The Crime Writer’s Association (CWA) located in the UK announced some of the winners of the CWA Dagger awards yesterday.  For those unfamiliar, it is a prestigious award handed out as a recognition of quality crime fiction and non-fiction writing.  

The CWA started giving out these awards in 1955 under the original title of the Crossed Red Herring Award. There are nine different awards handed out each year under the following categories: The CWA Gold Dagger is for best crime novel of the year, CWA Diamond (award for lifetime achievement), Ian Fleming Steel Dagger for best contempoary thriller, CWA/Ellis Peters Historical Award for best historical of the year, John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger (new writers of note), CWA International Dagger are for books originally written in a foreign language. To round out the rest of the Daggers you have  Non-Fiction, Short Story, Library and Debut (unpublished writers).

The awards for the Gold Dagger, CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger and CWA Gold will be announced later in the summer but I’ve listed the nominated titles along with links.

Andrea Camilleri won the International Dagger for The Potter’s Field, that’s apart of his Inspector Montalbano series.

Witty and entertaining, the Montalbano novels by Andrea Camilleri-a master of the Italian detective story-have become favorites of mystery fans everywhere. In this latest installment, an unidentified corpse is found near Vigàta, a town known for its soil rich with potter’s clay. Meanwhile, a woman reports the disappearance of her husband, a Colombian man with Sicilian origins who turns out to be related to a local mobster. Then Inspector Montalbano remembers the story from the Bible-Judas’s betrayal, the act of remorse, and the money for the potter’s field, where those of unknown or foreign origin are to be buried-and slowly, through myriad betrayals, finds his way to the solution to the crime. Personal note: I haven’t read this series yet but I plan to soon. I have noticed that some readers read these out of order but for those who read in order the first book is The Shape of Water.

The CWA Ellis Peters Historical Dagger Award was given to Aly Monroe for her book, Icelight and here is the synopsis:

1947. Threadbare London endures the bleakest, coldest winter for decades. Food rationing is worse than during the war. Coal supplies run out. The Thames freezes over. Against a background of black ice, blackouts and the black market, agent Peter Cotton is seconded to Operation Sea-snake. MI5 is in the grip of civil war; MI6 is riddled with traitors. Unsure who to trust – or even who is pulling the strings – Cotton, ever the outsider, must protect an atomic scientist caught up in a vicious homophobic witch-hunt, limit the damage caused by a bully-boy MP, rely on a rent-boy informer and, despite the murderous attentions of a couple of Glasgow razor boys, embark on a ruthless hunt of his own.

Here are the Gold Dagger nominations for best crime novel of 2012:

A Land More Kind than Home by Wiley Cash (Transworld/Bantam)
Vengeance in Mind by N.J. Cooper (Simon & Schuster)
Grandad, There’s a Head on the Beach by Colin Cotterill (Quercus)
The Flight by M.R. Hall (Mantle)
The Rage by Gene Kerrigan (Vintage)
Turn of Mind by Alice LaPlante (Harvill Secker)
The Child Who by Simon Lelic (Mantle)
Bereft by Chris Womersley (Quercus)

Here are the nominations for the Ian Fleming Steel for best contemporary thriller 2012:

Dare Me by Megan Abbott (Picador)
The Shadow Patrol by Alex Berenson (Headline)
A Foreign Country by Charles Cumming (HarperCollins)
The Fear Index by Robert Harris (Hutchinson)
The Dispatcher by Ryan David Jahn (Macmillan)
Uncommon Enemy by Alan Judd (Simon & Schuster)
The Child Who by Simon Lelic (Mantle)
Reamde by Neal Stephenson (Atlantic Books)

The John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger nominations 2012:

The Doll Princess by Tom Benn (Jonathan Cape)
Heart-Shaped Bruise by Tanya Byrne (Headline)
A Land More Kind than Home by Wiley Cash (Transworld/Bantam)
So Much Pretty by Cara Hoffman (Century)
Good People by Ewart Hutton (HarperCollins)
Turn of Mind by Alice LaPlante (Harvill Secker)
The Expats by Chris Pavone (Faber & Faber)
What Dies in Summer by Tom Wright (Canongate)

The Rap Sheet has a more thorough wrap up of the awards that were given out yesterday and all information relating to the CWA awards I got from their website.