Annal:2005 Barry Award for Best British Crime Novel
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Barry Award in the year 2005. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
Flesh & Blood: A Frank Elder Mystery
- 2005 Barry-British winner
- 2004 Silver Dagger
- Score: 18.55
Retirement has not come easy for Detective Inspector Frank Elder. He’s fled west, into a solitary existence on the Cornish coast, but he can’t escape the past. He continues to be troubled by his wife’s betrayal, he worries over their teenage daughter, he’s haunted by bad dreams that lead him to the body of a sixteen-year-old girl.
Susan Blacklock would be thirty now. But fourteen years ago she disappeared, and for fourteen years the case of the missing schoolgirl with a flair for drama has gone unsolved. Not that Elder hadn’t had his suspects. In fact, he’d…
The Burning Girl: A Detective Thorne Mystery
- 2005 Barry-British nominee
- Score: 6.55
Some fires never go out…
Thorne’s got plenty on his plate when he agrees to help out ex-DCI Carol Chamberlain rake through the ashes of an old case that has come back to haunt her. Schoolgirl Jessica Clarke was lit on fire twenty years ago. Now, Gordon Rooker, the man Chamberlain put away for the crime, is up for parole, and it seems there’s a copycat on the prowl.
Or perhaps it’s someone trying to right a serious wrong: Jessica Clarke was the victim of mistaken identity. The intended target was the daughter of a gangland boss, a woman who would grow up…
The Dramatist: A Jack Taylor Novel
- 2007 Shamus-Novel winner
- 2005 Barry-British nominee
- Score: 16.57
Seems impossible, but Jack Taylor is sober. One reason hes been able to keep clean: his dealers in jail, which leaves Jack without a source. That dealer calls him to Dublin and asks a favorthe mans sister is dead and the guards have called it death by misadventure. But he says that cant be true and begs Jack to have a look, check around, see what he can find. Jack agrees, though he cant possibly know the shocking, deadly consequences that granting this simple request will bring. Jack will understand soon, in the dark, lethal fourth entry in Ken Bruens award-winning Jack Taylor series.
- 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.
The Crime Trade: A Novel
- 2005 Barry-British nominee
- Score: 6.55
When Operation Surgical Strike, a police sting designed to catch Colombian drug traffickers in the act of selling a large consignment of cocaine to undercover police officers, goes horribly wrong, suspicion quickly falls on one of the police officers involved: “Stegs” Jenner. Stegs is no ordinary cop. Something of a maverick, he has in the past played the role of a criminal just a little too well. Now suspended from duty, and with his close friend killed in the shoot-out, he determines to go at it alone.
DI John Gallan and his partner Tina Boyd are part of…
- 2005 Barry-British nominee
- Score: 6.55
It should have been an easy introduction to Charlie Fox’s new career as a bodyguard, working for the close protection agency run by her ex-lover. All she has to do is babysit the 15-year-old son of a computer programmer. The last thing anyone expected was a determined attempt to snatch the boy.
