Annal:2004 Barry Award for Best British Crime Novel
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Barry Award in the year 2004. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
The Distant Echo: A Novel
- 2004 Barry-British winner
- Score: 10.54
Four in the morning, mid-December, and snow blankets St. Andrews School. Student Alex Gilbery and his three best friends are staggering home from a party when they stumble upon the body of a young woman. Rosie Duff has been raped, stabbed and left for dead in the ancient Pictish cemetery. The only suspects are the four young students stained with her blood.
Twenty-five years later, police mount a cold case review. Among the unsolved murders they’re examining is that of Rosie Duff. But someone else has his own idea of justice. One of the original quartet dies…
Lazybones: A Detective Thorne Mystery
- 2004 Barry-British nominee
- Score: 6.54
Thorne knew when he was looking at something out of the ordinary. This was a significant murder scene. This was the work of a killer driven by something special, something spectacular…He looked at the dead man on the bed—the position of him, as if he were praying…Thorne guessed that at the end, he probably had been.
The body is found in the grubbiest of North London hotel rooms. Kneeling, naked on a bare mattress, the head is hooded and the hands tied tight with a brown leather belt. And then there’s the oddest detail of all: the call from the florist to…
Full Dark House: A Bryant & May Mystery
- 2004 Barry-British nominee
- Score: 6.54
A present-day bombing rips through London and claims the life of eighty-year-old detective Arthur Bryant. For his partner John May, it means the end of a partnership that lasted over half-a-century and an eerie echo back to the Blitz of World War II when they first met. Desperately searching for clues to the killer’s identity, May finds his old friend’s notes of their very first case and becomes convinced that the past has returned…with a killing vengeance.
It begins when a dancer in a risque new production of Orpheus in Hell is found without her feet.…
- 2004 Macavity-Novel winner
- 2004 Barry-British nominee
- 2003 LATimes–Mystery finalist
- Score: 22.54
When a woman is found strangled to death on a popular beach in Sussex, the police have a hard time identifying her. It takes twelve days to discover she was a top psychological profiler for the National Crime Faculty. Detective Superintendent Peter Diamond is called in because the victim lived in Bath. He must coordinate his efforts with those of Henrietta Mallin, the original senior investigating officer, as well as try to cooperate with the cocky young officer charged with investigating the bizarre murder that the victim had been working on.
Oddly, the…
- 2003 Historical Dagger winner
- 2004 Barry-British nominee
- Score: 16.53
Edgar Allan Poe is the American boy, a child standing on the edge of mysteries.
In 1819, two Americans arrive in London, and soon afterwards a bank collapses. A man is found dead and horribly mutilated on a building site. An heiress flirts with her inferiors. A poor schoolmaster struggles to understand what is happening before it destroys him and those he loves.
But the truth, like the youthful Poe himself, has its origins in the new world as well as the old. Buried deep in the novel’s core is a bitter episode of corruption and divided loyalties during…
- 2004 Barry-British nominee
- Score: 6.54
When ex-mercenary Max Iversson is introduced to nightclub owner Roy Fowler, he senses immediately that the man’s trouble. Fowler wants security for a meeting with a group of businessmen who are looking to buy his club. Five grand for a couple of hours’ work is too tempting a proposition to turn down, so Iversson, who now runs his own firm of freelance bodyguards, takes the job.
But when he and two colleagues accompany Fowler to a deserted north London industrial estate to exchange the deeds for the money, it turns out to be not so much a double-cross as a…
