Annal:1997 Barry Award for Best First Novel
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Barry Award in the year 1997. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- –first–
- Barry Award
- 1998–>
A Test of Wills: A Mystery
- 1997 Barry-1st Novel winner
- 1997 Edgar-1st Novel nominee
- Score: 16.47
In 1914, Ian Rutledge left a brilliant career at Scotland Yard to fight in the Great War. Now, in 1919, he is back, burdened with a heavy secret: he is still suffering from shell shock. With him almost constantly is the cynical, taunting voice of the young Scots soldier he was forced to have executed on the battlefield for refusing to fight.
In a desperate gamble to salvage his sanity, Rutledge takes up his duties at Scotland Yard. But a colleague, jealous of Rutledge’s prewar successes, has learned his secret and maneuvers to have him assigned to a case that…
A Brother's Blood: A Novel
- 1997 Barry-1st Novel nominee
- 1997 Edgar-1st Novel nominee
- Score: 12.47
In the final days of World War II, Dieter Kallick, one of 200 German prisoners of war pressed into service at a Maine logging village, escaped into the woods. His body would later be found washed up on the shore of Moosehead Lake.
Decades later, Wolfgang Kallick arrives in this same rural town, hoping to unravel the mystery of his brother’s death. His questions trigger disturbing, long-dormant memories in Libby, a flinty Yankee store owner, and she is drawn inexorably into the drama when she realizes that her own family is involved in the case. Then Libby’s…
- 1997 Barry-1st Novel nominee
- Score: 6.47
There’s not much danger evident in Bob White, Oklahoma, in 1957. In a small town where doors are left unlocked at night, everyone knows your name, and alcohol is strictly forbidden, it’s difficult even for a fifteen-year-old boy to get in trouble. But Mark Stoddard has his ways, and with the help of his best friend Ferret and Ferret’s newly arrived tomboy cousin TJ, Mark is determined to spice up his summer—and win the respect of his older brother Jess, the local deputy sheriff—by catching a local bootlegger, an evil old man with a deadly grudge against Jess.…
- 1997 Barry-1st Novel nominee
- Score: 6.47
Lie Down with Dogs is the story of two people caught up in events they can neither understand nor control. Successful Chicago businessman Robert Cooper dislikes inconvenience, challenges to his authority, and dogs, but he must deal with all of these and more when he befriends a small boy late at night on a desolate country road and is thrown into uneasy partnership with the boy’s caretaker, Lisa Jacobi, and her enormous Bernese Mountain Dog.
Cooper and the independent Lisa have just one thing in common: the protection of young Luke from the people who…
What the Deaf-Mute Heard: A Novel
- 1997 Barry-1st Novel nominee
- Score: 6.47
Ten-year-old Sammy Ayers woke up one morning on a bus that had reached the end of its run after an overnight trip. The night before, his mother had been beside him. Now, she was gone and he was abandoned, a lost child in a small Georgia town of the 1940s.
As the curious patrons of the Barrington Bus Depot bombarded him with questions, he just kept his mouth shut. He pretended not to hear. It was on that morning, in 1940, that Sammy Ayers became deaf and mute. Alone and lost in this strange new world, Sammy found safety behind a wall of silence, a barrier that…
- 1997 Barry-1st Novel nominee
- Score: 6.47
Imagine that you were the secret witness to a sadistic killing, that only the victim was aware of your hidden presence at the scene, and that you were too paralyzed with fear to answer her silent pleas for help. This is Kasey Riteman’s dilemma.
Kasey had quit her job to escape the sexual advances of her hateful boss. Hoping to vent her anger, she drove aimlessly into the nighttime countryside, admonishing herself to begin to make adult choices about her life. Going from bad to worse, her old Honda quits running, and she’s stranded on an deserted rural road.…
- –first–
- Barry Award
- 1998–>
