Annal:2005 Anthony Award for Best Novel
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Anthony Award in the year 2005. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
Blood Hollow: A Cork O'Connor Mystery
- 2005 Anthony-Novel winner
- Score: 10.55
When the corpse of a beautiful high school student is discovered on a hillside four months after her disappearance on New Year’s Eve, all evidence points to her boyfriend, local bad boy Solemn Winter Moon. Despite Solemn’s self-incriminating decision to go into hiding, Cork O’Connor, Aurora’s former sheriff, isn’t about to hang the crime on the kid, whom O’Connor is convinced is innocent. In an uphill battle to clear Solemn’s name, Cork encounters no shortage of adversity. Some he knows all too well—small-town bigotry and bureaucracy foremost among them. What Cork isn’t prepared for is the emergence of a long-held resentment hailing from his own childhood. And when Solemn reappears, claiming to have seen a vision of Jesus Christ in Blood Hollow, the mystery becomes thornier than Cork could ever have anticipated. And that’s when the miracles start happening….
Praised by critics and peers alike for his bold and insightful writing, William Kent Krueger has become a master of mixing brilliant, evocative prose with stunning, nonstop suspense. Readers are sure to be riveted…
The Killing of the Tinkers: A Novel
- 2005 Macavity-Novel winner
- 2005 Anthony-Novel nominee
- Score: 16.55
When Jack Taylor blew town at the end of The Guards his alcoholism was a distant memory and sober dreams of a new life in London were shining in his eyes. In the opening pages of The Killing of the Tinkers, Jack’s back in Galway a year later with a new leather jacket on his back, a pack of smokes in his pocket, a few grams of coke in his waistband, and a pint of Guinness on his mind. So much for new beginnings.
Before long he’s sunk into his old patterns, lifting his head from the bar only every few days, appraising his surroundings for mere minutes and then descending deep into the alcoholic, drug-induced fugue he prefers to the real world. But a big gypsy walks into the bar one day during a moment of Jack’s clarity and changes all that with a simple request. Jack knows the look in this man’s eyes, a look of hopelessness mixed with resolve topped off with a quietly simmering rage; he’s seen it in the mirror. Recognizing a kindred soul, Jack agrees to help him, knowing but not admitting that getting involved is going to lead to more bad than good. But in Jack Taylor’s…
The Madman's Tale: A Novel
- 2005 Anthony-Novel nominee
- 2004 Hammett nominee
- Score: 12.55
It’s been twenty years since Western State Hospital was closed down and the last of its inmates reintegrated into society. Francis Petrel was barely out of his teens when his family committed him to the asylum, after his erratic behavior culminated in a terrifying outburst. Now middle-aged, he leads an aimless, solitary life housed in a cheap apartment, periodically tended to by his sisters, and perpetually medicated to quiet the chorus of voices in his head. But a reunion on the grounds of the shuttered institution stirs something deep in Francis’s troubled mind: dark memories he thought he had laid to rest, about the grisly events that led to Western State Hospital’s demise.
It begins in 1979, when twenty-one-year-old Petrel descends into the state-run purgatory of an overcrowded, understaffed Massachusetts mental hospital. Surrounded by inmates roaming the halls like drugged zombies and raving behind locked doors, well-meaning orderlies, jaded nurses, and patronizing doctors, Francis finds friendship with a motley assortment of fellow patients: a would-be Napoleon, a wise ex-firefighter,…
- 2005 Anthony-Novel nominee
- 2005 Edgar–Novel nominee
- 2004 Agatha–Novel nominee
- Score: 18.55
The winner of every major literary award in crime fiction, Laura Lippman brings back her complex and vulnerably human Baltimore P.I., Tess Monaghan, in a tense, expertly spun tale of a family torn asunder by forces it can barely comprehend.
Mark Rubin’s family is missing—and the police can’t do a thing because all the evidence indicates that his wife left willingly. So the successful furrier turns to Tess Monaghan, hoping she can help him find his wife and three children. Tess doesn’t know quite what to make of Rubin, a wealthy Orthodox Jew who refuses to shake her hand and doles out vitally important information in grudging dribs and drabs. According to her client, he and his beautiful wife, Natalie, had a flawless, happy marriage. Yet one day, without any warning or explanation, Natalie gathered up their children and vanished.
Tapping into a network of fellow investigators spread across the country, Tess is soon able to locate the runaway wife and her stolen progeny, moving furtively from state to state, town to town. But the Rubins are not alone. A man is traveling with them,…
California Girl: A Novel
- 2005 Edgar–Novel winner
- 2005 Anthony-Novel nominee
- 2005 Macavity-Novel nominee
- 2004 Hammett nominee
- Score: 28.55
California in the 1960s, and the winds of change are raging. Orange groves uprooted for tract houses, people flooding into Orange County, strange new ideas in the air about war, music, sex, and drugs, and new influences, ranging from Richard Nixon to Timothy Leary.
For the Becker brothers, however, the past is always present—and it comes crashing back full force when the body of the lovely and mysterious Janelle Vonn is discovered in an abandoned orange-packing plant. The Beckers and the Vonns have a history, beginning years ago in high school with a rumble between the brothers of each clan.
But boys grow up. Now one Becker brother is a cop on his first homicide case. One’s a minister yearning to perform just one miracle. One is a reporter drunk with ambition. And all three are about to collide with the changing world of 1968 as each brother, in his own unique way, tries to find Janelle’s killer.
As suspects multiply and secrets are exposed, the three Becker brothers are drawn further into the case, deeper into the past, and closer to danger.
Out of the Deep I Cry: A Clare Fergusson/Russ Van Alstyne Mystery
- 2005 Anthony-Novel nominee
- 2005 Edgar–Novel nominee
- Score: 12.55
On April 1, 1930, Jonathan Ketchem’s wife, Jane, walked from her house to the police department to ask for help in finding her husband. The men, worn out from a night of chasing bootleggers, did what they could. No one ever saw Jonathan Ketchem again.
But the Ketchems were far from forgotten. Over time, the family died off—except for Jane Ketchem herself (whom everyone but a few stubborn optimists/pessimists decided had been made a widow by Jonathan’s disappearance). When Jane inherited substantial funds and a successful dairy business, she grew the money shrewdly enough to be able to endow a charitable clinic bearing the Ketchem name.
The clinic was a solid institution in the town when Clare Fergusson took the position of priest of Millers Kill Episcopal Church. Now the disappearance of the clinic’s physician results in another seemingly unavoidable collaboration between Clare and police chief Russ Van Alstyne. Clare, a former army chopper pilot, has already proved herself a more-than-capable detective when serious local crimes brought the two together to work them out. Now…
