Anna Mazzola wins the 2025 CWA Gold Dagger for Book of Secrets
Anna Mazzola's Book of Secrets, set in seventeenth-century Rome, has won the Crime Writers' Association's Gold Dagger for the best crime novel of the year.
Anna Mazzola has won the 2025 Gold Dagger, the Crime Writers' Association's award for the crime novel of the year, for Book of Secrets (Orion). The winners were announced on 3 July 2025 at the CWA's dinner at the De Vere Grand Connaught Rooms in London. The novel is set in seventeenth-century Rome and follows a prosecutor investigating a series of suspicious deaths.
Other winners included Lou Berney's Dark Ride for the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger; Katy Massey's All Us Sinners for the John Creasey Dagger for a first novel; A.J. West's The Betrayal of Thomas True (Orenda Books) for the Historical Dagger; and Akira Otani's The Night of Baba Yaga, translated from the Japanese by Sam Bett and published by Faber, for the Crime Fiction in Translation Dagger.
Kate Summerscale won the Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction for The Peepshow: The Murders at 10 Rillington Place. Mick Herron received the Diamond Dagger for a career's contribution to the genre.
Why it matters: two of the main awards went to historical crime, which suggests the category's strength with judges as well as readers. The Daggers, first awarded in 1955, cover translation, short stories and non-fiction as well as the novel, which makes them one of the broadest sets of awards in British genre publishing.