Annal:2006 Ellis Peters Historical Dagger Award for Historical Crime Novel

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Results of the Dagger Award in the year 2006. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:

Red Sky Lament: A John Ray Horn Mystery

Edward Wright

Los Angeles, late 1940s: As brush fires begin to eat at the dry grass in the hills rimming the San Fernando Valley, a more ominous threat is taking shape. All over Hollywood, the U.S. government is ordering people to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee as part of the crusade to uncover Communist influence in the movies.

John Ray Horn has little use for politics, but as a former B-movie cowboy star who fell into prison and disgrace, he knows a few things about outsiders. And when his ex-lover Maggie O’Dare asks him to come to the aid of an…

 

The Pale Blue Eye: A Novel

Louis Bayard

From the critically acclaimed author of Mr. Timothy comes an ingenious tale of murder and revenge, featuring a retired New York City detective and a young cadet named Edgar Allan Poe.

At West Point Academy in 1830, the calm of an October evening is shattered by the discovery of a young cadet’s body swinging from a rope just off the parade grounds. An apparent suicide is not unheard of in a harsh regimen like West Point’s, but the next morning, an even greater horror comes to light. Someone has stolen into the room where the body lay and removed the…

 

Nefertiti: The Book of the Dead

Nick Drake

She is called ‘The Perfect One’, the most famous and beautiful woman in the world. Nefertiti rules equally with her husband, the Pharaoh Akhenaten, over the richest, most sophisticated and powerful society in the modern world. At home the wealthy enjoy their hunts and love affairs, their new jewellery and fashions, and invest their money in elaborate tombs for the afterlife. The rest of the population labour on the land as they have done since time began.

Yet behind the glorious facades of luxury and pleasure an epic power struggle is taking place; Akhenaten…

 

The Janissary Tree: A Novel

Jason Goodwin

It is 1836. Europe is modernizing, and the Ottoman Empire must follow suit. But just before the Sultan announces sweeping changes, a wave of murders threatens the fragile balance of power in his court. Who is behind them? Only one intelligence agent can be trusted to find out: Yashim Lastname, a man both brilliant and near-invisible in this world. You see, Yashim is a eunuch.

He leads us into the palace’s luxurious seraglios and Istanbul’s teeming streets, and leans on the wisdom of a dyspeptic Polish ambassador, a transsexual dancer, and a Creole-born queen…

 

Sovereign

C.J. Sansom

Autumn, 1541. Following the uncovering of a plot against his throne in Yorkshire, King Henry VIII has set out on a spectacular Progress to the North to overawe his rebellious subjects there. Accompanied by a thousand soldiers, the cream of the nobility, and his fifth wife Catherine Howard, the King is to attend an extravagant submission of the local gentry at York.

Already in the city are lawyer Matthew Shardlake and his assistant Jack Barak. As well as assisting with legal work processing petitions to the King, Shardlake has reluctantly undertaken a special…

 

The Sultan's Seal: A Novel

Jenny White

Rich in sensuous detail, this first novel brilliantly captures the political and social upheavals of the waning Ottoman Empire. The naked body of a young Englishwoman washes up in Istanbul wearing a pendant inscribed with the seal of the deposed sultan. The death resembles the murder by strangulation of another English governess, a crime that was never solved. Kamil Pasha, a magistrate in the new secular courts, sets out to find the killer, but his dispassionate belief in science and modernity is shaken by betrayal and widening danger. In a lush, mystical voice,…

 
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