Killer Nashville announced the finalists for the 2015 Silver Falchion Award.
The Killer Nashville Silver Falchion Award honors the best mystery books available to a North American audience. Only books published for the first time in 2015 may be nominated.
The finalists for best young adult novel are Elle Cosimano’s Nearly Gone, Kimberly G. Giarratano’s Grunge Gods and Graveyards, Hollis Gillespie’s Unaccompanied Minor, S.J. Laidlaw’s The Voice Inside My Head, and Kate Brauning’s How We Fall.
In Elle Cosimano’s Nearly Gone, Nearly Boswell knows how to keep secrets. When a serial killer starts attacking students and leaves her cryptic ads in the newspaper, she decides to confide in the new guy at school – a reformed bad boy working for the police, who is doing surveillance on her.
In Kimberly G. Giarratano’s Grunge Gods and Graveyards, Lainey Bloom’s senior year is a disaster: she might not graduate, she’s bullied, and everybody blames her for the death of the mean girl’s boyfriend. But when his ghost shows up, he begs Lainey to help her solve his murder.
Hollis Gillespie’s Unaccompanied Minor follows April May Manning, whose father dies in a car crash and whose mother remarries an abusive jerk – one that locks her mother in a psychiatric hospital. So April flees, living on airplanes, relying on flight crews who know her situation – but when her plane is hijacked, with her mother’s husband on board, it’s up to April and another unaccompanied minor to fight the hijackers.
In S.J. Laidlaw’s The Voice Inside My Head, seventeen-year-old Luke’s older sister, Pat, has always been his moral compass, like a voice inside his head, every time he has a decision to make. So when Pat disappears on a tiny island off the coast of Honduras and the authorities claim she’s drowned – despite the fact that they can’t produce a body – Luke heads to Honduras to find her because he knows something the authorities don’t. From the moment of her disappearance, Pat’s voice has become real.
In Kate Brauning’s How We Fall, ever since Jackie moved to her uncle’s sleepy farming town, she’s been flirting—a bit too much—with her cousin, Marcus. She pushes away the inevitable consequences of their friendship until her best friend, Ellie, disappears, and the police suspect foul play. Just when she needs him most, Marcus falls for the new girl in town—forcing Jackie to give a name to the secret summer hours she’s spent with him. As she watches the mystery around Ellie’s disappearance start to break, Jackie has to face that she’s fallen in love at an impossible time with an impossible boy. And she can’t let Marcus, or Ellie, go.
Who would you want to win? Sound off in the comments!
