Annal:2001 Anthony Award for Best First Novel
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Anthony Award in the year 2001. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 2001 Anthony-1st Novel winner
- 2001 Barry-1st Novel nominee
- 2001 Edgar-1st Novel nominee
- Score: 22.51
Murder in Shanghai in the ‘90s presents Inspector Chen with a difficult choice.
The victim, Guan Hongying, was a National Model Worker, a celebrity of utmost probity. But perhaps her personal life was not so pristine. Inspector Chen Cao, a published poet and translator of T. S. Eliot, who has been assigned to head the Shanghai Police Bureau’s Special Case Squad, is urged by his superiors to consider the political implications of his investigation. Commissar Zhang, an old bureaucrat, doesn’t want Chen to peer under any stones. Does Chen dare to persevere?
Contemporary China is a society in turmoil. Faithful old party members, forced to retire, have lost prestige and perquisites; the new capitalists are on the rise. Still ensconced on top of the ladder are the High Cadres and, even above them, the HCC-High Cadre Children-their privileged status analogous to that of medieval princes. Chen is romantically interested in a newspaperwoman whose background would damage his prospects. He relinquished his former Beijing girlfriend as soon as he learned that she was the daughter of a Politburo…
Black Dog: A Crime Novel
- 2001 Barry-British winner
- 2001 Anthony-1st Novel nominee
- Score: 16.51
It’s a long, hot summer in Northern England’s Peak District, where police helicopters darken blue skies and drown out the sound of birdsong. Fifteen-year-old Laura Vernon, smart, sexy, and the keeper of many secrets, is missing. Possibly she has run off to London. Possibly she’s dead. The police search, the wealthy parents wait by the phone. Detective Constable Ben Cooper quietly dreads the worst.
When retired miner Harry Dickinson and his black Labrador find the body lying in the woods, Harry’s strangely obstinate refusal to cooperate with the investigation raises more than a few eyebrows.
What about the parents? Graham Vernon is a man who knows all about secrets. What are he and his glamorous wife holding back?
Ben Cooper, who lives with a personal tragedy and who has known the villagers all his life, finds himself uneasily teamed with an ambitious newcomer, Detective Constable Diane Fry, who has her own secrets. As Ben and Diane begin a complicated dance of suspicion, attraction, and frustration, they discover that to understand the present, they must also understand…
- 2001 Anthony-1st Novel nominee
- 2001 Barry-1st Novel nominee
- 2001 Dagger shortlist
- 2001 Edgar-1st Novel nominee
- 2001 New Blood Dagger shortlist
- 2000 Hammett nominee
- Score: 36.51
Loaded guns, ladies of the night, broken neon, broken dreams. Here is a world that is immediately recognizable—through a shot glass at three A.M. This is life with rough edges, in a novel that gives you the straight goods—point blank— one cold, snowbound Christmas Eve in Kansas. One single night, defined in shadings of black and white, when everything changes…
For most, the city is closing up. For a few outsiders, this night, Christmas Eve 1979, is just beginning. Charlie Arglist is a lawyer saying goodbye to Wichita by revisiting the landscape of his used up life: the cold stare of his angry ex-wife, the empty strip clubs and bars where loneliness turns a profit, the frozen glare of ex-lovers and cops long snuggled in his deep pockets. Club owner Renata, an elegant dish in a smoky dive, dreams of financial prosperity and holds a single frame of a stolen film that could help her achieve them. And there’s Vic. He’s got a reputation, a bad temper, and a secret worth half a million dollars. Not to mention a knack for bringing people together…for the last time. Before the night…
- 2001 Anthony-1st Novel nominee
- 2000 IHG–1st Novel nominee
- 2000 Stoker–1st Novel nominee
- Score: 18.51
The buyers find us. Establish their bona fides. Then, and only then, we run.
Burdon Lane is a businessman living out the American Dream in a shiny suburb of Washington, D.C. His business card lists him as Executive VP of UniArms, Inc., a legitimate arms dealer that’s a front for a gunrunning empire. His girlfriend thinks he’s a salesman. His best friend thinks he’s a role model. His boss thinks he’s a good soldier.
This weekend’s run should be business as usual—guns for money, money for guns—moving the product north on the Iron Highway from Dirty City to Manhattan. But this weekend is going to teach Burdon something he doesn’t yet know about who he is…and isn’t. When the meet in Manhattan turns into a five-alarm fire and an all-out war on the tenth floor of a New York hotel, there is only one way out: an uneasy alliance with a hard case named Jinx and the street gang known as the U Street Crew. And once the heat is on, with a cadre of killers and every police officer and Federal agent on the eastern seaboard on their tail, Burdon gets the chilling sensation that,…
Street Level: A Mystery
- 2001 Shamus-1st Novel winner
- 2001 Anthony-1st Novel nominee
- 2001 Barry-1st Novel nominee
- Score: 22.51
When we meet private detective Duncan Sloan he’s just handed back a five thousand-dollar check meant as advance payment on a job. The wealthy prospective client wants Sloan to find a woman with an eyeball tattooed on her bottom. All he knows is the tattoo, that she’s very young, white and probably somewhere in or near Orlando, Florida, Sloan’s hometown. Thanks but no thanks; that’s not enough. But when the five grand reappears in Sloan’s mailbox, he uses it for a Costa Rican vacation and never mind the job.
Pike, however tracks him down. When he explains the assignment, Sloan finds it bizarre enough to say “yes.” Isaac Pike is the only son of a top-ranked tycoon. He is also gay. Because he genuinely wants to be a father, he has deposited sperm with a reputable clinic while he searches for a suitable mother. But a paroled convict working at the clinic steals the sperm, impregnates a teenager with it, and blackmails Pike—send money or we abort the child.
Although Pike’s idea of a suitable mother is not quite a waif from an Orlando trailer park, he is decent enough to…
A Conspiracy of Paper: A Novel
- 2001 Barry-1st Novel winner
- 2001 Edgar-1st Novel winner
- 2001 Macavity-1st Novel winner
- 2001 Anthony-1st Novel nominee
- Score: 36.51
Benjamin Weaver is an outsider in eighteenth-century London: a Jew among Christians; a ruffian among aristocrats; a retired pugilist who, hired by London’s gentry, travels through the criminal underworld in pursuit of debtors and thieves.
In A Conspiracy of Paper, Weaver investigates a crime of the most personal sort: the mysterious death of his estranged father, a notorious stockjobber. To find the answers, Weaver must contend with a desperate prostitute who knows too much about his past, relatives who remind him of his alienation from the Jewish faith, and a cabal of powerful men in the world of British finance who have hidden their business dealings behind an intricate web of deception and violence. Relying on brains and brawn, Weaver uncovers the beginnings of a strange new economic order based on stock speculation—a way of life that poses great risk for investors but real danger for Weaver and his family.
In the tradition of The Alienist and written with scholarly attention to period detail, A Conspiracy of Paper is one of the wittiest and most suspenseful historical…
