Annal:2003 Anthony Award for Best First Novel
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Anthony Award in the year 2003. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
In the Bleak Midwinter: A Reverend Clare Ferguson Mystery
- 2003 Barry-1st Novel winner
- 2003 Macavity-1st Novel winner
- 2002 Agatha–1st Novel winner
- 2003 Anthony-1st Novel nominee
- Score: 36.53
It’s a cold, snowy December in the upstate New York town of Millers Kill, and newly ordained Clare Fergusson is on thin ice as the first female priest of its small Episcopal church. The ancient regime running the parish covertly demands that she prove herself as a leader. However, her blunt manner, honed by years as an army pilot, is meeting with a chilly reception from some members of her congregation and Chief of Police Russ Van Alystyne, in particular, doesn’t know what to make of her, or how to address “a lady priest” for that matter.
The last thing she needs is trouble, but that is exactly what she finds. When a newborn baby is abandoned on the church stairs and a young mother is brutally murdered, Clare has to pick her way through the secrets and silence that shadow that town like the ever-present Adirondack mountains. As the days dwindle down and the attraction between the avowed priest and the married police chief grows, Clare will need all her faith, tenacity, and courage to stand fast against a killer’s icy heart.
In the Bleak Midwinter is one of the most outstanding…
- 2003 Anthony-1st Novel nominee
- 2003 Barry-1st Novel nominee
- Score: 12.53
In this masterfully written fiction debut, David Corbett combines a gripping crime story with a poignant tale of enduring love.
Freelance photographer and wildcat smuggler Dan Abatangelo blows into Vegas to hit the tables and taste the night life. In his path waits Shel Beaudry, a knockout redhead with a smile that says, Gentlemen, start your engines. The attraction is instant–and soon the two are living the gypsy life on the West coast, where Dan captains a distribution ring for premium Thai marijuana, His credo “no guns, no gangsters, it’s only money.”
But the trade is changing. Eager to get out, Dan plans one last run, judges poorly, and is betrayed by an underling and caught by the DEA. To secure light time for Shel and his crew, Dan takes the fall and pleads to ten years. Now, having served the full term, he emerges from prison a man with a hardened will but an unchanged heart. Though probation guidelines forbid any contact with Shel, a convicted felon, he sets his focus on one thing: finding her.
Shel’s life has taken a different turn since her release from prison.…
- 2003 Anthony-1st Novel nominee
- Score: 6.53
- 2003 Edgar-1st Novel winner
- 2003 Anthony-1st Novel nominee
- 2003 Barry-1st Novel nominee
- 2003 Macavity-1st Novel nominee
- Score: 28.53
Featuring ex-cop Max Freeman, The Blue Edge of Midnight marks the debut of a powerful new crime series.
Max Freeman’s old life ended on a night that will haunt him forever. The night he killed a twelve-year-old child in self-defense in a Philadelphia shootout. The night he stopped being a cop. Now he lives an existence of solitary confinement on the edge of the Florida Everglades, where he answers to no one but the demons that eat away at his conscience.
Until the night he finds the corpse of a child beside an ancient river. The night Max Freeman’s past explodes into the present.
Suddenly, Freeman is thrust into the center of the search for a killer responsible for a string of grisly slayings that is baffling both local authorities and the F.B.I. Distrusted as an outsider by the longtime residents of the Glades and pulled into the case as suspect by the police, Freeman must walk a tenuous tightrope of distrust on both sides of the law. When another child goes missing, all eyes turn to Freeman-and the ex-cop, driven by his old habits and the memories of that long-ago Philadelphia…
The Distance: A Billy Nichols Novel
- 2003 Shamus-1st Novel winner
- 2003 Anthony-1st Novel nominee
- 2003 Barry-1st Novel nominee
- 2003 Macavity-1st Novel nominee
- Score: 28.53
Morris White is a Sous Chef at a first-rate Philadelphia French restaurant. All he wants is to leave behind his past—the poor neighborhood and petty crime he knew as a kid—and open his own restaurant. His dream comes one step closer to reality when the affair he’s having with Vicky Ward heats up. Not only is she the manager of the restaurant, but she comes from money and a privileged background. The only thing that could stop them from turning their dream into a reality, is Morris’s half-brother, Vince Kammer, who is about to get out of Graterford Prison.
Vince may have done the time, but the crime is far from behind him. Soon poor Morris is stuck in the middle. His job is in jeopardy, his new relationship is in jeopardy, his dream is in jeopardy, all because he’s finding it harder and harder to escape his hometown roots, which, unlike the crisp, bright white linens of the restaurant, are black as hell and dark as night.
