Annal:2003 Hammett Prize for Crime-Writing
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Hammett Prize in the year 2003. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 2003 Hammett winner
- Score: 10.53
Iris Greenfeder, ABD (All But Dissertation) has just turned forty, lives in Manhattan, and works three teaching jobs to support herself. Recently she’s felt that the “buts” are taking over her life: all but published, all but a professor, all but married (to Jack, her boyfriend of ten years). Yet the sudden impulse to write a story about her mother leads to a shot at literary success. The piece recounts an eerie Irish fairy tale her mother used to tell her at bedtime–and nestled inside is the sad story of her mother’s death…
More than fifty years ago, Iris’s mother, Katherine Morrissey, arrived at the Catskills’ grand Hotel Equinox penniless, with almost no belongings. Kay was hired as a maid but refused to speak of her past or her family. One year later, she married Ben Greenfeder, the hotel’s manager. During the hotel’s off-season, Kay wrote the first two fantasy novels of a planned trilogy. There never was a third book. When Iris was nine, her mother left one day for a writer’s conference–and never came back. Kay died that very night in a hotel fire on Coney…
- 2004 Anthony-Novel nominee
- 2004 Macavity-Novel nominee
- 2003 Hammett nominee
- Score: 18.54
The third week in January in Algonquin Bay: A freak warm front has rolled in, making it feel like April and enticing the locals into shedding their down parkas and strolling the streets. But the warm weather has also brought the bears out of hibernation, and they have come out hungry. Suddenly the stakes turn ugly when an auto mechanic discovers a mauled human arm in his yard, and the cops determine that its owner was dead before the bears got to him. A search of the surrounding woods turns up body parts placed exactly where the bears were most likely to find them. A homicide, then, but who is the victim?
As detectives John Cardinal and Lise Delorme wrestle with what soon becomes a trail of misinformation about the victim’s identity, another body is found in the woods—a young woman, apparently raped. There has to be a connection: two bodies abandoned in the woods within days of each other cannot be a coincidence in a small town like Algonquin Bay. Then police records reveal an unsolved murder with the same MO—a woman found in the nearby woods, also apparently raped. It isn’t…
- 2003 Hammett nominee
- 2003 IHG–1st Novel nominee
- Score: 12.53
Jane Doe was a promising anthropologist, an expert on shamanism. Now she’s nothing, a shadow: after faking her own suicide, she’s living under an assumed identity in Miami with a little girl to protect. Everyone thinks she’s dead. Or so she hopes.
Then the killings start, a series of ritualistic murders that terrifies all of Miami. The investigator is Jimmy Paz, a Cuban-American police detective. There are witnesses, but they can recall almost nothing of the events, as though their memories have been erased—as if a spell has been cast on each of them. Equally bizarre is the string of clues Paz uncovers: a divination charm, exotic drugs found in the bodies of the victims, a century-old report telling of a secret place in the heart of Africa.
These clues point Paz inexorably toward the fugitive, Jane Doe, and force Jane to realize that the darkness she has fled is seeking her out, hunting her down. By the time her path intersects with Jimmy Paz’s, the two will be thrust into a cataclysmic battle between good and an evil unimaginable to the Western mind.
Shutter Island: A Novel
- 2004 Anthony-Novel nominee
- 2004 Barry-Novel nominee
- 2003 Hammett nominee
- Score: 18.54
Summer, 1954.
U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels has come to Shutter Island, home of Ashecliffe Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Along with his partner, Chuck Aule, he sets out to find an escaped patient, a murderess named Rachel Solando, as a hurricane bears down upon them.
But nothing at Ashecliffe Hospital is what it seems. And neither is Teddy Daniels. Is he there to find a missing patient? Or has he been sent to look into rumors of Ashecliffe’s radical approach to psychiatry? An approach that may include drug experimentation, hideous surgical trials, and lethal countermoves in the shadow war against Soviet brainwashing….
Or is there another, more personal reason why he has come there?
As the investigation deepens, the questions only mount:
- How has a barefoot woman escaped the island from a locked room?
- Who is leaving clues in the form of cryptic codes?
- Why is there no record of a patient committed there just one year before?
- What really goes on in Ward C?
- Why is an empty lighthouse surrounded by an electrified fence and armed guards?
The closer Teddy and Chuck get…
Every Secret Thing: A Novel
- 2004 Anthony-Novel winner
- 2004 Barry-Novel winner
- 2003 Hammett nominee
- Score: 26.54
On a July afternoon two little girls, banished from a birthday party, take a wrong turn onto an unfamiliar Baltimore street—and encounter an abandoned stroller with a baby inside it. Dutiful Alice Manning and unpredictable Ronnie Fuller only want to be helpful, to be good. People like children who are good, Alice thinks. But whatever the girls’ real intentions, things go horribly awry and three families are destroyed.
Seven years later Alice and Ronnie are heading home again—only separately this time, their fragile bond long shattered, their secrets still closely kept. Advised to avoid each other, they enter a world where they essentially have no past. In exchange, they are promised a fresh start, the chance to mold their own future.
That promise is broken when a child disappears, under disturbingly similar circumstances. And the adults in Alice’s and Ronnie’s lives—the parents, the lawyers, the police—realize that they must now confront the shattering truths they couldn’t face seven years earlier. Or another mother will lose her child.
Homicide detective Nancy Porter…
