Annal:2001 Anthony Award for Best First Novel

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Results of the Anthony Award in the year 2001. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:

Murder in Shanghai in the ‘90s presents Inspector Chen with a difficult choice.

The victim, Guan Hongying, was a National Model Worker, a celebrity of utmost probity. But perhaps her personal life was not so pristine. Inspector Chen Cao, a published poet and translator of T. S. Eliot, who has been assigned to head the Shanghai Police Bureau’s Special Case Squad, is urged by his superiors to consider the political implications of his investigation. Commissar Zhang, an old bureaucrat, doesn’t want Chen to peer under any stones. Does Chen dare to…

Black Dog: A Crime Novel

Stephen Booth

2001 Barry-British winner
2001 Anthony-1st Novel nominee
Score: 16.51

It’s a long, hot summer in Northern England’s Peak District, where police helicopters darken blue skies and drown out the sound of birdsong. Fifteen-year-old Laura Vernon, smart, sexy, and the keeper of many secrets, is missing. Possibly she has run off to London. Possibly she’s dead. The police search, the wealthy parents wait by the phone. Detective Constable Ben Cooper quietly dreads the worst.

When retired miner Harry Dickinson and his black Labrador find the body lying in the woods, Harry’s strangely obstinate refusal to cooperate with the investigation…

The Ice Harvest

Scott Phillips

Loaded guns, ladies of the night, broken neon, broken dreams. Here is a world that is immediately recognizable—through a shot glass at three A.M. This is life with rough edges, in a novel that gives you the straight goods—point blank— one cold, snowbound Christmas Eve in Kansas. One single night, defined in shadings of black and white, when everything changes…

For most, the city is closing up. For a few outsiders, this night, Christmas Eve 1979, is just beginning. Charlie Arglist is a lawyer saying goodbye to Wichita by revisiting the landscape of his used up…

Run

Douglas E. Winter

Burdon Lane is a businessman living out the American Dream in a shiny suburb of Washington, D.C. His business card lists him as Executive VP of UniArms, Inc., a legitimate arms dealer that’s a front for a gunrunning empire. His girlfriend thinks he’s a salesman. His best friend thinks he’s a role model. His boss thinks he’s a good soldier.

This weekend’s run should be business as usual—guns for money, money for guns—moving the product north on the Iron Highway from Dirty City to Manhattan. But this is the story of the last run, the run where no one—criminal, cop, or civilian—is who or what they seem.

Street Level: A Mystery

Bob Truluck

When we meet private detective Duncan Sloan he’s just handed back a five thousand-dollar check meant as advance payment on a job. The wealthy prospective client wants Sloan to find a woman with an eyeball tattooed on her bottom. All he knows is the tattoo, that she’s very young, white and probably somewhere in or near Orlando, Florida, Sloan’s hometown. Thanks but no thanks; that’s not enough. But when the five grand reappears in Sloan’s mailbox, he uses it for a Costa Rican vacation and never mind the job.

Pike, however tracks him down. When he explains the…

A Conspiracy of Paper: A Novel

David Liss

Benjamin Weaver is an outsider in eighteenth-century London: a Jew among Christians; a ruffian among aristocrats; a retired pugilist who, hired by London’s gentry, travels through the criminal underworld in pursuit of debtors and thieves.

In A Conspiracy of Paper, Weaver investigates a crime of the most personal sort: the mysterious death of his estranged father, a notorious stockjobber. To find the answers, Weaver must contend with a desperate prostitute who knows too much about his past, relatives who remind him of his alienation from the Jewish…

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Categories: Anthony Award for Best First Novel | 2001