Annal:2005 Barry Award for Best First Novel
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Barry Award in the year 2005. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
Carlos Ruiz Zafon, Lucia Graves
- 2005 Barry-1st Novel winner
- 2004 IHG–1st Novel nominee
- Score: 16.55
Barcelona, 1945—just after the war, a great world city lies in shadow, nursing its wounds, and a boy named Daniel awakes on his eleventh birthday to find that he can no longer remember his mother’s face. To console his only child, Daniel’s widowed father, an antiquarian book dealer, initiates him into the secret of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, a library tended by Barcelona’s guild of rare-book dealers as a repository for books forgotten by the world, waiting for someone who will care about them again. Daniel’s father coaxes him to choose a volume from the…
- 2005 Barry-1st Novel nominee
- 2005 Edgar-1st Novel nominee
- Score: 12.55
Picture a hotel room in 1948 Singapore. Picture a dispute between black marketer and thief Russell Pearce and an associate-an associate who opens fire and murders Russell Pearce. Fast forward to present-day Pottsville, Pennsylvania. Young Doug Pearce, just fired from his steady job in the brewery, has never strayed far from home. But he’s always found stories of his Uncle Russ, the family black sheep, fascinating.
In comes a letter from an old friend of his dead uncle inviting him up to Toronto. Doug, at loose ends and bored with killing time, accepts. On…
- 2005 Barry-1st Novel nominee
- Score: 6.55
For more than seventeen years with the U.S. Marshals Service, DEA, and Florida Department of Law Enforcement, Jim Born has seen just about everything Florida crime and criminals can throw at him, and he’s put it all into as entertaining and accomplished a first thriller as you’ll find anywhere this year.
State cop Bill Tasker has had problems in the past, but nothing compared to what’s about to happen to him. A satchel with a million and a half in skimmed money is about to go walking. A phony community activist has decided to cash in, but a local FBI agent…
- 2008 Dagger shortlist
- 2005 Barry-1st Novel nominee
- Score: 12.58
Laos, 1972. The Communist Pathet Lao has taken over this former French colony. Most of the educated class has fled, but Dr. Siri Paiboun, a Paris-trained doctor whose late wife had been an ardent Communist, remains. And so this 72-year-old physician is appointed state coroner, despite the fact that he has no training or even supplies to use in performing his new task. What he does have is curiosity and integrity. At his age he is not about to let a bunch of ignorant bureaucrats dictate to him.
One of his first cases involves three bodies recovered from a…
Skinny-dipping: A Novel of Suspense
- 2005 Barry-1st Novel nominee
- Score: 6.55
“I, Lilly Rose Cleary, have a nearly endless capacity for driving myself crazy.” And who knows a woman better than herself? Especially a woman like Lilly, a tough-as-nails partner working in a Sarasota, Florida, law firm representing fat-cat physicians in malpractice cases. Lilly is also an obsessive-compulsive health nut who has a bad habit of tripping over dead bodies.
After successfully representing a client in a kayak whiplash case, she becomes a victim herself when she’s ambushed at her office door. The following day a client turns up dead from an…
Some Danger Involved: A Novel
- 2005 Barry-1st Novel nominee
- 2005 Shamus-1st Novel nominee
- Score: 12.55
When a student bearing a striking resemblance to artists’ renderings of Jesus Christ is found murdered—by crucifixion—in London’s Jewish ghetto, 19th-century private detective Barker must hire an assistant to help him solve the sinister case. Out of all who answer an ad for a position with “some danger involved,” the eccentric and enigmatic Barker chooses downtrodden Llewelyn, a gutsy young man whose murky past includes recent stints at both an Oxford college and an Oxford prison.
As Llewelyn learns the ropes of his position, he is drawn deeper and deeper…
