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…
- 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…
- 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…
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…
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…
