I'd like to nominate
The Manual of Detection by Jedidiah Berry.
It won the 2009 Hammett Prize and the 2010 Crawford Award.
The Hammett Prize is awarded annually by the International Association of Crime Writers, North American Branch (IACW/NA).
The Crawford award is a literary award given to a writer whose first fantasy book was published during the preceding 18 months. It's one of several awards presented by the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts (IAFA).
Spoiler:
Review
Imaginative, fantastical, sometimes inexplicable, labyrinthine and ingenious...Great fun and very clever. My comparison? Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman - which is about as good as it gets --Observer
A wryly cerebral take on noir fiction...Separated conjoined twin gangsters, a duplicitous femme fatale and a nightmarish carnival owner inhabit the nocturnal, rain-soaked city where this clever, postmodern detective story is set --Financial Times
It is an elegant and stunningly imaginative fusion of detective and speculative fiction --Guardian
The plot's bursting with as many twists and surprises as you could hope for...It steams along the smooth rails of Berry's neatly constructed sentences, barrelling round each well-cambered turn with barely a judder --London Review of Books
Like Sin City, this is a noir fairytale, with the grey-scale, drizzly streets and shabby cafes contrasted by fluorescent, primary colour characters...Berry's work is reminiscent of the coolest young American novelists - Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, Glen David Gold - in its sheer delight at how genre writing can be re-invigorated and re-imagined. The Manual of Detection makes the weird, fantastical world of the unconsciousness seem comically logical - like its subject, it is a dream. -- Scotland on Sunday
You can read the first chapter here:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/s...ryId=104310258
Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/Manual-Detecti...qid=1263834367
Amazon.uk:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Manual-D...l+of+detection
Penguin:
http://www.penguin.com/book/the-manu.../9781101019962
Kobo:
http://store.kobobooks.com/en-US/ebo...l-of-detection