2009 Best Young Adult
John Green. Paper Towns

One month before graduating from his Central Florida high school, Quentin "Q" Jacobsen basks in the predictable boringness of his life until the beautiful and exciting Margo Roth Spiegelman, Q's neighbor and classmate, takes him on a midnight adventure and then mysteriously disappears.

2009 Best Juvenile
Tony Abbott. The Postcard

While in St. Petersburg, Florida, to help clean out his recently-deceased grandmother's house, thirteen-year-old Jason finds an old postcard which leads him on an adventure that blends figures from an old, unfinished detective story with his family's past.

2008 Best Young Adult

Tedd Arnold.  Rat Life

After developing an unusual friendship with a young Vietnam War veteran in 1972, fourteen-year-old Todd discovers his writing talent and solves a murder mystery.

2008 Best Juvenile

Katherine Marsh.  The Night Tourist

After fourteen-year-old classics prodigy Jack Perdu has a near fatal accident he meets Euri, a young ghost who introduces him to New York's Underworld, where those who died in New York reside until they are ready to move on, and Jack vows to find his dead mother there.

2007 Best Young Adult

Robin Merrow MacCready.  Buried

When her alcoholic mother goes missing, seventeen-year-old Claudine begins to spin out of control, despite her attempts to impose order on every aspect of her life.

2007 Best Juvenile

Andrew Clements.  Room One:  A Mystery or Two

Ted Hammond, the only sixth grader in his small Nebraska town's one-room schoolhouse, searches for clues to the disappearance of a homeless family.

2006 Best Young Adult

John Feinstein.  Last Shot

After winning a basketball reporting contest, eighth graders Stevie and Susan Carol are sent to cover the Final Four tournament, where they discover that a talented player is being blackmailed into throwing the final game.

2006 Best Juvenile

D. James Smith.  The Boys of San Joaquin

In a small California town in 1951, twelve-year-old Paolo and his deaf cousin Billy get caught up in a search for money missing from the church collection, leading them to complicated discoveries about themselves, other family members, and townspeople they thought they knew.

2005 Best Young Adult

Dorothy & Thomas Hoobler.  In Darkness, Death

In eighteenth-century Japan, young Seikei becomes involved with a ninja as he helps Judge Ooka, his foster father, investigate the murder of a samurai.

2005 Best Juvenile

Blue Balliett.  Chasing Vermeer

When seemingly unrelated and strange events start to happen and a precious Vermeer painting disappears, eleven-year-olds Petra and Calder combine their talents to solve an international art scandal.

2004 Best Young Adult

Graham McNamee.  Acceleration

Stuck working in the Lost and Found of the Toronto Transit Authority for the summer, seventeen-year-old Duncan finds the diary of a serial killer and sets out to stop him.

2004 Best Juvenile

Phyllis Reynolds Naylor.  Bernie Magruder and the Bats in the Belfry

Many residents of Middleburg, Indiana, are already going crazy from the ever-ringing church bells and now, after a bat is spotted in the hotel run by Bernie's family, they worry that the dangerous Indiana Aztec bat has finally arrived.

2003 Best Young Adult

Daniel Parker.  The Wessex Papers, Vols. 1-3

2003 Best Juvenile

Helen Ericson.  Harriet Spies Again

Harriet M. Welsch has just received the best news of her 11th year--Ole Golly is coming back! But the circumstances of her return are unclear. Where is George Waldenstein?

2002 Best Young Adult

Tim Wynne-Jones.  The Boy in the Burning House

Trying to solve the mystery of his father's disappearance from their rural Canadian community, fourteen-year-old Jim gets help from the disturbed Ruth Rose, who suspects her stepfather, a local pastor.

2002 Best Juvenile

Lillian Eige.  Dangling

Eleven-year-old Ben recalls his relationship with his unusual friend Ring, who walked into the river and disappeared one day.

2001 Best Young Adult

Elaine Marie Alphin.  Counterfeit Son

When serial killer Hank Miller is killed in a shoot-out with police, his abused son Cameron adopts the identity of one of his father's victims in order to find a better life.

2001 Best Juvenile

Frances O'Roark Dowell.  Dovey Coe

When accused of murder in her North Carolina mountain town in 1928, Dovey Coe, a stronged-willed twelve-year-old girl, comes to a new understanding of others, including her deaf brother.

2000 Best Young Adult

Vivian Vande Velde.  Never Trust a Dead Man

Wrongly convicted of murder and punished by being sealed in the tomb with the dead man, seventeen-year-old Selwyn enlists the help of a witch and the resurrected victim to find the true killer.

2000 Best Juvenile

Elizabeth McDavid Jones.  The Night Flyers

In 1918, caring for her family's homing pigeons while her father is away fighting in World War I, twelve-year-old Pam comes to suspect that a mysterious stranger in her small North Carolina town is a German spy.

1999 Best Young Adult

Nancy Werlin.  The Killer's Cousin

After being acquitted of murder, seventeen-year-old David goes to stay with relatives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he finds himself forced to face his past as he learns more about his strange young cousin Lily.

1999 Best Juvenile

Wendelin Van Draanen.  Sammy Keyes and the Hotel Thief

Thirteen-year-old Sammy's penchant for speaking her mind gets her in trouble when she involves herself in the investigation of a robbery at the "seedy" hotel across the street from the seniors' building where she is living with her grandmother.

1998 Best Young Adult

Will Hobbs.  Ghost Canoe

Fourteen-year-old Nathan, fishing with the Makah in the Pacific Northwest, finds himself holding a vital clue when a mysterious stranger comes to town looking for Spanish treasure.

1998 Best Juvenile

Barbara Brooks Wallace.  Sparrows in the Scullery

Despite horrible conditions at the boys' home where kidnappers left him, eleven-year-old Colley, an orphan, finds a reason and a way to live, along with comradeship.

1997 Best Young Adult

Willo Davis Roberts.  Twisted Summer

Fourteen-year-old Cici hopes for a romantic summer at the beach but instead finds herself trying to solve a murder which had occurred there the previous year.

1997  Best Juvenile

Dorothy Reynolds Miller.  The Clearing

While spending the summer with her cousins in rural Pennsylvania, eleven-year-old Amanda becomes involved with a long-ago tragedy that has impacted the lives of many local residents.

1996 Best Young Adult

Rob MacGregor.  Prophecy Rock

Will Lansa visits his father, who is the tribal police chief on the Hopi reservation in northern Arizona, and learns about some sacred Hopi traditions while he helps investigate several murders.

1996 Best Juvenile

Nancy Springer.  Looking for Jamie Bridger

Fourteen-year-old Jamie Bridger is determined to find out who her real parents were in spite of opposition from the grandparents who raised her, but her search ends in a bittersweet discovery.

1995 Best Young Adult

Nancy Springer.  Toughing It

Sixteen-year-old Shawn must deal with his loss and anger after witnessing his older brother's murder.

1995 Best Juvenile

Willo Davis Roberts.  The Absolutely True Story...:  How I Visited

Yellowstone Park with the Terrible Rupes   What they thought would be a dream vacation turns into a nightmare for twelve-year-old Lewis and his twin sister Alison, when they accompany their irresponsible new neighbors on a trip to Yellowstone Park and are chased by two mysterious men.

1994 Best Young Adult

Joan Lowery Nixon.  The Name of the Game Was Murder

When she visits her great-uncle, a successful and self-centered author, at his fortress-like home on Catalina Island, fifteen-year-old Samantha becomes involved in his manipulative game that leads to murder.

1994 Best Juvenile

Barbara Brooks Wallace.  The Twin in the Tavern

A young orphan, afraid of being sent to the workhouse, finds himself at the mercy of the unsavory owner of a tavern in Alexandria, Virginia, while he tries to solve the mystery surrounding his past and a missing twin.

1993 Best Young Adult

Chap Reaver.  A Little Bit Dead

In 1876, after interfering with the attempted lynching of a young Yahi Indian named Shanti, eighteen-year-old Reece finds his own life in danger and becomes intimately involved in the future of Shanti's people.

1993 Best Juvenile

Eve Bunting.  Coffin on a Case

Twelve-year-old Henry Coffin, the son of a private investigator, helps a gorgeous high school girl in her dangerous attempt to find her kidnapped mother.

1992 Best Young Adult

Theodore Taylor.  The Weirdo

Seventeen-year-old Chip Clewt fights to save the black bears in the Powhaten National Wildlife Refuge.

1992 Best Juvenile

Betsy Byars.  Wanted...Mud Blossom

Convinced that Mud is responsible for the disappearance of the school hamster that was his responsibility for the weekend, Junior Blossom is determined that the dog should be tried for his "crime."

1991 Best Young Adult

Chap Reaver.  Mote

1991 Best Juvenile

Pam Conrad.  Stonewords

Zoe discovers that her house is occupied by the ghost of an eleven-year-old girl, who carries her back to the day of her death in 1870 to try to alter that tragic event.

1990 Best Young Adult

Alane Ferguson.  Show Me the Evidence

When, after a bizarre series of events, her best friend is accused of murdering her own baby brother and two other babies, Lauren, convinced of her friend's innocence, joins her in trying to solve the mystery and find evidence to clear her name.

1989 Best Young Adult

Sonia Levitin.  Incident at Loring Groves

1989 Best Juvenile

Willo Davis Roberts.  Megan's Island

First eleven-year-old Megan is astonished when her mother insists on taking her and her younger brother up to the lake cottage a week before school is out; then they find mysterious strangers following them.

1988 Best Juvenile

Susan Shreve.  Lucy Forever and Miss Rosetree, Shrinks

Two sixth graders with a pretend psychiatry practice come upon a small mute child from an orphanage and determine they are going to use all their knowledge to help her to talk.

1987 Best Juvenile

Joan Lowery Nixon.  The Other Side of Dark

Seventeen-year-old Stacy awakens from a four-year coma ready to identify, locate, and prosecute the young man who murdered her mother and wounded her.

1986 Best Juvenile

Patricia Windsor.  The Sandman's Eyes

Angry because he was confined in a school for disturbed juveniles for two years after witnessing a murder, upon his release eighteen-year-old Michael seeks to prove his innocence by tracking down the killer only he saw.

1985 Best Juvenile

Phyllis Reynolds Naylor.  Night Cry

Often left alone on their five-acre Mississippi farm by her traveling-salesman father, Ellen learns, through a terrifying experience, to distinguish between real and false fears.

1984 Best Juvenile

Cynthia Voigt.  The Callendar Papers

In nineteenth-century Massachusetts, orphan Jean, employed to sort out the family papers of a reclusive artist, becomes curious about the mysterious, long-ago death of his wife and the subsequent disappearance of their young child.

1983 Best Juvenile

Robbie Branscum.  The Murder of Hound Dog Bates

When Sassafras Bates finds his dog dead, he suspects that one of his three spinster aunts is the murderer.

1982 Best Juvenile

Norma Fox Mazer.  Taking Terri Mueller

Fourteen-year-old Terri remembers only life with her father, but then she discovers that he kidnapped her from her mother after a divorce and that her mother is still alive.

1981 Best Juvenile

Joan Lowery Nixon.  The Seance

A seance begun as a game when a young girl insists that she can communicate with the dead ends in murder when the lights suddenly go out and one of the participants suddenly vanishes.

1980 Best Juvenile

Joan Lowery Nixon.  The Kidnapping of Christina Lattimore

A teenage girl is kidnapped, but when freed, is accused of masterminding the scheme to extort money from her wealthy grandmother.

1979 Best Juvenile

Dana Brookins.  Alone in Wolf Hollow

1978 Best Juvenile

Eloise Jarvis McGraw.  A Really Weird Summer

While staying with relatives who live in an old inn, twelve-year-old Nels finds a secret passageway to a part of the building that no longer exists and meets a strange boy whose family is trapped in a leftover pocket of time.

1977 Best Juvenile

Richard Peck.  Are You in the House Alone?

A sixteen-year-old girl with a steady boyfriend suddenly begins receiving threatening phone calls while she is babysitting and anonymous notes in her high school locker.

1976 Best Juvenile

Robert C. O'Brien.  Z for Zachariah

Seemingly the only person left alive after a nuclear war, a sixteen-year-old girl is relieved to see a man arrive into her valley until she realizes that he is a tyrant and she must somehow escape.

1975 Best Juvenile

Jay Bennett.  The Dangling Witness

1974 Best Juvenile

Jay Bennett.  The Long Black Coat

1973 Best Juvenile

Robb White.  Deathwatch

Needing money for school, a college boy accepts a job as guide on a desert hunting trip and nearly loses his life.

1972 Best Juvenile

Joan Aiken.  Nightfall

1970 Best Juvenile

Winfred Finlay.  Danger at Black Dyke

1969 Best Juvenile

Virginia Hamilton.  The House of Dies Drear

A black family of five moves into an enormous house once used as a hiding place for runaway slaves. Mysterious sounds and events as well as the discovery of secret passageways make the family believe they are in grave danger.

1968 Best Juvenile

Gretchen Sprague.  Signpost to Terror

1967 Best Juvenile

Kin Platt.  Sinbad and Me

1966 Best Juvenile

Leon Ware.  The Mystery of 22 East

1965 Best Juvenile

Marcella Thum.  Mystery at Crane's Landing

1964 Best Juvenile

Phyllis A. Whitney.  Mystery of the Hidden Hand

1963 Best Juvenile

Scott Corbett.  Cutlass Island

1962 Best Juvenile

Edward Fenton.  The Phantom of Walkaway Hill

1961 Best Juvenile

Phyllis A. Whitney.  The Mystery of the Haunted Pool