Annal:2000 Barry Award for Best British Crime Novel

A Place of Execution

Val McDermid

• 2001 Anthony-Novel winner
• 2001 Macavity-Novel winner
• 2000 Barry-British winner
• 2000 LATimes–Mystery winner
• 2001 Edgar–Novel nominee
• Score: 46.51

On a freezing day in December 1963, thirteen-year-old Alison Carter vanishes from her village. Nothing will ever be the same again for the inhabitants of the isolated hamlet in the English countryside. A young George Bennett, a newly-promoted inspector, he is determined to solve this case—even if it just to bring home a daughter’s dead body to her mother.

As days progress, the likelihood that Alison has been murdered increases when a gruesome discovery is made in a cave. But with no corpse, the barest of clues, and an investigation that turns up more questions than answers, Bennett finds himself up against a stone wall…until he learns the shocking truth—a truth that will have far-reaching consequences.

Decades later, Bennett finally tells his story to journalist Catherine Heathcote. But just when the book is posed for publication, he pulls the plug on it without explanation. He has new information that he will not divulge. Refusing to let the past remain a mystery, Catherine sets out to uncover what really happened to Alison Carter. But the secret is one she might wish she’d left buried on that cold, dark day thirty-five years ago.

River of Darkness

Rennie Airth

• 2000 Anthony-Novel nominee
• 2000 Barry-British nominee
• 2000 Edgar–Novel nominee
• 2000 Macavity-Novel nominee
• Score: 24.5

In rural England, in a landscape shadowed by the sorrow of World War I, the peace of a small Surrey village is shattered by a murderous attack, which leaves five butchered bodies and no motive for the killings. Sent by Scotland Yard to investigate is Inspector John Madden, a grave and good man who bears the emotional and physical scars from his own harrowing war experiences and from the tragic loss of his wife and child. The local police dismiss the slaughter as a robbery gone tragically awry, but Madden and his chief inspector detect the work of a madman.

With the help of a beautiful doctor who introduces Madden to the latest developments in forensic psychology and who opens his heart again to the possibility of love, Madden sets out to identify and capture the killer—a demented former soldier with a bloody past—even as he sets his sights on his next innocent victims.

Every Dead Thing

John Connolly

• 2000 Shamus-1st Novel winner
• 2000 Barry-British nominee
• Score: 16.5

Former NYPD detective Charlie “Bird” Parker is on the verge of madness. Tortured by the unsolved slayings of his wife and young daughter, he is a man consumed by guilt, regret, and the desire for revenge. When his former partner asks him to track down a missing girl, Parker finds himself drawn into a world beyond his imagining: a world where thirty-year-old killings remain shrouded in fear and lies, a world where the ghosts of the dead torment the living, a world haunted by the murderer responsible for the deaths in his family—a serial killer who uses the human body to create works of art and takes faces as his prize. But the search awakens buried instincts in Parker: instincts for survival, for compassion, for love, and, ultimately, for killing.

Aided by a beautiful young psychologist and a pair of bickering career criminals, Parker becomes the bait in a trap set in the humid bayous of Louisiana, a trap that threatens the lives of everyone in its reach.

Rough Justice

Colin Falconer

• 2000 Barry-British nominee
• Score: 6.5

A contemporary thriller set in London, featuring the sharp, new DCI Tennison-like, female detective—Sergeant Fox.

Chalon Heads: A Kathy and Brock Mystery

Barry Maitland

• 2000 Barry-British nominee
• Score: 6.5

When Scotland Yard detectives David Brock and Kathy Kolla are summoned to Cabot’s, a venerable dealer of rare stamps, they expect a simple case of theft and a pleasant digression from the usual sort of wrongdoing encountered in the Serious Crime Branch. Instead, they find themselves on the trail of an extortionist when they learn that the wife of Sammy China, an unsavory figure from Brock’s past, has been kidnapped. The only clue is a ransom note decorated with rare and valuable Chalon Head stamps of the young Queen Victoria, to whom Sammy’s wife bears an uncanny resemblance.