Ned Kelly Awards winners 2016
Congratulations to the 2016 winners of the Ned Kelly Awards for the best in Australian crime writing.
Best Fiction
Before it Breaks by Dave Warner
Detective Daniel Clement is back in Broome, licking his wounds from a busted marriage and struggling to be impressed by his new team of small-town cops. Here, in the oasis on the edge of the desert, life is as stagnant as Clement’s latest career move. But when a body is discovered in a local fishing spot, it is clearly not the result of a crocodile attack. Somewhere in Broome is a hunter of a different kind. As more bodies are found, Clement races to solve a decades-old mystery before a monster cyclone hits.
Best first fiction
Resurrection Bay by Emma Viskic
Caleb Zelic, profoundly deaf since early childhood, has always lived on the outside – watching, picking up tell-tale signs people hide in a smile, a cough, a kiss. When a childhood friend is murdered, a sense of guilt and a determination to prove his own innocence sends Caleb on a hunt for the killer. But he can’t do it alone. This gripping, original and fast-paced crime thriller is set between a big city and a small coastal town, Resurrection Bay, where Caleb is forced to confront painful memories.
Best true crime
Certain Admissions by Gideon Haigh
This book is Australian true crime at its best, and stranger than any crime fiction. It is real-life police procedural, courtroom drama, family saga, investigative journalism, social history, archival treasure hunt – a meditation, too, on how the past shapes the present, and the present the past.
This year the Australian Crimewriters Association also honoured Carmel Shute with a Lifetime Achievement Award. As a founder and national co-convener of Sisters in Crime Australia, Carmel has spent 25 years supporting and nurturing Australian women crime writers.
