Annal:2005 Gold Dagger Award for Nonfiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Dagger Award in the year 2005. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- Gold Dagger Award for Nonfiction
- Nonfiction books
- Nonfiction authors
- Mystery/Suspense books
- Mystery/Suspense authors.
On the Run: A Mafia Childhood
- 2005 Dagger-Nonfiction winner
- Score: 10.55
In the 1970s, Henry Hill pulled off heists and busted heads with the Mob. In the ‘80s, he became famous-as the antihero of the bestselling book Wiseguy and blockbuster movie Goodfellas. But there was one story he couldn’t tell. Now his children, Gregg and Gina, tell it for him.
On the Run is the extraordinary true account of what it’s like to grow up in the federal witness protection program. Just as Gregg was celebrating his bar mitzvah and his sister, Gina, was buying her first bra, Henry Hill was informing on his former cronies. Henry, his wife, and…
The Wreckers: A Story of Killing Seas and Plundered Shipwrecks
- 2005 Dagger-Nonfiction shortlist
- Score: 6.55
Bella Bathurst’s first book, the acclaimed The Lighthouse Stevensons,told the story of Scottish lighthouse construction by the ancestors of Robert Louis Stevenson. Now she returns to the sea to search out the darker side of those lights, detailing the secret history of shipwrecks and the predatory scavengers who live off the spoils.
Even today, Britain’s coastline remains a dangerous place. An island soaked by four separate seas, with shifting sand banks to the east, veiled reefs to the west, powerful currents above, and the world’s busiest shipping…
The Last Duel: A True Story of Crime, Scandal, and Trial by Combat in Medieval France
- 2005 Dagger-Nonfiction shortlist
- Score: 6.55
In 1386, a few days after Christmas, a huge crowd gathers at a Paris monastery to watch the two men fight a duel to the death meant to “prove” which man’s cause is right in God’s sight. The dramatic true story of the knight, the squire, and the lady unfolds during the devastating Hundred Years War between France and England, as enemy troops pillage the land, madness haunts the French court, the Great Schism splits the Church, Muslim armies threaten Christendom, and rebellion, treachery, and plague turn the lives of all into toys of Fortune.
At the heart of…
The Trial: A History, from Socrates to O. J. Simpson
- 2005 Dagger-Nonfiction shortlist
- Score: 6.55
For as long as accuser and accused have faced each other in public, criminal trials have been establishing far more than who did what to whom—and in this fascinating book, Sadakat Kadri surveys four thousand years of courtroom drama.
A brilliantly engaging writer, Kadri journeys from the silence of ancient Egypt’s Hall of the Dead to the clamor of twenty-first-century Hollywood to show how emotion and fear have inspired Western notions of justice–and the extent to which they still riddle its trials today. He explains, for example, how the jury emerged in…
A Serpent in Eden: The Greatest Murder Mystery of All Time
- 2005 Dagger-Nonfiction shortlist
- Score: 6.55
Night comes quickly to the Bahamas.
That of July 7 1943 was unpleasantly close and humid, for though the rains were nearing their end, the air was heavy with an approaching storm. It struck Nassau soon after midnight. By the time it had blown itself out, one of the world’s richest men, Sir Harry Oakes, had been murdered in his own bedroom. He had been burned alive, then had his skull broken by four blows to the head. When the body was found at daybreak, bloody handprints marked the walls of the room, while a fan stirred small white feathers that clung to the…
