Annal:2002 Anthony Award for Best First Novel
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Anthony Award in the year 2002. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
Open Season: A Joe Pickett Novel
- 2002 Anthony-1st Novel winner
- 2002 Barry-1st Novel winner
- 2002 Macavity-1st Novel winner
- 2002 Edgar-1st Novel nominee
- 2001 LATimes–Mystery finalist
- Score: 42.52
Few first mysteries have been welcomed as enthusiastically as Open Season, or with better cause.
“When a high-powered bullet hits living flesh, it makes a distinctive -pow-WHOP-sound that is unmistakable even at tremendous distance.” And so it begins for Joe Pickett, a Wyoming game warden who, with the shot of a rifle, is thrust into a race to save not only an endangered species, but also the life and family he loves.
C. J. Box knows the wilderness and he knows how to create a wonderfully authentic, vividly alive sense of place. Most of all, he knows…
Austin City Blue: A Zoe Barrow Mystery
- 2002 Anthony-1st Novel nominee
- Score: 6.52
When Austin police officer Zoe Barrow fatally shoots twenty-five-year-old Jesse Garcia during a standoff, Internal Affairs has some hard questions—because the dead perp also happens to be the guy who put a bullet in Zoe’s husband and left him a vegetable. Assigned to desk duty until she’s cleared of any vendetta, Zoe tries to piece together a series of strange and violent new twists that will make or break her career.
One of her snitches, a local prostitute, is murdered and Zoe finds a strange connection to another unofficial case: a friend of her husband’s…
The Jasmine Trade: A Novel of Suspense Introducing Eve Diamond
- 2004 New Blood Dagger shortlist
- 2002 Anthony-1st Novel nominee
- 2002 Edgar-1st Novel nominee
- 2002 Macavity-1st Novel nominee
- Score: 24.54
Everything was set. Seventeen-year-old Marina Lu had even ordered custom-made gowns for the ten bridesmaids who, in several months’ time, would have preceded her down the aisle at her storybook wedding.
There isn’t going to be a wedding. Marina lies dead, alone in her shiny status car in a suburban shopping center parking lot, her two-carat diamond engagement ring refracting another abruptly shattered Los Angeles dream. Was her death merely a carjacking gone bad? Or is there more to the story?
Marina’s murder chillingly introduces Los Angeles Times…
- 2002 Anthony-1st Novel nominee
- 2002 Barry-1st Novel nominee
- Score: 12.52
Set against the black backdrop of a ruthless Minnesota winter, KJ Erickson’s debut novel is bursting with masterfully plotted suspense and intricately rendered characters.
Prickly but gifted Minneapolis Special Detective Marshall “Mars” Bahr is a man whose devotion to his eight-year-old son is eclipsed only by his love of the hunt. Mars hasn’t won any popularity contests among his fellow officers, but his commitment to his job and his investigative talents have gotten him a plumb assignment: Special Detective in charge of the First Response Unit, reporting…
A Witness Above: A Frank Pavlicek Mystery
- 2002 Anthony-1st Novel nominee
- 2002 Shamus-1st Novel nominee
- 2001 Agatha–1st Novel nominee
- Score: 18.52
Thirteen years ago, Frank Pavlicek left the NYPD under less than ideal circumstances. Now, the divorced father of a teenage daughter, he works as a private investigator in Charlottesville, Virginia, where he indulges his passion for falconry – and tries to live outside the shadow of his past.
Frank is hunting with his red-tailed hawk, Armistead, when he finds it. A teenage boy’s body – barely concealed behind a pile of brush in a part of the forest Frank recently visited with his daughter, Nicole. It’s a truly gruesome crime scene – one of the many things…
