Annal:2005 Dagger Award for Crime Novel
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Dagger Award in the year 2005. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
Silence of the Grave: A Reyjavik Murder Mystery
- 2005 Gold Dagger
- 2006 Barry-British nominee
- Score: 16.55
Downtrodden detective Erlendur and his team must once again look into Reykjavik’s hidden past to unravel a case of human nastiness. Alive with tension and atmosphere and disturbingly real, this is an outstanding continuation of the Reykjavik Murder Mysteries.
- 2005 Silver Dagger
- Score: 8.55
The young go to extremes to get their kicks nowadays.
A naked teenage girl is found dead near the beautiful Byzantine Yoros Castle in Turkey. She has stabbed herself through the heart but there is evidence of bizarre sexual practice. In another part of Istanbul, a young boy sems to have committed suicide in similar circumstances. What dark rituals could have compelled them to fatal self abuse? Inspectors Cetin Ikmen and Mehmet Suleyman follow an internet trail that leads them to an underworld of Goth nightclubs and Satanic worship. But even those murkey…
Calling Out For You: An Inspector Sejer Mystery
- 2005 Dagger shortlist
- Score: 6.55
Gunder Jomann, a quiet, middle-aged man from a peaceful Norwegian community, meets Poona on a trip to India and the two agree to marry. Gunder returns home to prepare for her arrival, but the day Poona is due to arrive, he is summoned to the hospital as his sister has been involved in a car crash. The driver sent to collect Poona in Gunder’s place fails to meet her. Then the body of an Indian woman matching Poona’s description is found in a cornfield on the edge of the community and a murder enquiry is set underway.
This baffling mystery—for what motive could…
In Matto's Realm: A Sergeant Studer Mystery
- 2005 Dagger shortlist
- Score: 6.55
A child-murderer escapes from a Swiss insane asylum. The stakes get higher when Detective Sergeant Studer discovers the director’s body, neck broken, in the boiler room of the madhouse. The intuitive Studer is drawn into the workings of an institution that darkly mirrors the world outside. Even he cannot escape the pull of the no man’s land between reason and madness where Matto, the spirit of insanity, reigns.
Addicted to morphine, Friedrich Glauser spent much of his life in psychiatric wards and prison. He began writing mystery novels while an asylum inmate in 1935.
Skinny Dip: A Novel
- 2005 Dagger shortlist
- Score: 6.55
Chaz Perrone might be the only marine scientist in the world who doesn’t know which way the Gulf Stream runs. He might also be the only one who went into biology just to make a killing, and now he’s found a way–doctoring water samples so that a ruthless agribusiness tycoon can continue illegally dumping fertilizer into the endangered Everglades. When Chaz suspects that his wife, Joey, has figured out his scam, he pushes her overboard from a cruise liner into the night-dark Atlantic. Unfortunately for Chaz, his wife doesn’t die in the fall.
Clinging blindly to…
Seeking Whom He May Devour: A Commissaire Adamsberg Mystery
- 2005 Dagger shortlist
- Score: 6.55
Each day, inhabitants of a small community in the French Alps find another of their ewes with its throat cut. When one of the villagers too is killed people begin to wonder: could it be the work of a werewolf? Soon suspicion falls on Massart, one of the villagers, because of his beardlessness (according to popular legend, werewolves have no hair on their bodies because they are inside the body).
Soliman, the victim’s adopted son; Le Veilleur, a lonely sheperd and Camille, a lovely girl from the city, decide to pursue Massart and their hunt leads them into the…
