The longlists for the 2019 CWA Daggers were announced at a reception at CrimeFest yesterday Friday 10 May 2019. Shortlists will be announced in the summer, and the glamorous Dagger Award ceremony where the winners are announced will be held at the Grange City Hotel in London on 24 October 2019 – the crime writing event of the year. The CWA Diamond Dagger for lifetime achievement is awarded in the springtime of the year and in 2019 goes to Robert Goddard. He will receive his prize at the October awards ceremony.
You can download here the 2019 longlist pdf.
As in previous years, I’m particularly interested in reading most of the books in the CWA International Dagger 2019 longlist. Particularly those new to me (at least) authors.
I couldn’t resist to downloaded today Long Night in Paris by Dov Alfon, Translated from the Hebrew by Daniella Zamir (MacLehose Press). The Kindle Edition was available today at EUR 0,99.
Chinese gangsters and Israeli intelligence face off in Paris – Israel’s bestselling book of 2017, perfect for fans of Homeland, John Le Carré and Mick Herron
When an Israeli tech entrepreneur disappears from Charles de Gaulle airport with a woman in red, logic dictates youthful indiscretion. But Israel is on a state of high alert nonetheless. Colonel Zeev Abadi, the new head of Unit 8200’s autonomous Special Section, who just happens to be in Paris, also just happens to have arrived on the same flight.
For Commissaire Léger of the Paris Police coincidences have their reasons, and most are suspect. When a second young Israeli is kidnapped soon after arriving on the same flight, this time at gunpoint from his hotel room, his suspicions are confirmed – and a diplomatic incident looms.
Back in Tel Aviv, Lieutenant Oriana Talmor, Abadi’s deputy, is his only ally, applying her sharp wits to the race to identify the victims and the reasons behind their abduction. In Paris a covert Chinese commando team listens to the investigation unfurl and watches from the rooftops. While by the hour the morgue receives more bodies from the river and the city’s arrondissements.
The clock has been set. And this could be a long night in the City of Lights.
About the Author: Dov Alfon is the former editor-in-chief of Haaretz Newspaper. He took up the post on May 1, 2008, becoming the fifth editor in the 90 years of the newspaper’s existence, and resigned on August 1, 2011. Born in Tunisia in 1961, Alfon was brought up in France and Israel, publishing his first articles at the age of 10 in comics weekly Spirou Magazine. After completing his military service in the IDF, Alfon began his studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1983, where he started writing in “Pi Ha’aton”, the high-profile campus journal. Less than a year later, he was invited by Tom Segev and Nahum Barnea to join a new journalistic venture, the political weekly “Koteret Rashit.” Alfon joined Haaretz in 1989, writing a weekly column, “Kivun Harouah,” about the relationship between culture and money. He was appointed editor of the cultural page in 1992, and turned it into the daily section “Galleria”. He launched several new journalistic formats for Haaretz throughout the years, including “Captain Internet” (in 1994), a weekly column supposedly written by a fictive grandfather investigating the new medium; “The Marker Magazine”, a business monthly (2001) and the re-designed Haaretz Weekend Magazine, of which he was editor from 1992 to 1998. Alfon was chief editor of the Kinneret-Zmora Bitan publishing house from 2004-2008, and hosted “Nispah Tarbut”, a weekly cultural show on Israel’s Channel 2 television from 2002 to 2007. He is a regular guest at international forums about the Internet culture and his writings have appeared in various anthologies, including “75 years of Ha’aretz: The Very Best Writing,” published by Schocken Press in 1999. (Source: Haarezt) His debut thriller novel was published in English as A Long Night in Paris in 2019.
About the translator: Daniella Zamir is editor and translator of prose, business and marketing documents for private clients, companies and government offices (such as ‘Google Israel’ and ‘Fig Films Israel’, ‘Lead Advertising’, the Ministry of Culture and Sports, etc…), as well as academic essays in the fields of culture studies, economics,political science, gender studies and more. (Source: Linkedin)
A Crime is Afoot 