The winners of the Crime Writers’ Association Daggers for 2025 have been revealed! The Dagger’s celebrate the best in crime writing across all genres through a wide variety of categories. Take a look at these crime novels, available to borrow with your library card.
The Book of Secrets
Anna Mazzola
Winner of Gold Dagger for Best Crime Novel of the Year
Rome, 1659. Months after the plague has ravaged Rome, men are still dying in unnatural numbers, and rumour has it that their corpses do not decay as they should. The Papal authorities commission prosecutor Stefano Bracchi to investigate, telling him he will need considerable mettle to reach the truth. To the west of the Tiber, Girolama and her female friends are at work, helping other women with childbirths and foretelling their futures. Elsewhere in the city, a young wife, Anna, must find a way to escape her abusive husband. But in a city made by men for men, there are no easy paths out. Stefano’s investigation at the Tor di Nona prison will introduce him to horror, magic and an astonishing cast of characters. He will be left wondering if certain deeds should remain forever unpunished.
Dark Ride
Lou Berney
Winner of the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger
Twenty-one-year-old Hardy ‘Hardly’ Reed – good-natured, easygoing, usually stoned – is drifting through life. A minimum-wage scare actor at an amusement park, he avoids unnecessary effort and unrealistic ambitions. Then one day he notices two children, around six or seven, sitting all alone on a bench. Hardly checks if they’re okay and sees injuries on both children. Someone is hurting these kids. He reports the incident to Child Protective Service. That should be the end of it. After all, Hardly’s not even good at looking out for himself so the last thing he wants to do is look out for anyone else. But he’s haunted by the two kids, his heart breaking for them. And the more research he does the less he trusts that Child Protective Services – understaffed and overworked – will do anything about it. That leaves – Hardly. He is probably the last person you’d ever want to count on.
All Us Sinners
Kate Massey
Winner of the ILP John Creasey First Novel Dagger
Leeds, 1977. A chill lies over the city: sex workers are being murdered by a serial killer they are calling the ‘Ripper’, the streets creeping with fear. Tough, sharp, but tender, Maureen runs Rio’s, a clean, discreet brothel in the city. She’s a good boss who takes great care of her workers – especially her best girls, Bev and Anette. The Ripper may be terrifying girls who work the street, but at Rio’s the girls seem safer. But when Bev’s sweet-natured son is found beaten to death, a figure from Maureen’s past, DS Mick Hunniford, shows up at her door. Does his arrival herald danger or salvation? And who can Maureen really trust?
The Betrayal of Thomas True
AJ West
Winner of the Historical Dagger
It is the year 1715, and Thomas True has arrived on old London Bridge with a dangerous secret. One night, lost amongst the squalor of London’s hidden back streets, he finds himself drawn into the outrageous underworld of the molly houses. Meanwhile, carpenter Gabriel Griffin struggles to hide his double life as Lotty, the molly’s stoic guard. When a young man is found murdered, he realises there is a rat amongst them, betraying their secrets to a pair of murderous Justices.
Can Gabriel unmask the traitor before they hang? Can he save hapless Thomas from peril, and their own forbidden love?
The Night of Baba Yaga
Akira Otani
Winner of the Dagger for Crime Fiction in Translation
Fierce, mixed-race fighter Shindo has been kidnapped by the yakuza. After brutally beating most of them in an attempt to escape, she is forced to work as a bodyguard to protect the gang boss’s sheltered daughter Shoko, a strange, friendless eighteen-year-old who could order Shindo’s death in a moment. At first Shindo derides Shoko’s naïvete, but as the men around them grow ever more bloodthirsty and controlling, she becomes ferociously devoted to her charge. However, she knows that if things continue as they are, neither woman can expect to survive much longer. But could there ever be a different life for two people like them?
The Peepshow: The Murders at 10 Rillington Place
Kate Summerscale
Winner of the ALCS Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction
London, 1953. Police discover the bodies of three young women hidden in a wall at 10 Rillington Place, a dingy terrace house in Notting Hill. On searching the building, they find another body beneath the floorboards, then an array of human bones in the garden. But they have already investigated a double murder at 10 Rillington Place, three years ago, and the killer was hanged. Did they get the wrong man? A nationwide manhunt is launched for the tenant of the ground-floor flat, a softly spoken former policeman named Reg Christie. Star reporter Harry Procter chases after the scoop. Celebrated crime writer Fryn Tennyson Jesse begs to be assigned to the case.
Nightwatching
Tracy Sierra
Winner of the Twisted Dagger for Psychological Thrillers
There was someone in the house. Home alone with her young children during a blizzard, a mother tucks her son back into bed in the middle of the night. Then she hears a noise – old houses are always making some kind of noise. But this sound is disturbingly familiar: it’s the tread of footsteps, unusually heavy and slow, coming up the stairs. In that split second, she has three choices. Should she hide? Should she run? Or should she fight?
The Case of the Singer and the Showgirl
Lisa Hall
Winner of the Whodunnit Dagger
Lily Jones can’t forget her incredible time-slip adventure back to the Golden Age of Hollywood and the friends she made there – especially a handsome barman by the name of Louis, with whom she felt such a strong connection. Back in 2020, life isn’t going so well for her and Lily is idly googling when she is horrified to discover that Evelyn, Louis’ ex-girlfriend, is brutally murdered in 1953. She is compelled to go back to the 1950s and try to save Evelyn’s life, but this time it isn’t just the gilded stars of Tinseltown she will have to contend with, but The Mob as she finds herself in the seedy glamour of Vegas and learns that Evelyn’s future depends upon her first solving the murder of a Vegas showgirl. Thankfully she has Louis and his sister, Tilda, to help her, but her own life is in danger as she tries to find the killer and change Evelyn’s fate.
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