The Verdict Is In: 2024 Ngaio Marsh Award winners explore societal prejudices and characters under fire
A trio of superb Kiwi writers were honoured at WORD Christchurch Festival last night as they scooped the 2024 Ngaio Marsh Awards for novels offering readers insights into people and place alongside cracking crime tales
In the fifteenth instalment of Aotearoa’s annual awards celebrating excellence in crime, mystery, thriller, and suspense writing, Rotorua author Claire Baylis won Best First Novel for her harrowing examination of jury beliefs and biases in Dice (Allen & Unwin), while Scotland-based DV Bishop scooped Best Novel for his Renaissance Florence-set mystery Ritual of Fire (Macmillan), and Wellington writer Jennifer Lane joined rare company by winning Best Kids/YA for smalltown mystery Miracle (Cloud Ink Press).
“I’m stoked we have a special award this year recognising writers of crime, mystery, and thriller tales for younger readers,” says Ngaios founder Craig Sisterson. “Many of us owe any lifelong passion for books, and all the good that come along with that, to the children’s authors we read when we were youngsters ourselves. Aotearoa has amazing kids authors, across many genres. In future we plan to award our Best Kids/YA Book prize biennially, alternating with our Best Non-Fiction prize that returns in 2025.”
Last night, ‘Bookshop Detectives’ Gareth and Louise Ward interrogated several of the prime suspects, aka 2024 Ngaios finalists, in person and by video before a large crowd of witnesses in Tūranga, before revealing whowunnit. “It’s the kind of denouement Dame Ngaio may have enjoyed,” says Sisterson.
First up, Lane was stunned to find herself onstage accepting the 2024 Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Kids/YA, adding to the Best First Novel prize she won in 2018 for All Our Secrets. She joins Paul Cleave, Jacqueline Bublitz, and Michael Bennett as winners of multiple Ngaio Marsh Awards. The judges praised Miracle, which stars a teenager trying to deal with devastating events and clear her father’s name after he’s arrested for a brutal attack, as “poignant and funny, with a complex storyline and memorable, well-developed characters including a fascinating heroine with her authentic adolescent voice”.
Lane’s fellow IIML graduate Claire Baylis was equally thrilled to win Best First Novel for Dice, a unique courtroom drama inspired by her research for the trans-Tasman Jury Project. Her debut gives readers insights into some harsh realities in our criminal justice system through the eyes and beliefs and biases of 12 jurors serving on a tricky sexual assault case. “Both timely and sensitively handled, there is so much that’s clever and surprising about Dice,” said the Ngaios judges. “Inventive, devastating, infuriating.”
The international judging panel for this year’s Ngaio Marsh Awards comprised leading crime fiction critics, editors, and authors from Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, the UK, and the United States.
The Best Novel judges praised Bishop for crafting great characters and “vividly evoking the glorious but menacing Medici-era Florence with convincing historical details seamlessly woven” into Ritual of Fire’s terrific story of Cesare Aldo, a gay court officer at a time when that was punishable potentially by death, trying to uncover the murderers of rich merchants burned to death in disturbing echoes of a religious sect.
“I’m delighted, and amazed frankly because the standard of the books on the longlist this year, let alone amongst the finalists, was incredible,” said Bishop over video from his home south of Edinburgh, when he was surprised with the news Ritual of Fire had won the 2024 Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Novel.
For more information on any of our 2024 Ngaio Marsh Awards winners or finalists, or the Ngaios in general, please contact ngaiomarshaward@gmail.com, or founder Craig Sisterson, craigsisterson@hotmail.com
Miracle by Jennifer Lane (Cloud Ink Press)
Born in the middle of Australia’s biggest-ever earthquake, Miracle is fourteen when her world crumbles. Thanks to her dad’s new job at Compassionate Cremations — which falls under suspicion for Boorunga’s spate of sudden deaths — the entire town turns against their family. Miracle is tormented by her classmates, even by Oli, the boy she can’t get out of her head. She fears for her agoraphobic mother, and for her angelic, quake-damaged brother, Julian. When Oli plays a cruel trick on Miracle, he sets off a chain of devastating events. Then her dad is arrested for a brutal attack. Miracle takes the full weight on her shoulders. How can she convince the town of her dad’s innocence?
Rituals of Fire by D V Bishop (Macmillan UK)
Florence. Summer, 1538. A night patrol finds a rich merchant hanged and set ablaze in the city’s main piazza. More than mere murder, this killing is intended to put the fear of God into Florence. Forty years earlier on this date, puritanical monk Girolamo Savonarola was executed the same way in the same place. Does this new killing mean Savonarola’s vengeful spirit has risen again? Or are his fanatical disciples plotting to revive the monk’s regime of holy terror? Cesare Aldo has his suspicions but is hunting thieves and fugitives in the Tuscan countryside, leaving Constable Carlo Strocchi to investigate the ritual killing. When another important merchant is slain even more publicly than the first, those rich enough to escape the summer heat are fleeing to their country estates. But the Tuscan hills can also be dangerous places. Soon growing religious fervour combines with a scorching heatwave to drive the city ever closer to madness, while someone is stalking powerful men that forged lifelong alliances during the dark days of Savonarola and his brutal followers. Unless Aldo and Strocchi can work together to stop the killer, Florence could become a bonfire of the vanities once more . . .
Dice by Claire Baylis (Allen & Unwin)
