Annal:2006 Barry Award for Best British Crime Novel
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Barry Award in the year 2006. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 2006 Barry-British winner
- Score: 10.56
The first in a new series by Scotland’s princess of crime, Denise Mina.
When the body of a four-year-old boy is found tortured and battered to death, it is assumed the child has been the victim of a vicious sexual predator. Instead the police are led, not to the house of an adult killer, but to the doors of two eleven-year-old boys.
Fresh from school, Paddy Meehan has just started work on the Scottish Daily News. Determined to be an investigative journalist, she also wants to be financially independent. But her colleagues — hard-drinking chauvinists to a…
The Blood-Dimmed Tide: A Novel
- 2006 Barry-British nominee
- Score: 6.56
With The New York Times Notable Book River of Darkness, Rennie Airth established himself as a formidable master of suspense. Now, in The Blood-Dimmed Tide, Airth returns with a macabre tale, filled with fascinating historical detail, of the social struggles of post–World War I Britain and the looming menace of Hitler’s Germany.
It is 1932, and former Inspector John Madden leads a quiet life in rural England with his wife and children—until a young village girl is savagely murdered. The crime catapults Madden into the grisly world of a…
Lifeless: A Detective Thorne Mystery
- 2006 Barry-British nominee
- Score: 6.56
In Lifeless, Mark Billingham’s Tom Thorne reaches something like the nadir of his police career, broken by the death—possibly the murder—of his demented father and shuffled off to a desk job of infinite tedium. When someone starts kicking the London homeless to death, he suggests going undercover, and those of his friends who care about him worry that he is looking for his own destruction as much as for the killer. Certainly Thorne finds compensations on the street for danger, cold, hunger and squalor—his friendship with two young addicts is nonetheless…
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.
- 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…
Lost: A Novel of Suspense
- 2006 Barry-British nominee
- Score: 6.56
On a cold London night, Detective Ruiz is fished out of the Thames with a bullet in his leg and no memory of the circumstances surrounding the shooting. In his pocket is a photograph of Mickey Carlyle, a seven-year-old girl kidnapped three years before and presumed dead. It’s anybody’s guess what Ruiz was up to—especially when a bloody boat discovered nearby makes it clear that Ruiz was not the sole casualty. But with Mickey’s killer convicted and behind bars, no one wants the case reopened. Ruiz’s only hope of unraveling the puzzle is to retrace his steps and…
