Dilys Award

The Dilys Award was a literary award given out each year from 1992 to 2014, by the members of the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association. It was given to the mystery title of the year which the member booksellers have most enjoyed selling. The Independent Mystery Booksellers Association (IMBA) is an association of retail businesses that are either wholly or substantially devoted to the sale of mystery books.

The Dilys Award is named after Dilys Winn (1939-2016), who founded bookstore Murder Ink in 1972 in Manhattan, the first specialty bookseller of mystery books in the United States. Winn sold her interest in Murder Ink in 1975, and after a move to the area around Broadway, the store eventually closed in 2006. Winn, herself, eventually moved to Key West, Florida, in the 1990s, where she opened another mystery-focused bookstore, Miss Marple’s Parlour. Winn also contributed hundreds of reviews of mystery novels to the journal Kirkus Reviews, before retiring from that role in 2013. With the disappearance of more and more independent mystery booksellers in early 2000s, the IMBA lost ground and faded away, taking The Dilys Award with it, in 2014. It’s namesake, Dilys Winn, passed away on February 5, 2016.

All books on this list which are owned by Lincoln City Libraries are hotlinked to their entries in our library catalog, so that you may check on their current availability. If you see a title on this list that is not hotlinked to our collection, please consider ordering it through our Interlibrary Loan department.

2014

William Kent Krueger
Ordinary Grace

2013

Peter Robinson
Before the Poison

2012

R.J. Rozan
Ghost Hero

2011

Louise Penny
Bury Your Dead

2010

Alan Bradley
The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

2009

Sean Chercover
Trigger City

2008

William Kent Krueger
Thunder Bay

2007

Louise Penny
Still Life

2006

Colin Cotterill
Thirth-Three Teeth

2005

Jeff Lindsay
Darkly Dreaming Dexter

2004

Jasper Fforde
Lost in a Good Book

2003

Julia Spencer-Fleming
In the Bleak Midwinter

2002

Dennis Lehane
Mystic River

2001

Val McDermid
A Place of Execution

2000

Robert Crais
L.A. Requiem

1999

Dennis Lehane
Gone, Baby, Gone

1998

Janet Evanovich
Three to Get Deadly

1997

Michael Connelly
The Poet

1996

Michael Connelly
The Last Coyote

1995

Janet Evanovich
One for the Money

1994

Peter Hoeg
Smilla’s Sense of Snow

1993

John Dunning
Booked to Die

1992

Carl Hiaasen
Native Tongue

1991

Last updated March 2022 sdc