. The town where his childhood sweetheart, Star Radley, still lives. The same Star Radley whose sister he killed. Duchess, Star's daughter, is a self-proclaimed outlaw. She needs to be. Who else is going to take care of her and her five-year-old...

"A small town hides big secrets in The Dry. After getting a note demanding his presence, Federal Agent Aaron Falk arrives in his hometown for the first time in decades to attend the funeral of his best friend, Luke. Twenty years ago when Falk was accused of murder, Luke was his alibi. Falk and his father fled under a cloud of suspicion, saved from prosecution only because of Luke's steadfast claim that the boys had been together at the time of the...

"Audie was sentenced to 10 years for a robbery in which four people died, including two members of his gang. Five million dollars has never been recovered from the robbery, and everybody believes Audie knows where the money is. For 10 years Audie has been beaten, stabbed, and threatened by inmates and guards, all desperate to know the secret. The day before he is due to be released, Audie suddenly vanishes. The hunt for Audie, and the money, is on....

London's Slough House is where disgraced MI5 spies go to while away what's left of their washed-up careers. Maybe they messed up an op badly and can't be trusted anymore. Maybe they got in the way of an ambitious colleague and had the rug yanked out from under them. Maybe they just got too dependent on the bottle--not unusual in this line of work. But they have one thing in common: they all want to be back in the action. And they'll do anything to...

For a few months in the late 1970s, Larry, the child of lower-middle-class white parents, and Silas, the son of a poor, single black mother, stepped outside their circumstances to become pals. Then tragedy struck: Larry took a girl on a date, and she was never heard from again. Larry never confessed, but all eyes rested on him. The incident broke their friendship, and then Silas left town. Twenty years later Larry, a solitary mechanic, and Silas,...

"Father Anselm lays bare a gripping story of the cruelty and heroism of the First World War. In the Larkwood Priory, secrets are rare. So Father Anselm is deeply dismayed when a mysterious visitor to the monastery raises an allegation against Father Herbert Moore, the recently deceased founding father of the Priory and the man who shaped Anselm's own vocation. The claim is inconceivable, but Anselm soon learns that Herbert did indeed have long-buried...

"Shaken by a scrape with death, [Joe Cashin's] posted away from the Homicide Squad to the quiet town on the South Australian coast where he grew up. Carrying physical scars and more than a little guilt, he spends his time playing the country cop, walking his dogs, and thinking about how it all was before. But when a prominent local is attacked in his own home and left for dead, Cashin is thrust into what becomes a murder investigation. The evidence...

When elderly Ailsa Lockyer-Fox is found dead in her garden, dressed only in nightclothes and with bloodstains on the ground near her body, the finger of suspicion points at her wealthy husband, Colonel James Lockyer-Fox. A coroner's investigation deems it death by natural causes, but the gossip surrounding James refuses to go away. Friendless and alone, James and his reclusive behavior begins to alarm his attorney, whose concern deepens when he discovers...