Malice Domestic has announced its nominees for the Agatha Awards, honoring the best novel, best first mystery novel, best non-fiction, and best short story published in 2000. Also, this year's Lifetime Achievement Award will go to Mildred Wirt Benson, the original author of the Nancy Drew series.
Best Novel
- He Shall Thunder in the Sky by Elizabeth Peters (Amelia Peabody series) - This book completes an internal quartet (which also includes Seeing a Large Cat, The Ape Who Guards the Balance, and The Falcon at the Portal) within Elizabeth Peters's legendary series starring Amelia Peabody, the intrepid Edwardian Egyptologist, her husband, Emerson, and her extended family. The Falcon at the Portal left readers hanging impatiently in the enormous rift that book's events gouged between Ramses and Nefret, both madly in love but unrelentingly proud. The winter of 1914-15 finds the Peabody-Emerson family back in Cairo, now under British martial law, with the Suez Canal under constant threat of attack from the Ottoman Empire. The city's young Englishmen are rushing to enlist, except for Ramses, who is widely scorned for his pacifism. Yet Amelia and Emerson soon find out that Ramses is (literally) playing a mysterious and potentially explosive part in the conflict between Egyptian nationalists and the British authorities, for reasons both political and familial. Nefret, for her part, is still running a health clinic for the city's fallen women and trying to avoid the attentions of Percy, Amelia's odious nephew. In the meantime, the Emersons' excavations at Giza reveal an unexpected treasure so remarkable that the uneasy Amelia immediately senses the fine hand of Sethos, the Master Criminal (who through many previous books has alternately plagued her and protested his boundless affection for her), at work. The climax and denouement tie up a decade's worth of loose strings and explain some nagging points so subtle that less observant readers might easily have missed them.
- The Floating Girl by Sujata Massey (Rei Shimura series) - In her fourth mystery, Rei is writing about art and antiques for a monthly magazine published in Tokyo. After a hostile takeover aided by a deceptively perky college intern, the Gaijin Times has adopted a comic-book format to attract more readers. It falls upon Rei to write something glowing about the history of comic-book art. During a long weekend of research and relaxation at her boyfriend Takeo's beachside house, Rei stumbles on an exquisitely drawn modern comic book that reveals the disturbing social milieu of pre-World War II Japan. Rei's exhaustive search for the comic book's twenty-something creators leads to three college students. When one of them turns up dead in a scene straight out of the comic, the art story turns into a murder investigation. Rei finds herself floating through strip clubs, animation shops, and coffeehouses to get the true story--and to save her own skin.
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