Annal:1992 Hammett Prize for Crime-Writing
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Hammett Prize in the year 1992. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 1992 Hammett winner
- Score: 10.42
Turtle Moon transports the reader to Verity, Florida, a place where anything can happen during the month of May, when migrating sea turtles come to town, mistaking the glow of streetlights for the moon. Lucy Rosen, a transplanted New Yorker, is determined to start a new life in Verity, along with her twelve-year-old son, Keith.
But neither Lucy nor Keith could begin to imagine what the town holds in store for them. Everything they’ve ever hoped for, everything they’ve feared, begins to happen. When Julian Cash, Verity-born and fierce enough to paralyze…
- 1992 Hammett special
- Score: 8.42
Recently jilted by his young wife, Rene’s father, John X. Shade, has come back to St. Bruno. Broke, boozed-out and too shaky to hold the pool cue that once made his fame and fortune, John X. seeks the sons he abandoned years ago for more than an ordinary reunion.
- 1993 Edgar-1st Novel nominee
- 1992 Hammett nominee
- Score: 12.43
Faith Crowell is 39 years old, content in an artist’s life that is solitary but not lonely. A specialist in trompe l’oeil—the art of painterly illusion that makes things seem to be what they are not—she is about to learn that illusion is more than a painter’s trick: for some it is a way of life.
Frances Griffin is a grande dame, a reclusive widow whose fabulous fortune represents the accumulated wealth of generations of American aristocrats. She is one of the country’s foremost art collectors, but the commission she is about to offer demands far more…
White Butterfly: An Easy Rawlins Mystery
- 1993 Edgar–Novel nominee
- 1992 Hammett nominee
- Score: 12.43
It’s 1956 and, times being what they are, no one in official Los Angeles pays much attention as a serial killer murders three black bar girls. But when a white stripper is similarly murdered-and when she turns out to be a UCLA coed, and the daughter of a politically powerful L.A. prosecutor-all hell breaks loose. The heat is finally on to find the killer.
Stymied, the LAPD calls on Easy Rawlins for help, for Easy can go places and do things the police cannot. Reluctantly, Easy accepts their plea and begins a deadly quest that takes him through the seedy jazz…
