Daphne du Maurier Awards: 2024 Finalists and Winners

A peaceful day in the garden turns hellish for horticultural expert and mother of three Abby Finch when she discovers the bones of a baby buried among the rose bushes.

She calls the police, but she can’t get a hold of her husband, Howard—probably because he’s secretly off with the mistress he got pregnant. 

Before Abby has a chance to discover his infidelity, disaster strikes again: Howard’s body is found in the same rose bushes, his throat slashed with Abby’s spade. 

Now Abby is the prime suspect, and if she can’t solve this mystery herself, she just may find herself out of the garden and behind bars.

Leo loves Ren; Ren sees him as just a friend. But when Ren needs Leo’s construction expertise to land a new job, Leo only agrees on one condition: Ren will live on-site with him while he teaches her.

As if the prospect of temptation wasn’t terrifying enough, the site itself, an abandoned gothic mansion, gives Ren the creeps. But when the two finally kiss, they awaken something more than passion in the house. 

What does the ghosts of an unrequited lover who haunts the house want? And can Ren and Leo give it to him before its too late? 

After a fire rages through Montreal’s merchant quarters, all suspicions land on Marie-Joseph Angélique, an enslaved Black woman, and her white lover, who is nowhere to be found in the aftermath.

Angélique is sent to jail, and since lawyers are still forbidden from practicing in New France in 1734, Angélique is on her own. 

Despite her fervent protests, everyone thinks Angélique is guilty. But when the county clerk, Philippe Archambeau, arrives to document her case, he becomes convinced she is telling the truth about her innocence.

Philippe has his own suspicions about who really started the fire. If only he can prove them before it is too late for Angélique. 

Six months ago, K-9 Sergeant Jamie Pataglio went undercover at a maximum-security prison to infiltrate the Mancusco crime family.

Getting accepted as one of their own was hard, but keeping up appearances in the real criminal underworld is going to be even harder. And that was before Bella Bianco. 

Bella has a strict no-mobster policy—it’s bad enough her family took over her Italian bistro for their nefarious purposes, the least she can do is not date one of their kind.

But there’s something different about Jamie, and she knows he feels it too. 

The stakes are high. The trust is low. The only way they can ever be together is to take down Bianca’s family. And if they’re caught? Well, they’ll be a lot worse than heartbroken…

Department of Homeland Security Agent Allison Quinn is sent to the Gulf Coast of Texas to investigate a cyber-attack on a luxury cruise liner.

Quinn is determined to find out who orchestrated the attack, but she’s even more determined to solve the lingering mystery of her father’s murder. 

Quinn must balance her personal vendetta with national security when she connects the attack to the Anarchists for Tomorrow, sending her and her partner, Donovan Steele, from Galveston to Costa Luna to Cozumel in search of the hackers threatening not only the ship, but the entire U.S. economy. 

Seven years ago, a dangerous encounter with a serial killer wrought psychological havoc on ex-partners and -colleagues Megan and Jack, causing them to split and Megan to return to her small Inuit village in Alaska. 

While Megan fights nightmares of her fateful last case, Jack throws himself into new ones, hoping to distract himself from the fact that he almost got her killed.

But when a new string of murders perfectly mirrors the ones he and Megan investigated all those years ago, he knows she’s the only person who can help him stop it a second time. 

Jack and Megan must put their old feelings for each other aside to crack the case and avoid the detriment it caused the last time around. But Jack finds old emotions about Megan pushing their way to the surface. And Megan has a secret that could change everything.

Not only was this book chosen the overall winner, it was also awarded first place in the Romantic Suspense Category.

It's no wonder the full series is currently #1 at Barnes and Noble!