Annal:2002 Ellis Peters Historical Dagger Award for Historical Crime Novel
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Dagger Award in the year 2002. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- Ellis Peters Historical Dagger Award for Historical Crime Novel
- Mystery/Suspense books
- Mystery/Suspense authors.
- 2002 Historical Dagger winner
- 2002 Booker shortlist
- 2002 Orange shortlist
- Score: 22.52
From the author of the New York Times Notable Book Tipping the Velvet and the award-winning Affinity: a spellbinding, twisting tale of a great swindle, of fortunes and hearts won and lost, set in Victorian London among a family of thieves.
Sue Trinder is an orphan, left as an infant in the care of Mrs. Sucksby, a “baby farmer,” who raised her with unusual tenderness, as if Sue were her own. Mrs. Sucksby’s household, with its fussy babies calmed with doses of gin, also hosts a transient family of petty thieves-fingersmiths-for whom this house in the heart of a…
The Jupiter Myth: A Marcus Didius Falco Mystery
- 2002 Historical Dagger shortlist
- Score: 6.52
The fourteenth Falco novel is a tale of love, gangsters and female gladiators—including one from Falco’s own past.
Falco and his family are staying in London when Falco is summoned to the scene of a murder. The victim, Verovolcus, was a renegade with ties to Roman crime magnates operating in London, but he was also close to King Togidubnus. So when he is discovered stuffed head-first down a well, a tricky diplomatic situation develops that Falco must defuse, and which leads him into the seedy underbelly of London. There is a newly built amphitheatre in town,…
The Pale Companion: A Shakespearean Murder Mystery
- 2002 Historical Dagger shortlist
- Score: 6.52
Midsummer 1601. Nick Revill and his fellow actors in the Chamberlain’s Men are journeying across the Wiltshire Downs for a country-house presentation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It should be a pleasant, well-paid jaunt to celebrate a noble marriage, but things go wrong from the start.
On a brief stopover in the market town of Salisbury, the locals make clear their dislike of actors by beating up Nick, a painful experience relieved only by his meeting with the local magistrate Adam Fielding—and Fielding’s beautiful daughter Kate. When…
Dead Man Riding: A Nell Bray Mystery
- 2002 Historical Dagger shortlist
- Score: 6.52
After three years of traipsing across Europe with her lovesick, widowed mother, Nell Bray has finally found her way to Oxford University. There she has befriended the beautiful Imogen and the charming Midge.
When the three girls decide to accept an invitation by their male classmates to join a reading party in the country during vacation—accompanied by a dashing philosophy don with a reputation for stirring up trouble—they go against what is quickly becoming the obsolete conventions of the nineteenth-century.
Once they arrive in the country, they are…
- 2002 Gold Dagger
- 2002 Historical Dagger shortlist
- Score: 16.52
In this brilliant, highly entertaining, and intriguing novel, Jose Carlos Somoza intertwines two darkly compelling riddles, forcing us to confront the ways in which we interpret reality.
In ancient Athens, one of the pupils of Plato’s Academy is found dead. His idealistic teacher Diagoras is convinced the pupil’s death is not as accidental as it appears, and asks the famous Heracles Pontor, the “Decipherer of Enigmas,” to investigate. As the death toll rises, the two men find themselves drawn into the dangerous underworld of the Athenian aristocracy, risking…
The Desperate Remedy: Henry Gresham and the Gunpowder Plot: A Novel
- 2002 Historical Dagger shortlist
- Score: 6.52
Thief. Informer. Double-dealer. Pimp. Will Shadwell may not be the most moral of men, but to gentleman spy Henry Gresham he is invaluable. During the reign of King James I a man must know his enemies to survive and Shadwell is one of Gresham’s best sources.
Then Shadwell is discovered brutally murdered. And before Gresham is able to establish why, he is summoned by the man he fears most: Robert Cecil, the King’s Machiavellian Chief Secretary. Cecil wants Gresham to investigate Sir Francis Bacon’s private life. When Gresham begins his inquiries, he uncovers a…
