Annal:2002 Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award for Best Thriller
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Dagger Award in the year 2002. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- –first–
- Dagger Award
- 2003–>
- 2002 Steel Dagger winner
- Score: 10.52
- 2003 Barry-British nominee
- 2002 Steel Dagger shortlist
- Score: 12.53
For Richard Field, a young Englishman new to the international police force, Shanghai represents a brave new world away from the past he is trying to escape. But his naivete is quickly dashed when he is called to the scene of a brutal crime, in which a young Russian woman, Lena Orlov, has been found sadistically murdered in her bed. Field’s idealistic instincts push him to investigate the case, but his attempts are met with apathy—then menace—from his colleagues. He beings to recognize that some cases in Shanghai are intended to remain unsolved, and, in a matter of days, he glimpses the murky depths that lurk beneath a luminous city.
Field’s drive to find the murderer leads him to Lena’s neighbor, Natasha Medvedev. A stunning beauty who fled her charmed life in tsarist Russia, Natasha escaped the Revolution but landed, like many of her counterparts, in a treacherous life in Shanghai. Natasha travels in an elite circle—one that orbits, Field knows, around the city’s most feared drug lord, Lu Huang. As Field’s attraction to the beguiling Natasha grows, he is faced with…
Without Fail: A Jack Reacher Novel
- 2003 Barry-Novel nominee
- 2002 Steel Dagger shortlist
- Score: 12.53
With each new book, more and more join the chorus of praise for “one of the most original and daring heroes in suspense fiction” (The Providence Journal-Bulletin), Lee Child’s ex-military cop Jack Reacher.
In Without Fail, Reacher is approached by a Secret Service agent who needs a favor. “I want to hire you to assassinate the Vice President of the United States,” she asks. She is the newly appointed head of the VP’s security detail and wants Reacher to try to penetrate her team’s shield. He has the skills and the stealth, and no one knows him. How else can she be sure her protection is truly effective?
What she doesn’t tell Reacher-but what he soon discovers-is that a very determined and deadly team of assassins has just put the VP in its sights. These men have planned well, but they haven’t planned on Reacher. For only Reacher has the head and the heart to corner his prey and bring them to justice-without fail.
Hostage: A Novel
- 2002 Steel Dagger shortlist
- Score: 6.52
As the Los Angeles Times said, Robert Crais is “a crime writer operating at the top of his game.” His complex heroes and heroines, his mastery of noir atmosphere, and his brilliant, taut plots have catapulted him into the front rank of a new breed of thriller writers. Hostage proves his earlier success was no fluke. It’s an unstoppable read.
An ex-con with delusions of grandeur and his tagalong brother unwittingly team up with a psychopath one wrong word away from meltdown. When their late afternoon joyride turns into a random act of violence, they take a family hostage in the affluent bedroom community of Bristo Camino. Enter Chief of Police Jeff Talley, a stressed-out former LAPD SWAT negotiator who is hiding from his past. Plunged back into the high-pressure world that he desperately wants to forget, Talley soon learns that his nightmare has only begun.
The hostages are not who they seem, and the home contains secrets that even L.A.’s most lethal and volatile crime lord, Sonny Benza, fears. As Talley tries to hold himself together and save the people inside, the…
- 2002 Steel Dagger shortlist
- Score: 6.52
A spellbinding political thriller from Denmark’s finest crime writer.
Peter Lime is trained to hunt down his prey and catch them on film. But now he’s the one being hunted. Whose prey has he become? And what is it that he has that these people will kill to get? Lime is a Danish paparazzo living in Madrid. For more than 20 years, he’s stalked and captured the rich and famous on film, making vast sums of money from exposing their secrets—the more salacious the image, the bigger the fee. But lately he’s been thinking of giving it up. Then he goes on a routine assignment, snapping a Spanish minister out sailing with his mistress, and suddenly his world is turned upside down. When a fire destroys his home, Lime sets out to discover a motive and finds himself drawn into a terrifying web of international terrorism.
- 2002 Steel Dagger shortlist
- Score: 6.52
- 2002 Steel Dagger shortlist
- Score: 6.52
An electrifying thriller that takes the reader inside the world of drug dealers, gangs, and organized crime.
In different parts of London, three recruits prepare for their first day at the Metropolitan Police training center. All three have secrets in their past that they’re eager to put behind them. But the Met has other plans for Jamie, Bunny, and Tina. They’re to join a team of undercover detectives, a secret unit involved in the long-term penetration of criminal gangs. Their target? One of the world’s major drug dealers: Den Donovan—alias “Tango One.” A man so rich and powerful that he’s virtually untouchable. But as the three recruits close in on their quarry, they’re unaware that someone is pursuing an alternative agenda. Someone who has deliberately put their lives on the line.- –first–
- Dagger Award
- 2003–>
