Annal:2002 Barry Award for Best Novel
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Barry Award in the year 2002. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
Mystic River: A Novel
- 2002 Anthony-Novel winner
- 2002 Barry-Novel winner
- 2002 Macavity-Novel nominee
- 2001 Hammett nominee
- Score: 32.52
When they were children, Sean Devine, Jimmy Marcus, and Dave Boyle were friends. But then a strange car drove up their street. One boy got in the car, two did not, and something terrible happened—something that ended their friendship and changed all three boys forever. Twenty-five years later, Sean is a homicide detective. Jimmy is an ex-con. And Dave is trying to hold his marriage together and keep his demons at bay-demons that urge him to do horrific things.
When Jimmy’s daughter is found murdered, Sean is assigned to the case. His investigation brings him…
- 2002 Anthony-Novel nominee
- 2002 Barry-Novel nominee
- 2002 Edgar–Novel nominee
- 2002 Macavity-Novel nominee
- Score: 24.52
For Dr. David Beck, the loss was shattering. And every day for the past eight years, he has relived the horror of what happened. The gleaming lake. The pale moonlight. The piercing screams. The night his wife was taken. The last night he saw her alive.
Everyone tells him it’s time to move on, to forget the past once and for all. But for David Beck, there can be no closure. A message has appeared on his computer, a phrase only he and his dead wife know. Suddenly Beck is taunted with the impossible—that somewhere, somehow, Elizabeth is alive.
Beck has been…
- 2002 Barry-Novel nominee
- Score: 6.52
Terrence McCaleb is asked by the LAPD to help them investigate a series of murders that have them baffled. They are the kind of ritualized killings that McCaleb specialized in solving with the FBI, and he is reluctantly drawn from his peaceful new life back into the horror and excitement of tracking down a terrifying homicidal maniac. More horrifying still, the suspect who seems to fit the profile that McCaleb develops is someone he has known and worked with in the past: Detective Harry Bosch.
A Darkness More Than Night is a fresh and lightning-paced…
Purgatory Ridge: A Cork O'Connor Mystery
- 2002 Barry-Novel nominee
- Score: 6.52
Not far from the small town of Aurora (population 3,752) lies an ancient two-hundred-acre expanse of great white pines, sacred to the Anishinaabe and known to them as Minishoomisag (Our Grandfathers).
Wealthy industrialist Karl Lindstrom does not have a reputation as a sensitive environmentalist, and some members of the Anishinaabe tribe are concerned about the proximity of the trees to his lumber mill. So when an explosion at the mill results in the death of a night watchman, it’s obvious whom suspicion will fall upon.
Cork O’Connor, in the throes of…
- 2002 Edgar–Novel winner
- 2001 LATimes–Mystery winner
- 2002 Barry-Novel nominee
- 2002 Macavity-Novel nominee
- 2001 Hammett nominee
- Score: 38.52
With the horrible remnants of a childhood tragedy forever visible across his otherwise handsome face, Joe Trona is scarred in more ways than one. Rescued from an orphanage by Will Trona, a charismatic Orange County politician who sensed his dark potential, Joe is swept into the maelstrom of power and intimidation that surrounds his adoptive father’s illustrious career. Serving as Will’s right-hand man, Joe is trained to protect and defend his father’s territory—but he can’t save the powerful man from his enemies. Will Trona is murdered, and Joe will stop at…
- 2002 Barry-Novel nominee
- 2001 Dagger shortlist
- 2001 Hammett nominee
- Score: 18.52
Derek Strange is an ex-cop who now runs his own private detective agency. The mother of a young police officer killed by another cop hires him to clear up the lingering doubts surrounding her son’s death. Although Terry Quinn, the other cop, has been cleared in the official investigation, his guilt torments him. After Strange interviews him, Quinn joins the investigation, even though in part he is investigating himself and whether his own prejudices led him to pull the trigger.
Strange and Quinn seek their answers in the darkest sectors of Washington, D.C.,…
Bad News: A Dortmunder Novel
- 2002 Barry-Novel nominee
- Score: 6.52
“I’m a robber,” John Dortmunder says, “not a grave robber.” Yet he soon finds himself in a Long Island cemetery, in the very dead of night, with dirt up to his knees.
His old friend Andy Kelp is to blame—Andy Kelp and the Internet. For it was while ambling on the Net that Kelp met up with master manipulator Fitzroy Guilderpost and his nefarious companions, the flunked teacher Irwin Gabel and the Las Vegas showgirl Little Feather Redcorn.
What these three have in mind is the amazing takeover of an upstate New York casino, and what they also envision is…
