Annal:2005 Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award for Best Thriller
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Dagger Award in the year 2005. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 2005 Steel Dagger winner
- Score: 10.55
The Stasi was among the most sophisticated intelligence organisations in the world, but by the end of the 80s the state of East Germany was collapsing around it. The squads of armed officers, the torture chambers in the Stasi jails, the hundreds of thousands of informers could do nothing to prevent the rebellion that saw the fall of the Berlin Wall. It is in the context of these last few paranoid weeks of the Communist world that Brandenburg is set.
Dr Rudi Rosenharte—once a double agent, now an art historian living quietly in Dresden—is summoned to…
- 2005 Steel Dagger shortlist
- Score: 6.55
The rules never mattered much to Frank Corso, rogue reporter, successful true crime writer, and honorable loner with a dangerous edge. The fact that two Texas troopers have a warrant with his name on it means nothing to him—except run—which he does in the company of photojournalist Meg Dougherty, his former lover and perhaps one true friend. But the running stops when a furious Midwestern blizzard sends their car crashing to the bottom of an icy hill, and they are forced to seek an escape from the storm in an abandoned Wisconsin house of horrors.
In a shed…
- 2006 Barry-British nominee
- 2005 Steel Dagger shortlist
- Score: 12.56
When Dennis Milne—now living under an assumed identity in the Philippines—hears that his old friend and colleague Malik has been gunned down in a restaurant, he decides to go back to the violent city he once called home, and bring the murderer to book.
Milne arrives in a pre-Christmas London that is cold and hostile. But he is no longer a policeman; no longer charged with keeping the peace and upholding the law.
Although his friends at the King’s Cross station do not know that Milne is back in town, it soon becomes clear that his arrival has been expected…
- 2005 Steel Dagger shortlist
- Score: 6.55
July 2005. In the Pyrenees mountains near Carcassonne, Alice, a volunteer at an archaeological dig stumbles into a cave and makes a startling discovery-two crumbling skeletons, strange writings on the walls, and the pattern of a labyrinth; between the skeletons, a stone ring, and a small leather bag.
Eight hundred years earlier, on the eve of a brutal crusade to stamp out heresy that will rip apart southern France, Alais is given a ring and a mysterious book for safekeeping by her father as he leaves to fight the crusaders. The book, he says, contains the…
- 2005 Steel Dagger shortlist
- Score: 6.55
December 1, 1941
It is seven days before the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor. Days that are numbered for Sondegger, a Nazi spy captured in London while on a mission to take down the Twenty Committee, a German network of spies the British have turned.
For American Tom Wall, the days have run together as he awakens to find himself locked in a British military asylum. Wounded and shell-shocked, all he knows is that his brother, Earl, betrayed his unit in Crete, causing one of the bloodiest massacres of the war.
MI5 releases Tom by way of a bargain. Pretend…
- 2005 Barry-Thriller nominee
- 2005 Steel Dagger shortlist
- Score: 12.55
The sins of the past reverberate into the present, in an extraordinary novel by the new master of international suspense.
It was an ordinary-looking photograph. Just the portrait of a man. But the very sight of it chilled Allon to the bone.
Art restorer and sometime spy Gabriel Allon is sent to Vienna to authenticate a painting, but the real object of his search becomes something else entirely: to find out the truth about the photograph that has turned his world upside down. It is the face of the unnamed man who brutalized his mother in the last days of…
- 2005 Steel Dagger shortlist
- Score: 6.55
When an old woman storms into the Rijks Museum demanding the return of her painting, archivist Ruth Braams cannot quell her curiosity. Together with Myles, her gay confidant, Ruth delves into the history of the piece of looted Nazi art and discovers an enigmatic picture with a disturbing wartime provenance. It also appears that the elderly Lydia is not the only claimant and, against strict bureau regulations, Ruth endeavours to help strengthen her case. Days later, Ruth begins to receive sinister anonymous threats, warning her to stay away from Lydia and the…
