Annal:2007 Hammett Prize for Crime-Writing

The Outlander

Gil Adamson

• 2007 Hammett winner
• Score: 10.57

n 1903 a mysterious, desperate young woman flees alone across the west, one quick step ahead of the law. She has just become a widow by her own hand.

Gil Adamson’s extraordinary novel opens in heart-pounding mid-flight and propels the reader through a gripping road trip with a twist—the steely outlaw in this story is a grief-struck nineteen-year-old woman. As the young widow encounters characters of all stripes—unsavoury, wheedling, greedy, lascivious, self-reliant, and occasionally generous and trustworthy—Adamson weds her brilliant literary style to the gripping, moving, picaresque tale of one woman’s deliberate journey into the wild.

Dahlia's Gone: A Novel

Katie Estill

• 2007 Hammett nominee
• Score: 6.57

Sand Williams has returned to her childhood home in the Ozarks for a much-needed rest after years of working abroad as a journalist. A mile upstream from Sand lives Norah Everston, and the two women couldn’t be more different. When Norah asks Sand to look in on her children, Timothy and Dahlia, while she and her husband go traveling, Sand reluctantly agrees, because she grew up in the Ozarks believing that you helped your neighbor out.

Dahlia’s Gone is the story of three remarkable women whose lives are profoundly changed by the murder of Dahlia Everston: Sand, who makes the grisly discovery; Norah, the victim’s grieving step-mother, who comes to blame Sand for the tragedy; and Patty Callahan, who leads the investigation of Dahlia’s brutal murder.

This mesmerizing narrative beautifully and suspensefully explores the aftermath of tragedy, and the process of facing the truth. Dahlia’s Gone looks unflinchingly at what’s been lost, but in the end this is a story about redemption, the beauty of hope, and the soul-healing friendship that can be forged among women.

End Games: An Aurelio Zen Mystery

Michael Dibdin

• 2007 Hammett nominee
• Score: 6.57

In Calabria, Italy, an American lawyer is missing, presumed kidnapped. A movie company is about to start filming the story of the Book of Revelation. An obsessed games player, richer than Croesus, is determined to find an ancient Roman statue that is buried under a river. A team of mercenaries is on its way there from Iraq to assist. And Aurelio Zen’s latest posting is Cosenza, Calabria, where the local chief of police has shot himself in the foot. Looking down on all this activity is the abandoned village of Altomonte, once the seat of the powerful Calopezzati family.

When the lawyer’s bloody corpse is discovered in Altomonte, Zen is determined to find a way to penetrate the local code of silence and uncover the truth. But his quest is quickly complicated by the lavish and clandestine treasure hunt, which Zen learns is being carried out by no ordinary fanatics.

Stalin's Ghost: An Arkady Renko Novel

Martin Cruz Smith

• 2007 Hammett nominee
• Score: 6.57

Investigator Arkady Renko, the pariah of the Moscow prosecutor’s office, has been assigned the thankless job of investigating a new phenomenon: late-night subway riders report seeing the ghost of Joseph Stalin. The illusion seems part political hocus-pocus and also part wishful thinking, for Stalin is again popular. More so than Renko, whose lover, Eva, has left him for Detective Nikolai Isakov, a charismatic veteran of the civil war in Chechnya, a hero of the far right and, Renko suspects, a killer for hire. The cases entwine, and Renko’s quests become a personal inquiry fueled by jealousy.

The investigation leads to the fields of Tver, where once a million soldiers fought. There, amidst the detritus, Renko must confront the ghost of his own father, a favorite general of Stalin’s. In these barren fields, patriots and shady entrepreneurs—the Red Diggers and Black Diggers—collect the bones, weapons and personal effects of slain World War II soldiers, and find that even among the dead there are surprises.

The Yiddish Policemen's Union: A Novel

Michael Chabon

• 2007 Nebula winner
• 2008 Campbell 2nd
• 2008 Edgar–Novel nominee
• 2008 Hugo-Novel nominee
• 2007 Hammett nominee
• Score: 36.57

For sixty years, Jewish refugees and their descendants have prospered in the Federal District of Sitka, a “temporary” safe haven in the Alaskan panhandle, created in the wake of revelations of the Holocaust and the shocking 1948 collapse of the fledgling state of Israel. Now the District is set to revert to Alaskan control, and their dream is coming to an end.

But homicide detective Meyer Landsman of the District Police has enough problems without worrying about the upcoming Reversion. His life is a shambles, his marriage a wreck, his career a disaster. And in the cheap hotel where he has washed up, someone has just murdered his neighbor, a former chess prodigy. When word comes down from on high that the case is to be dropped immediately, Landsman soon finds himself contending with all the powerful forces of faith, obsession, hopefulness, evil, and salvation that are his heritage—and with the unfinished business of his marriage.