The 2024 CWA Dagger Winners
The Crime Writer's Association UK has announced the winners of the 2024 CWA Daggers.
Here are the recipients for each of the main categories.
Gold Dagger: Tell Me What I Am by Una Mannion
The Gold Dagger is given to the overall best crime novel of the year, from thrillers to mysteries, procedurals to psychological suspense.
Deena Garvey disappeared in 2004. She left behind a daughter and a sister.
Deena’s daughter grows up in the country. She learns how to hunt, when to seed the garden, how to avoid making her father angry. Never to ask about her absent mother. Deena’s sister stays stuck in the city, getting desperate. She knows the man responsible for her sister’s disappearance, but she can’t prove it. Not yet.
Over fourteen years, four hundred miles apart, these two women slowly begin to unearth the secrets and lies at the heart of their family, and the history of power and control that has shaped them both in such different ways.
Ian Fleming Steel Dagger: Everybody Knows by Jordan Harper
Sponsored by Ian Fleming Publications, the Steel Dagger is for the best espionage, psychological, or adventure thriller novel.
A 'black-bag' publicist at one of Hollywood's most powerful crisis PR firms, Mae Pruett's job isn't to get good news out, it's to keep the bad news in. But just as she starts to question her job and life choices, her boss is gunned down in front of the Beverly Hills Hotel, and everything changes.
Investigating with the help of an ex-boyfriend, Mae dives headlong into a neon joyride through the jungle of contemporary Hollywood. Pitted against the twisted system she's worked so hard to perpetuate, she's desperately fighting for redemption, and her life.
ILP John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger: In the Blink of an Eye by Jo Callaghan
Awarded to the best crime novel by a first-time author of any nationality, first traditionally published in the UK in English.
DCS Kat Frank knows all about loss. A widowed single mother, Kat is a cop who trusts her instincts. Picked to lead a pilot programme that has her paired with AIDE (Artificially Intelligent Detective Entity) Lock, Kat's instincts come up against Lock's logic. But when the two missing person's cold cases they are reviewing suddenly become active, Lock is the only one who can help Kat when the case gets personal.
AI versus human experience. Logic versus instinct. With lives on the line can the pair work together before someone else becomes another statistic?
Dagger for Crime Fiction in Translation: My Husband by Maud Ventura & translated by Emma Ramadan
This dagger is awarded to a crime novel not originally written in English, and translated into English for UK publication during the judging period. Sponsored in honour of Dolores Jakubowski.
From the outside, she has an enviable life – a successful career, stunning looks, a beautiful house in the suburbs, two healthy children, and most importantly, an ideal husband. After fifteen years together, she is still besotted with him. But she's never quite sure that her passion is reciprocated.
Determined to keep their relationship perfect, she meticulously prepares for every encounter they have, always taking care to make her actions seem effortless. She watches him attentively, charting every mistake and punishing him accordingly to help him improve. And she tests him – setting traps to make sure that he still loves her just as much as he did when they first met.
Until one day she realizes she may have gone too far . . .
Other prizes awarded were:
Lynda La Plante and James Lee Burke were jointly awarded the prestigious Diamond Dagger, recognising their lifetime contribution to crime writing in the English language.
The ALCS Gold Dagger for Nonfiction, which is awarded to any non-fiction work on a crime-related theme, including biography, historical crime and true crime, went to Nicholas Shakespeare for Ian Fleming: The Complete Man.
The Dagger in the Library, which is awarded to a writer whose body of work is popular with library users, and who in turn supports libraries and borrowers, went to Anthony Horowitz.
The Historical Dagger, which is awarded to the best historical crime novel set in any period up to 50 years prior to the year of the award, went to Viper's Dream by Jake Lamar.
