From AwardAnnals
Results of the Dagger Award in the year 1986. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
Live Flesh
Ruth Rendell
After ten years in prison for shooting—and permanently crippling—a young policeman, Victor Jenner is released to a strange new world and told to make a new life for himself. It’s hard to fill the days, but at least there’s one blessing—he was never convicted for all those rapes he committed. Then Victor meets David, the policeman he shot all those years ago, and David’s beautiful girlfriend, Clare. And suddenly Victor’s new life is starting to look an awful lot like the old one…
A Taste for Death: An Adam Dalgliesh Mystery
P.D. James
When the quiet Little Vestry of St. Matthew’s Church becomes the blood-soaked scene of a double murder, Scotland Yard Commander Adam Dalgliesh faces an intriguing conundrum: How did an upper-crust Minister come to lie, slit throat to slit throat, next to a neighborhood derelict of the lowest order? Challenged with the investigation of a crime that appears to have endless motives, Dalgliesh explores the sinister web spun around a half-burnt diary and a violet-eyed widow who is pregnant and full of malice—all the while hoping to fill the gap of logic that joined these two disparate men in bright red death….