Agatha Awards for Best Mystery Novel

It's spring and Three Pines is reemerging after the harsh winter. But not everything buried should come alive again. Not everything lying dormant should reemerge. But something has. As the villagers prepare for a special celebration, Armand Gamache and Jean-Guy Beauvoir find themselves increasingly worried. A young man and woman have reappeared in the Sûreté du Québec investigators' lives after many years. The two were young children when their...

"The 16th novel by #1 bestselling author Louise Penny finds Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Surete du Quebec investigating a sinister plot in the City of Light. On their first night in Paris, the Gamaches gather as a family for a bistro dinner with Armand's godfather, the billionaire Stephen Horowitz. Walking home together after the meal, they watch in horror as Stephen is knocked down and critically injured in what Gamache knows is no accident,...

When a flood upends life in the tiny town of Pelican, Louisiana during Mardi Gras season-- and deposits a body of a stranger behind the Crozat Plantation B & B-- Maggie Crozat is determined to give the stranger a name and find out why he was murdered. The post-flood recovery has delayed the opening of a controversial exhibit about the little-known Louisiana Orphan Train. And when a judge for the Miss Pelican Mardi Gras Gumbo Queen pageant is shot,...

"When an intricate old map is found stuffed into the walls of the bistro in Three Pines, it at first seems no more than a curiosity. But the closer the villagers look, the stranger it becomes. Given to Armand Gamache as a gift the first day of his new job, the map eventually leads him to shattering secrets. To an old friend and older adversary. It leads the former Chief of Homicide for the Sûreté du Québec to places even he is afraid to go....

A middle-class family's evicted from their suburban home. In digging up the facts on this story and on other foreclosures, reporter Jane Ryland soon learns the truth behind a big-bucks scheme and the surprising players who'll stop at nothing, including murder, to keep their goal a secret.

No outsiders are ever admitted to the monastery of Saint-Gilbert-Entre-les-Loups, hidden deep in the wilderness of Quebec, where two dozen cloistered monks live in peace and prayer. They grow vegetables, they tend chickens, they make chocolate. And they sing. Ironically, for a community that has taken a vow of silence, the monks have become world famous for their glorious voices, raised in ancient chants whose effect on both singer and listener is...

An obsessive historian's quest for the remains of the founder of Quebec, Samuel de Champlain, ends in murder. Could a secret buried with Champlain for nearly 400 years be so dreadful that someone would kill to protect it? Although he is supposed to be on leave, Chief Inspector Gamache cannot walk away from a crime that threatens to ignite long-smoldering tensions between the English and the French. Meanwhile, he is receiving disquieting letters from...

Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Sûreté du Québec is called to investigate the death of a villager at an Easter séance that was held at the Old Hadley House.

On the night of the decade's worst blizzard, a local farm boy discovers the naked body of a beautiful young woman in the snow. Seventeen years later, the Virgin of Small Plains has become a local myth. Strange miracles have visited those who faithfully tend to her grave and Small Plains becomes a haven for those hoping the Virgin will cure them. But soon strange and sinister events unfold. What really happened seventeen years ago? And why are some...

Maisie Dobbs is back and this time she has been hired to find a wealthy grocery magnate's daughter who has fled from home. What seems a simple case at first becomes complicated when Maisie learns of the recent violent deaths of three of the heiress's old friends. Is there a connection between her mysterious disappearance and the murders? Who would kill such charming young women? As Maisie investigates, she discovers that the answers to all her questions...