By Hook or By Crook Read online

  Best Actor Dagger: Dominic West for The Wire (HBO; BBC Two)

  Bestseller Dagger: Harlan Coben

  Hall of Fame: Colin Dexter, Lynda La Plante, Ian Rankin, and Val McDermid

  Diamond Dagger: Andrew Taylor

  Ellis Peters Award Historical Dagger: Philip Kerr, If the Dead Rise Not (Quercus)

  Dagger in the Library (voted by librarians for a body of work): Colin Cotterill

  Debut Dagger (for unpublished writers): Catherine O’Keefe, The Pathologist

  Anthony Awards (Bouchercon World Mystery Convention)

  Best novel: Michael Connelly, The Brass Verdict (Little, Brown)

  Best first novel: Stieg Larsson, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (Knopf)

  Best paperback original: Julie Hyzy, State of the Onion (Berkley)

  Best short story: Sean Chercover, “A Sleep Not Unlike Death” (Hardcore Hardboiled, Kensington)

  Best critical nonfiction work: Jeffrey Marks, Anthony Boucher: A Biobibliography (McFarland)

  Best children’s/young adult novel: Chris Grabenstein, The Crossroads (Random House)

  Best cover art: Stieg Larsson, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (Knopf), designed by Peter Mendelsund

  Special Services Award: Jon and Ruth Jordan

  Shamus Awards (Private Eye Writers of America)

  Best hardcover novel: Reed Farrel Coleman, Empty Ever After (Bleak House)

  Best first novel: Ian Vasquez, In the Heat (St. Martin’s Minotaur)

  Best original paperback novel: Lori Armstrong, Snow Blind (Medallion)

  Best short story: Mitch Alderman, “Family Values” (Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, June)

  The Eye (life achievement): Robert J. Randisi

  Hammer Award (for a memorable private eye character or series): Matt Scudder (created by Lawrence Block)

  Macavity Awards (Mystery Readers International)

  Best novel: Deborah Crombie, Where Memories Lie (William Morrow)

  Best first novel: Stieg Larsson, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (Knopf)

  Best nonfiction: Frankie Y. Bailey, African American Mystery Writers: A Historical and Thematic Study (McFarland)

  Best short story: Dana Cameron, “The Night Things Changed” (Wolfsbane and Mistletoe, Penguin)

  Sue Feder Historical Mystery Award: Rhys Bowen, A Royal Pain (Berkley)

  Barry Awards(Deadly Pleasures and Mystery News)

  Best novel: Arnaldur Indridason, The Draining Lake (Minotaur)

  Best first novel: Tom Rob Smith, Child 44 (Grand Central)

  Best British novel: Stieg Larsson, The Girl With the Dragon Tatoo (MacLehose/Quercus)

  Best paperback original: Julie Hyzy, State of the Onion (Berkley)

  Best thriller: Brett Battles, The Deceived (Delacorte)

  Best short story: James O. Born, “The Drought” (The Blue Religion, Little, Brown)

  Don Sandstrom Memorial Award for Lifetime Achievement in Mystery Fandom: Art Scott

  Arthur Ellis Awards(Crime Writers of Canada)

  Best novel: Linwood Barclay, Too Close to Home (Bantam)

  Best first novel: Howard Shrier, Buffalo Jump (Vintage Canada)

  Best nonfiction: Michael Calce and Craig Silverman, Mafiaboy: How I Cracked the Internet and Why It’s Still Broken (Penguin Canada)

  Best juvenile novel: Sharon E. McKay, War Brothers (Penguin Canada)

  Best short story: Pasha Malla, “Filmsong” (Toronto Noir, Akashic)

  The Unhanged Arthur (best unpublished first crime novel): Douglas A. Moles, Louder

  Best crime writing in French: Jacques Cote, Le chemin des brumes (Alire)

  Thriller Awards (International Thriller Writers, Inc.)

  Best novel: Jeffery Deaver, The Bodies Left Behind (Simon & Schuster)

  Best first novel: Tom Rob Smith, Child 44 (Grand Central)

  Best short story: Alexandra Sokoloff, “The Edge of Seventeen” (The Darker Mask, Tor)

  ThrillerMaster Award: David Morrell

  Silver Bullet Award: Brad Meltzer

  Silver Bullet Corporate Award: Dollar General Literacy Foundation, for longstanding support of literacy and education

  Ned Kelly Awards(Crime Writers’ Association of Australia)

  Best novel (tie): Peter Corris, Deep Water (Allen & Unwin); Kel Robertson, Smoke and Mirrors (Ginninderra)

  Best first novel: Nick Gadd, Ghostlines (Scribe)

  Best nonfiction: Chloe Hooper, The Tall Man (Penguin)

  Best short story (S. D. Harvey Award): Scott McDermott, “Fidget’s Farewell,”

  Lifetime achievement: Shane Maloney

  Left Coast Crime Awards

  Lefty (best humorous mystery): Tim Maleeny, Greasing the Piñata (Poisoned Pen)

  Bruce Alexander Memorial Historical Mystery Award: Kelli Stanley, Nox Dormienda, A Long Night for Sleeping (Five Star)

  Hawaii Five-O Award (best police procedural): Neil S. Placky, Mahu Fire (Alyson)

  Strand Critics(The Strand Magazine)

  Best novel: Richard Price, Lush Life (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

  Best first novel: Tom Rob Smith, Child 44 (Grand Central)

  Lifetime achievement: John Mortimer (posthumously)

  Dilys Award (Independent Mystery Booksellers Association)

  Sean Chercover, Trigger City (William Morrow)

  Nero Wolfe Award (Wolfe Pack)

  Joseph Teller, The Tenth Case (MIRA)

  Hammett Prize

  (International Association of Crime Writers, North America Branch)

  George Pelecanos, The Turnaround (Little, Brown)

  Los Angeles Times Book Prize

  Mystery/Thriller Category

  Michael Koryta, Envy the Night (St. Martin’s Minotaur)

  • • •

  JON L. BREEN was first published in 1966 with a quiz in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, followed the following year by his first short story, a parody of Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct. Around a hundred short stories have followed, plus seven novels (with an eighth on the horizon), three story collections, several edited anthologies, three reference books on mystery fiction (two of them Edgar winners), and more book reviews and articles than he can count. In 1977, he became the proprietor of EQMM ’S “Jury Box” column, which he has contributed ever since, save for a few years in the mid-’80s. He also contributes the “What About Murder?” column to Mystery Scene and has been an occasional strictly non-political contributor to The Weekly Standard. Retired since the dawn of 2000, he lives happily with his wife, Rita, in Fountain Valley, California.

  ANIMAL RESCUE

  By Dennis Lehane

  DORCHESTER

  Bob found the dog in the trash.

  It was just after Thanksgiving, the neighborhood gone quiet, hungover. After bartending at Cousin Marv’s, Bob sometimes walked the streets. He was big and lumpy and hair had been growing in unlikely places all over his body since his teens. In his twenties, he’d fought against the hair, carrying small clippers in his coat pocket and shaving twice a day. He’d also fought the weight, but during all those years of fighting, no girl who wasn’t being paid for it ever showed any interest in him. After a time, he gave up the fight. He lived alone in the house he grew up in, and when it seemed likely to swallow him with its smells and memories and dark couches, the attempts he’d made to escape it — through church socials, lodge picnics, and one horrific mixer thrown by a dating service — had only opened the wound further, left him patching it back up for weeks, cursing himself for hoping.

  So he took these walks of his and, if he was lucky, sometimes he forgot people lived any other way. That night, he paused on the sidewalk, feeling the ink sky above him and the cold in his fingers, and he closed his eyes against the evening.

  He was used to it. He was used to it. It was okay.

  You could make a friend of it, as long as you didn’t fight it.

  With his eyes closed, he heard it — a worn-out keening accompanied by distant scratching and a sharper, metallic rattl
ing. He opened his eyes. Fifteen feet down the sidewalk, a large metal barrel with a heavy lid shook slightly under the yellow glare of the streetlight, its bottom scraping the sidewalk. He stood over it and heard that keening again, the sound of a creature that was one breath away from deciding it was too hard to take the next, and he pulled off the lid.

  He had to remove some things to get to it — a toaster and five thick Yellow Pages, the oldest dating back to 2000. The dog — either a very small one or else a puppy — was down at the bottom, and it scrunched its head into its midsection when the light hit it. It exhaled a soft chug of a whimper and tightened its body even more, its eyes closed to slits. A scrawny thing. Bob could see its ribs. He could see a big crust of dried blood by its ear. No collar. It was brown with a white snout and paws that seemed far too big for its body.

  It let out a sharper whimper when Bob reached down, sank his fingers into the nape of its neck, and lifted it out of its own excrement. Bob didn’t know dogs too well, but there was no mistaking this one for anything but a boxer. And definitely a puppy, the wide brown eyes opening and looking into his as he held it up before him.

  Somewhere, he was sure, two people made love. A man and a woman. Entwined. Behind one of those shades, oranged with light, that looked down on the street. Bob could feel them in there, naked and blessed. And he stood out here in the cold with a near-dead dog staring back at him. The icy sidewalk glinted like new marble, and the wind was dark and gray as slush.

  “What do you got there?”

  Bob turned, looked up and down the sidewalk.

  “I’m up here. And you’re in my trash.”

  She stood on the front porch of the three-decker nearest him. She’d turned the porch light on and stood there shivering, her feet bare. She reached into the pocket of her hoodie and came back with a pack of cigarettes. She watched him as she got one going.

  “I found a dog.” Bob held it up.

  “A what?”

  “A dog. A puppy. A boxer, I think.”

  She coughed out some smoke. “Who puts a dog in a barrel?”

  “Right?” he said. “It’s bleeding.” He took a step toward her stairs and she backed up.

  “Who do you know that I would know?” A city girl, not about to just drop her guard around a stranger.

  “I don’t know,” Bob said. “How about Francie Hedges?”

  She shook her head. “You know the Sullivans?”

  That wouldn’t narrow it down. Not around here. You shook a tree, a Sullivan fell out. Followed by a six-pack most times. “I know a bunch.”

  This was going nowhere, the puppy looking at him, shaking worse than the girl.

  “Hey,” she said, “you live in this parish?”

  “Next one over. St. Theresa’s.”

  “Go to church?”

  “Most Sundays.”

  “So you know Father Pete?”

  “Pete Regan,” he said, “sure.”

  She produced a cell phone. “What’s your name?”

  “Bob,” he said. “Bob Saginowski.”

  Bob waited as she stepped back from the light, phone to one ear, finger pressed into the other. He stared at the puppy. The puppy stared back, like, How did I get here? Bob touched its nose with his index finger. The puppy blinked its huge eyes. For a moment, Bob couldn’t recall his sins.

  “Nadia,” the girl said and stepped back into the light. “Bring him up here, Bob. Pete says hi.”

  • • •

  They washed it in Nadia’s sink, dried it off, and brought it to her kitchen table.

  Nadia was small. A bumpy red rope of a scar ran across the base of her throat like the smile of a drunk circus clown. She had a tiny moon of a face, savaged by pockmarks, and small, heart-pendant eyes. Shoulders that didn’t cut so much as dissolve at the arms. Elbows like flattened beer cans. A yellow bob of hair curled on either side of her face. “It’s not a boxer.” Her eyes glanced off Bob’s face before dropping the puppy back onto her kitchen table. “It’s an American Staffordshire terrier.”

  Bob knew he was supposed to understand something in her tone, but he didn’t know what that thing was so he remained silent.

  She glanced back up at him after the quiet lasted too long. “A pit bull.”

  “That’s a pit bull?”

  She nodded and swabbed the puppy’s head wound again. Someone had pummeled it, she told Bob. Probably knocked it unconscious, assumed it was dead, and dumped it.

  “Why?” Bob said.

  She looked at him, her round eyes getting rounder, wider. “Just because.” She shrugged, went back to examining the dog. “I worked at Animal Rescue once. You know the place on Shawmut? As a vet tech. Before I decided it wasn’t my thing. They’re so hard, this breed...”

  “What?”

  “To adopt out,” she said. “It’s very hard to find them a home.”

  “I don’t know about dogs. I never had a dog. I live alone. I was just walking by the barrel.” Bob found himself beset by a desperate need to explain himself, explain his life. “I’m just not...” He could hear the wind outside, black and rattling. Rain or bits of hail spit against the windows.

  Nadia lifted the puppy’s back left paw — the other three paws were brown, but this one was white with peach spots. Then she dropped the paw as if it were contagious. She went back to the head wound, took a closer look at the right ear, a piece missing from the tip that Bob hadn’t noticed until now.

  “Well,” she said, “he’ll live. You’re gonna need a crate and food and all sorts of stuff.”

  “No,” Bob said. “You don’t understand.”

  She cocked her head, gave him a look that said she understood perfectly.

  “I can’t. I just found him. I was gonna give him back.”

  “To whoever beat him, left him for dead?”

  “No, no, like, the authorities.”

  “That would be Animal Rescue,” she said. “After they give the owner seven days to reclaim him, they’ll — ”

  “The guy who beat him? He gets a second chance?”

  She gave him a half-frown and a nod. “If he doesn’t take it,” she lifted the puppy’s ear, peered in, “chances are this little fella’ll be put up for adoption. But it’s hard. To find them a home. Pit bulls. More often than not?” She looked at Bob. “More often than not, they’re put down.”

  Bob felt a wave of sadness roll out from her that immediately shamed him. He didn’t know how, but he’d caused pain. He’d put some out into the world. He’d let this girl down. “I” he started. “It’s just...”

  She glanced up at him. “I’m sorry?”

  Bob looked at the puppy. Its eyes were droopy from a long day in the barrel and whoever gave it that wound. It had stopped shivering, though.

  “You can take it,” Bob said. “You used to work there, like you said. You — ”

  She shook her head. “My father lives with me. He gets home Sunday night from Foxwoods. He finds a dog in his house? An animal he’s allergic to?” She jerked her thumb. “Puppy goes back in the barrel.”

  “Can you give me til Sunday morning?” Bob wasn’t sure how it was the words left his mouth, since he couldn’t remember formulating them or even thinking them.

  The girl eyed him carefully. “You’re not just saying it? Cause, I shit you not, he ain’t picked up by Sunday noon, he’s back out that door.”

  “Sunday, then.” Bob said the words with a conviction he actually felt. “Sunday, definitely.”

  “Yeah?” She smiled, and it was a spectacular smile, and Bob saw that the face behind the pockmarks was as spectacular as the smile. Wanting only to be seen. She touched the puppy’s nose with her index finger.

  “Yeah.” Bob felt crazed. He felt light as a communion wafer. “Yeah.”

  • • •

  At Cousin Marv’s, where he tended bar 12:00 to 10:00, Wednesday through Sunday, he told Marv all about it. Most people called Marv Cousin Marv out of habit, something that went back to grade
school though no one could remember how, but Marv actually was Bob’s cousin. On his mother’s side.

  Cousin Marv had run a crew in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. It had been primarily comprised of guys with interests in the loaning and subsequent debt-repayal side of things, though Marv never turned his nose down at any paying proposition because he believed, to the core of his soul, that those who failed to diversify were always the first to collapse when the wind turned. Like the dinosaurs, he’d say to Bob, when the cavemen came along and invented arrows. Picture the cavemen, he’d say, firing away, and the tyrannosauruses all gucked up in the oil puddles. A tragedy so easily averted.

  Marv’s crew hadn’t been the toughest crew or the smartest or the most successful operating in the neighborhood — not even close — but for a while they got by. Other crews kept nipping at their heels, though, and except for one glaring exception, they’d never been ones to favor violence. Pretty soon, they had to make the decision to yield to crews a lot meaner than they were or duke it out. They took Door Number One.

  Marv’s income derived from running his bar as a drop. In the new world order — a loose collective of Chechen, Italian, and Irish hard guys — no one wanted to get caught with enough merch or enough money for a case to go Federal. So they kept it out of their offices and out of their homes and they kept it on the move. About every two-three weeks, drops were made at Cousin Marv’s, among other establishments. You sat on the drop for a night, two at the most, before some beer-truck driver showed up with the weekend’s password and hauled everything back out on a dolly like it was a stack of empty kegs, took it away in a refrigerated semi. The rest of Marv’s income derived from being a fence, one of the best in the city, but being a fence in their world (or a drop bar operator for that matter) was like being a mailroom clerk in the straight world — if you were still doing it after thirty, it was all you’d ever do. For Bob, it was a relief — he liked being a bartender and he’d hated that one time they’d had to come heavy. Marv, though, Marv still waited for the golden train to arrive on the golden tracks, take him away from all this. Most times, he pretended to be happy. But Bob knew that the things that haunted Marv were the same things that haunted Bob — the shitty things you did to get ahead. Those things laughed at you if your ambitions failed to amount to much; a successful man could hide his past; an unsuccessful man sat in his.