Annal:2004 Anthony Award for Best First Novel
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Anthony Award in the year 2004. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 2004 Anthony-1st Novel winner
- 2004 Barry-1st Novel winner
- Score: 20.54
Haunted by a series of horrifying and violent episodes in their past, Grace McBride and the oddball crew of her software company, Monkeewrench, create a computer game where the killer is always caught, where the good guys always win. But their game becomes a nightmare when someone starts duplicating the fictional murders in real life, down to the last detail.
By the time the police realize what’s happening, three people are dead, and with seventeen more murder scenarios available online, there are seventeen more potential victims. While the authorities…
- 2004 Anthony-1st Novel nominee
- 2003 Agatha–1st Novel nominee
- Score: 12.54
When farmers cutting turf in a peat bog make a grisly discovery - the perfectly preserved severed head of a young woman with long red hair - Irish archaeologist Cormac Maguire and American pathologist Nora Gavin team up in a case that will open old wounds. Peat bogs prevent decay, so the decapitated young woman could have been buried for two decades, two centuries, or even much longer. Who is she? When was she killed? The extraordinary find leads to even more disturbing puzzles. The red-haired girl is clearly a case for the archaeologists, not the police. Still,…
- 2004 Edgar-1st Novel winner
- 2004 Anthony-1st Novel nominee
- 2004 Macavity-1st Novel nominee
- 2003 LATimes–Mystery finalist
- Score: 28.54
Madrid 1938. Carlos Tejada Alonso y Leon is a Sergeant in the Guardia Civil, a rank rare for a man not yet thirty, but Tejada is an unusual recruit. The bitter civil war between the Nationalists and the Republicans has interrupted his legal studies in Salamanca. Second son of a conservative Southern family of landowners, he is an enthusiast for the Catholic Franquista cause, a dedicated, and now triumphant, Nationalist.
This war has drawn international attention. In a dress rehearsal for World War II, fascists support the Nationalists, while Communists have…
Wiley's Lament: A Novel
- 2004 Anthony-1st Novel nominee
- Score: 6.54
Wiley’s Lament is a violent, profane, and graphic look at a life that has spun off its rails in the wrong part of town, but it’s also about remorse, renewal, and the flickering possibility of redemption.
Wiley is a man who ripped his life apart with his bare hands and is now drifting through the remains like a ghost, making ends meet by playing poker when the cards run well enough and ripping off drug dealers when the cards run bad. He is separated from his long-suffering wife-permanently, so far-and his daughter hadn’t spoken to him for a year by the…
- 2004 Macavity-1st Novel winner
- 2003 Agatha–1st Novel winner
- 2004 Anthony-1st Novel nominee
- 2004 Anthony-Historical nominee
- 2004 Barry-1st Novel nominee
- 2004 Edgar–Novel nominee
- Score: 44.54
What do Hercule Poirot and Charlotte Gray have in common? It may be the wonderful Maisie Dobbs. Lady Rowan Compton first met Maisie when, at thirteen, she went into service as a maid at her ladyship’s Belgravia mansion. A suffragette, Lady Rowan took the remarkably smart youngster under her wing and became her patron. She encouraged Maisie to study at Cambridge, and was aided in this by Maurice Blanche, a friend often retained as an investigator by the elite of Europe when discretion and results were required. It was he who first recognized Maisie’s intuitive…
