Monday, June 15, 2015

Who Has Dagger Swagger Today?

The British Crime Writers’ Association (CWA) announced, in May, the longlist of nominees in five of its 2015 Dagger Awards categories. Today it offers up four additional sets of contenders for CWA prizes.

CWA Goldsboro Gold Dagger:
The Shut Eye, by Belinda Bauer (Bantam Press)
The Rules of Wolfe, by James Carlos Blake (No Exit Press)
The Silkworm, by Robert Galbraith (Sphere)
Missing, by Sam Hawken (Serpent’s Tail)
Mr. Mercedes, by Stephen King (Hodder & Stoughton)
Pleasantville, by Attica Locke (Serpent’s Tail)
The Bone Seeker, by M.J. McGrath (Mantle)
The Serpentine Road, by Paul Mendelson (Constable)
Life or Death, by Michael Robotham (Sphere)
The Kind Worth Killing, by Peter Swanson (Faber and Faber)

CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger:
No Safe House, by Linwood Barclay (Orion)
The Defence, by Steve Cavanagh (Orion)
The Stranger, by Harlan Coben (Orion)
Missing, by Sam Hawken (Serpent’s Tail)
The Girl on the Train, by Paula Hawkins (Doubleday)
Nobody Walks, by Mick Herron (Soho Crime)
The White Van, by Patrick Hoffman (Grove Press)
The Final Minute, by Simon Kernick (Century)
Runner, by Patrick Lee (Michael Joseph)
The Night the Rich Men Burned, by Malcolm MacKay (Mantle)
Cop Town, by Karin Slaughter (Century)
The Kind Worth Killing, by Peter Swanson (Faber and Faber)
Heartman, by M.P. Wright (Black & White)

CWA John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger:
The Abrupt Physics of Dying, by Paul E. Hardisty (Orenda)
Dear Daughter, by Elizabeth Little (Harvill Secker)
Dry Bones in the Valley, by Tom Bouman (Faber and Faber)
Everything I Never Told You, by Celeste Ng (Little, Brown)
Fourth of July Creek, by Smith Henderson (Heinemann)
The Girl in the Red Coat, by Kate Hamer (Faber and Faber)
The Killing of Bobbi Lomax, by Cal Moriarty (Faber and Faber)
The Well, by Catherine Chanter (Canongate)
You, by Caroline Kepnes (Simon & Schuster)

Shortlists of the competitors in all of these Dagger categories should be declared on June 30, with the final winners to be announced in September during an awards ceremony in central London.

1 comment:

Kiwicraig said...

I've heard good things about many of those books on the longlists. It will be interesting to see what the finalists/shortlists are this year - there's great potential for tremendously strong shortlists, but we'll see. Speaking from personal reading experience, I can certainly vouch for the quality of THE SERPENTINE ROAD by Paul Mendelson and LIFE OR DEATH by Michael Robotham, in terms of the Gold Dagger. The latter in particular is a masterful piece of writing. Karin Slaughter's COP TOWN, along with Robotham's LIFE OR DEATH, was one of my very top reads of 2014, so similarly it would be great to see it make the cut in the Steel Dagger. And Hardisty's THE ABRUPT PHYSICS OF DYING is a superb debut, a searing literary thriller about the oil industry and the collision of commerce, business, and the environment. I'd recommend them all as great reads.