Gold Dagger Award 2011

På Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival den 22 juli presenterades åtta författare som är med och tävlar om årets The CWA Gold Dagger Award:

Tom Franklin Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter (Macmillan)
Lucretia Grindle The Villa Triste (Mantle)
Steve Hamilton The Lock Artist (Orion)
Mo Hayder Hanging Hill (Bantam Press)
Michael Koryta The Cypress House (Hodder & Stoughton)
M. J. McGrath White Heat (Mantle)
A.D. Miller Snowdrops(Atlantic Books)
Denise Mina The End of the Wasp Season (Orion)

Den 19 augusti ska dessa reduceras till fyra och jag håller tummarna för att boken som jag håller på att läsa just nu fortfarande finns med i matchen då:

Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

Tom Franklin

Macmillan

Synopsis: Amos, Mississippi, is a quiet town. Silas Jones is its sole law enforcement officer. The last excitement here was nearly twenty years ago, when a teenage girl disappeared on a date with Larry Ott, Silas’s one-time boyhood friend. The law couldn’t prove Larry guilty, but the whole town has shunned him ever since.

Then the town’s peace is shattered when someone tries to kill the reclusive Ott, another young woman goes missing, and the town’s drug dealer is murdered. Woven through the tautly written murder story is the unspoken secret that hangs over the lives of two men – one black, one white.

Judges’ comments: Larry and Silas, white and black, boyhood friends in rural Mississippi thirty years ago, are separated by an apparent crime that changes their lives. A poignant suspense novel drenched in the languid atmosphere of small-town Mississippi where police investigate the murder of a local teenage girl. The novel explores fractured friendships and families as the legacy of racism, poverty, loneliness and misplaced suspicion from decades back (thecwa.co.uk).

Den är bra, riktigt bra!