Friday, September 9, 2011

"Snow Angels" by James Thompson Nominated for 2011 Best First Novel Anthony Award


James Thompson's Snow Angels has been nominated for the Anthony Award for Best First Novel. The Anthony Awards are given at each annual Bouchercon World Mystery Convention with the winners selected by attendees. The award is named for the late Anthony Boucher (William Anthony Parker White), well-known writer and critic from the New York Times, who helped found the Mystery Writers of America. This year's Bouchercon will be held this September 15-18 right here in St. Louis.

From James Thompson's web site:
Kaamos: Just before Christmas, the bleakest time of the year in Lapland. The unrelenting darkness and extreme cold above the Arctic Circle drive everyone just a little insane . . . perhaps enough to kill.

A beautiful Somali immigrant is found dead in a snowfield, her body gruesomely mutilated, a racial slur carved into her chest. Heading the murder investigation is Inspector Kari Vaara, the lead detective of the small-town police force. Once a big-city “hero cop,” Vaara has retreated to his old hometown to nurse unhealed wounds. Now he has put himself under intense pressure to solve the case without asking for outside help. The vicious killing may have been a hate crime, a sex crime -- or one and the same. Vaara knows he must keep this potentially explosive case out of the national headlines, or it will send shock waves across Finland, an insular nation afraid to face its own xenophobia.

The demands of the investigation begin to take their toll on Vaara and his marriage. His young American wife, Kate, newly pregnant with their first child, is struggling to adapt to both the unforgiving Arctic climate and the Finnish culture of silence and isolation. Meanwhile Vaara himself, haunted by his rough childhood and failed first marriage, discovers that the past keeps biting at his heels: he suspects that the rich man for whom his ex-wife left him years ago may be the killer.

Snow Angels is the chilling and resonant debut from James Thompson, a talented new voice in crime thrillers.

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