Annal:2007 Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award for Best Thriller
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Dagger Award in the year 2007. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
Sharp Objects: A Novel
- 2007 Steel Dagger winner
- 2007 Barry-1st Novel nominee
- 2007 Edgar-1st Novel nominee
- 2007 Dagger shortlist*
- 2007 New Blood Dagger winner*
- Score: 22.57
Fresh from a brief stay at a psych hospital, Camille’s Preaker’s first assignment from the second-rate daily paper where she works brings her reluctantly back to her hometown to cover the murders of two preteen girls. As Camille works to uncover the truth about these violent crimes, she finds herself identifying with the young victims—a bit too strongly. Clues keep leading to dead ends, forcing Camille to unravel the psychological puzzle of her own past to get at the story. Dogged by her own demons, Camille will have to confront what happened to her years before if she wants to survive this homecoming.
- 2007 Steel Dagger shortlist
- Score: 6.57
John Harper has always been alone. His mother died when he was just seven years old and he was raised in New York by an aunt he barely knew. He never even made his father’s acquaintance—a man who died shortly after he was born. After leaving the Big Apple as soon as he was old enough, his life consisted of one moderately successful book, a collection of affectionately received newspaper columns and a comfortable existence in Miami.
Then everything changes. A liquor store heist goes wrong—and turns John’s existence on its head. It seems that his father didn’t die all those years ago. In fact, he has thrived in the New York underworld. But now the man himself lies critically injured in a Manhattan hospital and it’s time for father and son to meet at last…
- 2007 Edgar-1st Novel winner
- 2007 Barry-1st Novel nominee
- 2007 Steel Dagger shortlist
- Score: 22.57
From secret American military bases where suspects are held and “interrogated” to basement laboratories where al Qaeda’s scientists grow the deadliest of biological weapons, The Faithful Spy is a riveting and cautionary tale, as affecting in its personal stories as it is sophisticated in its political details. The first spy thriller to grapple squarely with the complexities and terrors of today’s world, this is a uniquely exciting and unnerving novel by an author who truly knows his territory: A New York Times reporter has drawing upon his experience covering the occupation in Iraq.
- 2007 Steel Dagger shortlist
- Score: 6.57
Joel Demetrius is quite looking forward to moving in with his new step-family, but his sister Cassie doesn’t want anything to do with Gerald and his two sons, and to make matters worse their new home is practically derelict.
Joel is fascinated by the old house, but even he has to admit that there’s something not quite right about it, He keeps seeing things out of the corner of his eye, and he’s plagued by nightmares of a terrified boy who repeats the same fractured prayed over and over.
Events in the house become harder and harder to explain, and as Cassie’s battle with her stepbrothers draws everyone deeper into the mystery, all four kids are forced to confront the question of just who the intruders really are…
- 2007 Steel Dagger shortlist
- Score: 6.57
Alisha Barba’s dreams of being a detective were shattered when a murder suspect broke her back across a brick wall. Now on her feet again, with her police career in limbo, she receives a message from an old school friend, Cate Beaumont, who is eight months pregnant and in trouble.
On the night they arrange to meet, Cate is run down by a car that kills her husband instantly. As paramedics fight to save her life they discover there is no baby. Her pregnancy is an elaborate lie, a cruel deception.
Why? What happened? As Alisha sets out to answer these questions she is drawn deeper and deeper into a dangerous quest that will take her from the East End of London to Amsterdam’s red light district and into a murky underworld of sex trafficking, slavery and exploitation.
- 2007 Steel Dagger shortlist
- Score: 6.57
When Atlanta police detective Michael Ormewood is called out to a murder scene at the notorious Grady Homes, he finds himself faced with one of the the most brutal killings of his career: Aleesha Monroe is found in the stairwell in a pool of her own blood, her body horribly mutilated.
As a one-off killing it’s shocking, but when it becomes clear that it’s just the latest in a series of similar attacks, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation are called in, and Michael is forced into working with Special Agent Will Trent of the Criminal Apprehension Team—a man he instinctively dislikes.
But then, only twenty-four hours later, the violence Michael sees around him every day explodes in his own back yard. And it seems the mystery behind Monroe’s death is inextricably entangled with a past that refuses to stay buried…
- 2007 Steel Dagger shortlist
- Score: 6.57
Twenty years ago, four teenagers at summer camp walked into the woods at night. Two were found murdered, and the others were never seen again. Paul “Cope” Copeland, the county prosecutor of Essex, still mourns his missing sister. When a homicide victim is found with evidence linking him to Cope, the well-buried secrets of the prosecutor’s family are threatened.
Is this homicide victim one of the campers who disappeared with his sister? Could his sister be alive? Cope has to confront so much he left behind that summer twenty years ago: his first love, Lucy; his mother, who abandoned the family; and the secrets that his Russian parents might have been hiding even from their own children. Cope must decide what is better left hidden in the dark and what truths can be brought to the light.
