CWA Dagger Awards
The Duncan Lawrie Dagger (formerly Golden Dagger) Award is the best known of those presented annually by the British Crime Writer Association (CWA) for the best crime fiction published in the previous year. Only British publishers can submit entries for the awards, and the submissions must have been published in the English language in the United Kingdom within a limited period of time. Originally called the Crossed Red Herrings Award, the Dagger has been given annually since 1955. Since 1969, the runner-up in the voting has been awarded the Silver Dagger. For more information, please visit: www.thecwa.co.uk/daggers
2008 Blood From Stone by Frances Fyfield **
(Not currently published in the U.S.) Marianne Shearer is at the height of her career, a dauntingly successful barrister, respected by her peers and revered by her clients. So why has she killed herself? Her latest case had again resulted in an acquittal, though the outcome was principally due to the death of the prime witness after Marianne's forceful cross-examination. Had this wholly professional and unemotional lawyer been struck by guilt or uncertainty, or is there some secret to be discovered in her blandly comfortable private life?
2007 The Broken Shore by Peter Temple
Shaken by a scrape with death, big-city detective Joe Cashin is posted away from the Homicide Squad to a quiet town on the South Australian coast. Carrying physical scars and not a little guilt, he spends his time playing the country cop, walking his dogs and thinking about how it all was before. When a prominent local is attacked and left for dead in his own home, Cashin is thrust into a murder investigation. The evidence points to three boys from the nearby aboriginal community, whom everyone wants to blame. Cashin is unconvinced and soon begins to see the outlines of something far more terrible than a simple robbery gone wrong.
2006 Raven Black by Ann Cleeves **
When murder strikes a remote hamlet in the Shetland Islands, and the body of a teenage girl turns up in the winter snow, Inspector Jimmy Perez launches an investigation into the killing that takes him into the heart of sinister secrets from the past.
2005 Silence of the Grave by Arnaldur Indridason
In Silence of the Grave, a corpse is found on a hill outside the city, and Detective Inspector Erlendur Sveinsson and his team think the body may have been buried for some years. While Erlendur struggles to hold together the crumbling fragments of his own family, slowly but surely he finds out the truth about another unhappy family. Few people are still alive who can tell the tale, but even secrets taken to the grave cannot remain hidden forever.
2004 Blacklist by Sara Paretsky
This is a story of secrets and betrayals that stretch across four generations – secrets political, social, sexual, financial: all of them with the power to kill. Eager for something physical to do in the spirit-exhausting wake of 9/11, V.I. accepts a request from an old client to check up on an empty family mansion; subsequently surprises an intruder in the dark; and, giving chase, topples into a pond. Grasping for something to hold on to, her fingers close around a lifeless human hand.
2003 Fox Evil by Minette Walters
Friendless and alone after his wife dies under suspicious circumstances, Colonel James Lockyer-Fox searches desperately for the illegitimate granddaughter who could be the only answer to the problems plaguing his name and his life.
2002 The Athenian Murders by Jose Carlos Somoza **
In a dual story set in ancient Greece and modern times, the idealistic Diagoras teams up with Heracles Pontor to solve the murders of young Pluto's Academy students, and the present-day translator of the ancient text pursues what he believes to be a hidden meaning in the words of the writer.
2001 Sidetracked by Henning Mankell
A young girl spends a day almost catatonic in an isolated farm field, then immolates herself. Sweden's retired minister of justice--a man with a pornographic interest in young girls--takes his usual evening walk on the beach and meets a murderer's axe. With these possibly connected cases on his plate, series policeman Kurt Wallander and his team interrupt their personal agendas to identify the girl, expose unsavory personal/political secrets and deal with the subsequent connected murder of an art dealer.
2000 Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem
Lionel Essrog is Brooklyn's very own Human Freakshow, an orphan whose Tourettic impulses drive him to bark, count and rip apart language in startling and original ways. Together with three veterans of the St. Vincent's Home for Boys, he works for small-time mobster Frank Minna's limo service cum detective agency. Life without Frank, the charismatic King of Brooklyn, would be unimaginable. When Frank is fatally stabbed, Lionel's world is suddenly turned upside-down, and this outcast who has trouble even conversing attempts to untangle the threads of the case, while trying to keep the words straight in his head.
1999 A Small Death In Lisbon by Robert Wilson
1998 Sunset Limited by James Lee Burke
1997 Black And Blue by Ian Rankin
1996 Popcorn by Ben Elton
1995 Mermaids Singing by Val McDermid
1994 The Scold's Bridle by Minette Walters
1993 Cruel And Unusual by Patricia Cornwell
1992 King Solomon's Carpet by Barbara Vine
1991 The Way Through The Woods by Colin Dexter
1990 Bones And Silence by Reginald Hill
1989 The Wench Is Dead by Colin Dexter
1988 Ratking by Michael Dibdin
1987 A Fatal Inversion by Barbara Vine
1986 Live Flesh by Ruth Rendell
1985 Monkey Puzzle by Paula Gosling **
1984 The Twelfth Juror by B.M. Gill
1983 Accidental Crimes by John Hutton **
1982 The False Inspector Dew by Peter Lovesey
1981 Gorky Park by Martin Cruz Smith
1980 The Murder Of The Maharajah by H.R.F. Keating **
** = Wake County Public Libraries does not currently own this book.