Annal:2004 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Mystery/Thriller
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the year 2004. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
Tijuana Straits: A Novel
- 2004 LATimes–Mystery winner
- Score: 10.54
From Kem Nunn, the National Book Award-nominated author of Tapping the Source and The Dogs of Winter, comes an exquisitely written tale of loss and redemption. Nunn renders the dangerous beaches and waters of California’s borderland as only the critically acclaimed poet laureate of surf noir can, and Tijuana Straits confirms his reputation as a master of suspense and a novelist of the first rank.
When Fahey, once a great surfer, now a reclusive ex-con, meets Magdalena, she is running from a pack of wild dogs along the ragged wasteland…
Dark Voyage: A Novel
- 2004 LATimes–Mystery finalist
- Score: 6.54
May, 1941. At four in the morning, a rust-streaked tramp freighter streams up the Tagus River to dock at the port of Lisbon. She is the Santa Rosa; she flies the flag of neutral Spain and is in Lisbon to load cork oak, tinned sardines, and drums of cooking oil bound for the Baltic port of Malmö.
But she is not the Santa Rosa. She is the Noordendam, a Dutch freighter. Under the command of Captain Eric DeHaan, she sails for the Intelligence Division of the British Royal Navy, and she will load detection equipment for a clandestine operation…
The Return of the Dancing Master
Henning Mankell, Laurie Thompson
- 2004 LATimes–Mystery finalist
- Score: 6.54
The new thriller from the internationally bestselling author of the Kurt Wallander mystery series.
It would be nearly two hours before he died. As if in a borderland of horror between the nagging pain and the hopeless will to live, he was taken back in time, to the occasion when he engaged the fate that had now caught up with him.
—from The Return of the Dancing Master
December 12, 1945. Nazi Germany lies in ruins as a British warplane lands in Buckeburg. A man carrying a small black bag quickly disembarks and travels to Hameln,…
- 2004 LATimes–Mystery finalist
- Score: 6.54
Charles McCarry is considered by many to be the master of American spy fiction, brilliantly staking his claim with such international bestsellers as The Tears of Autumn and The Miernik Dossier. A spy writer’s spy writer, he has been lauded extravagantly by his peers. George V. Higgins wrote, “Charles McCarry is the Lord’s best combination of spellbinding storyteller and silken prose writer.” “Intelligent and enthralling,” said Eric Ambler, and Jeffrey Archer praised writing that “makes one put the book down and gasp.”
In his magnificent new…
A Question of Blood: An Inspector Rebus Novel
- 2004 LATimes–Mystery finalist
- Score: 6.54
There is no mystery. Lee Herdman stormed into a private school just north of Edinburgh and killed two boys. He was a loner, a creep, an army veteran who got kicks out of terrifying local teenagers on his speedboat—just the sort of shady character to commit a random and heinous crime. It’s a simple case of a man gone mad.
But how random were the killings at Port Edgar Academy? Why did Herdman open fire only in the student lounge, bypassing the swarm of students outside the school? What exactly was his relationship with the school’s misfits? Why are military…
