Annal:2004 Ellis Peters Historical Dagger Award for Historical Crime Novel

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Results of the Dagger Award in the year 2004. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:

The Damascened Blade: A Detective Joe Sandilands Novel

Barbara Cleverly

In the northwest frontier 1910, the screams of a wounded British officer abandoned at the bottom of a dark ravine are heard by a young Scottish subaltern. Ignoring the command to retreat to base the Highlander sets out alone, with dagger in hand, to rescue his fellow officer from the Pathan tribesman who is slowly torturing him to death. But the bloody outcome of this rescue attempt is not what anybody could have predicted.

Over a dozen years later the backwash of this tragedy threatens to engulf Joe Sandilands. On a welcome break from his policing duties,…

 

The Shape of Sand

Marjorie Eccles

Life an charnley was blessed, or so thought the Jardine children, until at a party to celebrate their mother Beatrice’s birthday, a family scandal catapulted them into the headlines. Nearly four decades later, at the end of world War Two, builders working on the house discover letters, photographs and a diary, and Beatrice’s daughters set about unraveling the events of that fateful night. The due lies in a voyage to Egypt undertaken by Beatrice, but the mummified body of a woman is discovered in their old home, a whole new set of questions need to be asked.

 

Hell at the Breech: A Novel

Tom Franklin

In 1897, an aspiring politician is mysteriously murdered in the rural area of Alabama known as Mitcham Beat. His outraged friends——mostly poor cotton farmers—form a secret society, Hell-at-the-Breech, to punish the townspeople they believe responsible. The hooded members wage a bloody year-long campaign of terror that culminates in a massacre where the innocent suffer alongside the guilty. Caught in the maelstrom of the Mitcham war are four people: the aging sheriff sympathetic to both sides; the widowed midwife who delivered nearly every member of…

 

The Thief Taker

Janet Gleeson

Agnes Meadowes is cook to the Blanchards of Foster Lane, the renowned silversmiths. Her quiet world of culinary activity, preparing jugged hare, oyster loaves, almond soup and other delicacies for the family, is a happy refuge from the hustle and bustle of 1750s London. But in a single night everything is to change: the Blanchards’ most prestigious and expensive commission, a giant silver wine cooler destined for the house of Sir Bartholomew Grey, is stolen and a sinister chain of events is set in motion. A young apprentice is murdered and a young maid, Rose,…

 

The Dante Club: A Novel

Matthew Pearl

In 1865 Boston, the literary geniuses of the Dante Club—poets and Harvard professors Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, and James Russell Lowell, along with publisher J. T. Fields—are finishing America’s first translation of The Divine Comedy and preparing to unveil Dante’s remarkable visions to the New World. The powerful Boston Brahmins at Harvard College are fighting to keep Dante in obscurity, believing that the infiltration of foreign superstitions into American minds will prove as corrupting as the immigrants arriving at Boston…

 

The Judgement of Caesar: A Novel of Ancient Rome

Steven Saylor

It is 48 B.C. For years now, the rival Roman generals Caesar and Pompey have engaged in a contest for world domination. Both now turn to Egypt, where Pompey plans a last desperate stand on the banks of the Nile, while Caesar’s legendary encounter with Queen Cleopatra will spark a romance that reverberates down the centuries. But Egypt is a treacherous land, torn apart by the murderous rivalry between the goddess-queen and her brother King Ptolemy.

Into this hothouse atmosphere of intrigue and deception comes Gordianus the Finder, innocently seeking a cure for…

 

The Lover

Laura Wilson

Autumn, 1940, and London is in the grip of the Blitz. An unidentified female corpse is discovered in an alleyway in Soho—the fourth to have been found in a matter of weeks.

Rene is a Soho prostitute with a young son to support. She’s learnt to cope with the air-raids, but each night on the streets is a terrifying ordeal as the killer begins to pick off her friends. Lucy is a young, middle-class office worker living with her family in Clapham, struggling to make sense of things as her peaceful suburban life degenerates into chaos. Jim is a fighter pilot,…

 
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