Annal:1998 Hammett Prize for Crime-Writing
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Hammett Prize in the year 1998. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 1998 Hammett winner
- 1999 Barry-1st Novel nominee
- Score: 16.48
For two hundred and fifty years, the LeBlancs of Tidewater Virginia—landed, rich, and proud of it—have been celebrating their French Huguenot ancestry. Each year, over an extravagant lunch and in period costume dress, they relive the beginnings of the LeBlanc line, reminding everyone of their rise from meager beginnings to a position of great stature, wealth, and privilege. But this year’s celebration goes horribly wrong. At the stroke of one, a deafening explosion brings down the massive plantation house columns, crushing every member of the family present. As…
Praying to a Laughing God: A Novel
- 1998 Hammett nominee
- Score: 6.48
Set in the heartland of America, Praying to a Laughing God is the remarkable and moving story of old friendships, new love, deeply hidden secrets, and the discovery of truths. It is about the death of dreams and the birth of hope; about a disappearing way of life and the reaffirmation of the human spirit.
When Clark Holstrom goes each morning to open the hardware store he has operated for years on the main street of Credibull, Minnesota, he asks himself why he even bothers. Both the town and the way of life Clark has known for the past 70 years are…
The Man Who Stole the Mona Lisa
- 1998 Hammett nominee
- Score: 6.48
On August 21, 1911, the world’s most celebrated painting, the “Mona Lisa”, was stolen from the Louvre in a plot that was not revealed until the 1930s. Weaving from the threads of this fantastic batch of truth, Robert Noah’s novel pits a crackerjack team of thieves against the largest museum in the world.
- 1999 Edgar–Novel nominee
- 1998 Hammett nominee
- Score: 12.49
Domenic Stansberry’s award-winning novel tells the story of Niccolo Jones, a broken-down man plagued by his obsession with his brother Joe’s ex-wife Marie. Set in the old Italian neighborhood of North Beach in San Francisco, the novel flashes back and forth between their childhood days in the 1950s and events thirty years later. The kids are adults now, and everything has changed.
Nick’s story begins when Joe is murdered, igniting in Nick an unquenchable desire for revenge. The crime also awakens Nick’s memories of days gone by, particularly his own illicit…
- 1998 Hammett nominee
- Score: 6.48
Daniel Woodrell has been called “stone brilliant” (James Ellroy); an author whose novels “make you whistle they’re so good” (Chicago Tribune). In Tomato Red, his 1998 New York Times Notable Book, now being published in a Plume trade edition, Woodrell brings together a trio of hard-luck souls desperate for that one big break.
All nineteen-year-old Jamalee Merridew wants is a one-way ticket out of West Table, Missouri. What she needs is a plan, one that includes her brother, Jason, a seventeen-year-old boy so pretty that “if your ex had his…
