Annal:2004 Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award for Best Thriller
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Dagger Award in the year 2004. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
Garden of Beasts: A Novel of Berlin 1936
- 2004 Steel Dagger winner
- Score: 10.54
Paul Schumann, a German American living in New York City in 1936, is a mobster hitman known as much for his brilliant tactics as for taking only “righteous” assignments. But then Paul gets caught. And the arresting officer offers him a stark choice: prison or covert government service. Paul is asked to pose as a journalist covering the summer Olympics taking place in Berlin. He’s to hunt down and kill Reinhard Ernst—the ruthless architect of Hitler’s clandestine rearmament. If successful, Paul will be pardoned and given the financial means to go legit; if he…
- 2004 Steel Dagger shortlist
- Score: 6.54
Dan Fesperman takes us to present-day Afghanistan—the global capital of death long before it became a battleground for America—where the fates of an American journalist and a Pakistani translator become dangerously intertwined with the fortunes of warlords, spies, and dubious corporate interests.
A burned-out war correspondent hoping for a last hurrah in Afghanistan, Skelly arrives on the Afghan border just as American bombs begin falling on the ruling Taliban. Seeking the scoop of a lifetime as witness to the capture of “the biggest fish of them all,” he…
Paranoia: A Novel
- 2005 Barry-Thriller nominee
- 2004 Steel Dagger shortlist
- Score: 12.55
Adam Cassidy is twenty-six and a low level employee at a high-tech corporation who hates his job. When he manipulates the system to do something nice for a friend, he finds himself charged with a crime. Corporate Security gives him a choice: prison—or become a spy in the headquarters of their chief competitor, Trion Systems.
They train him. They feed him inside information. Now, at Trion, he’s a star, skyrocketing to the top. He finds he has talents he never knew he possessed. He’s rich, drives a Porsche, lives in a fabulous apartment, and works directly for…
- 2005 Barry-British nominee
- 2004 Dagger shortlist
- 2004 Steel Dagger shortlist
- Score: 18.55
Student Grey Hutchins comes to Tokyo seeking answers to what happened during the notorious Nanking Massacre in which, in one city, the Imperial Japanese Army killed up to 300,000 civilians. With its focus on 1980’s Tokyo and China in the late 1930s, and a woman who has quite a lot to prove and even more to hide, this is a literary thriller of the highest order. With its heady atmosphere of overt violence, lurking fear and sexual tension, Tokyo is a novel that takes hold of the reader and does not let go until its explosive final pages.
- 2004 Steel Dagger shortlist
- Score: 6.54
Dan “Spider” Shepherd is used to putting his life on the line. Working for an elite undercover squad he has lied, cheated and conned in order to bring Britain’s most wanted criminals to justice. But when a powerful drugs baron starts to kill off witnesses to his crimes, Shepherd is given his most dangerous assignment yet. He has to go undercover in a top security prison, a world where one wrong move will mean certain death. As Shepherd gambles everything to move in on his quarry, he soon realises that the man he is hunting is even more dangerous than the police…
Dead I Well May Be: A Novel
- 2004 Steel Dagger shortlist
- Score: 6.54
This Irish bad-boy thriller—set in the hardest streets of New York City—brims with violence, greed, and sexual betrayal.
“I didn’t want to go to America, I didn’t want to work for Darkey White. I had my reasons. But I went.”
So admits Michael Forsythe, an illegal immigrant escaping the Troubles in Belfast. But young Michael is strong and fearless and clever—just the fellow to be tapped by Darkey, a crime boss, to join a gang of Irish thugs struggling against the rising Dominican powers in Harlem and the Bronx. The time is…
- 2004 Steel Dagger shortlist
- Score: 6.54
In Munich, a Jewish scholar is assassinated. In Venice, Mossad agent and art restorer Gabriel Allon receives the news, puts down his brushes, and leaves immediately. And at the Vatican, the new pope vows to uncover the truth about the church’s response to the Holocaust-while a powerful cardinal plots his next move.
Now, as Allon follows a trail of secrets and unthinkable deeds, the lives of millions are changed forever-and the life of one man becomes expendable…
