Annal:2003 Barry Award for Best British Crime Novel
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Barry Award in the year 2003. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
The White Road: A Novel
- 2003 Barry-British winner
- Score: 10.53
After years of suffering unfathomable pain and guilt over the murders of his wife and daughter, private detective Charlie Parker has finally found some measure of peace. As he and his lover, Rachel, are awaiting the birth of their first child and settling into an old farmhouse in rural Maine, Parker has found the kind of solace often lost to those who have been touched by true evil.
But darkness soon descends when Parker gets a call from Elliot Norton, an old friend from his days as a detective with the NYPD. Now practicing law in Charleston, South Carolina,…
Scaredy Cat: A Detective Thorne Mystery
- 2003 Barry-British nominee
- 2002 Dagger shortlist
- Score: 12.53
It was a calculated, vicious murder. The killer selected his victim at Euston station, followed her home on the tube, and then strangled her to death in front of her child. At the same time the dead woman is found, a second body is discovered at the back of King’s Cross station—killed in identical fashion. It is a grisly coincidence that eerily echoes the murders of two other women, both stabbed to death months before on the same day.
Introduced in Sleepyhead, Detective Inspector Tom Thorne sees the link and comes to the horrifying conclusion that it…
- 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…
- 2003 Barry-British nominee
- Score: 6.53
It’s a typical cold November night and Detective Sergeant Dennis Milne, a very atypical policeman, waits in the Traveller’s Rest Hotel parking lot for the arrival of three men. Cynical and jaded, Milne earns money on the side by doing what he does best: punishing the bad guys. But this time he’s been duped. Instead of blowing away drug dealers, he kills three innocent people, their deaths starting an investigation that sees him and his conscience heading for trouble.
Less than twelve hours later, Milne is out on the streets again. Eighteen-year-old Miriam Fox…
Diamond Dust: A Peter Diamond Mystery
- 2003 Barry-British nominee
- Score: 6.53
A detective learns to suppress his feelings when a verdict is announced. Peter Diamond, the head of Bath’s murder team, reveals no joy when the gang leader Jake Carpenter is sentenced to life imprisonment for murder. But the next day, when a woman is shot dead in Royal Victoria Park, Diamond’s self-control dissolves in an instant.
The dead woman is Stephanie, his own wife.
Traumatised, grief-stricken and angry for justice, Diamond is told that the case he is desperate to solve is the one he won’t be allowed to work on. Not only that. As the victim’s…
The Yeare's Midnight: A Psychological Thriller
- 2003 Barry-British nominee
- Score: 6.53
An international sports star is found murdered—her face mutilated in a bizarre, ritualistic manner. What is the significance of the poetic text the killer has left at the crime scene? Why did he surgically remove the victim’s left eye? And can a Cambridge lecturer help the police reconstruct the killer’s fantasy in time to save her own life? As Inspector John Underwood and his team work frantically to piece together the last hours of Olympic athlete Lucy Harrington, events take an unexpected turn. Harrington’s murderer contacts English literature lecturer Heather…
