Strand Magazine Critics Award (2009)

Nominees for the 2009 Strand Magazine
Critics Awards, recognizing excellence in
mystery fiction, are:

Best Novel:

Nine Dragons by Michael Connelly (Little, Brown)
The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death by Charlie Huston (Ballantine)
Life Sentences by Laura Lippman (Morrow)
The Renegades by T. Jefferson Parker (Dutton)
The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters (Riverhead)

Best First Novel:

Beat the Reaper by Josh Bazell (Little, Brown)
The Manual of Detection by Jedediah Berry (Penguin Press)
A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick (Algonquin)

Starvation Lake by Bryan Gruley (Touchstone)

Black Water Rising by Attica Locke (Harper)

Also, the Strand gave its lifetime achievement award to Elmore Leonard "for his huge body of mystery and crime novels."

The winners of the Critics Awards will be announced on July 7.