Annal:1994 Shamus Award for Best P.I. Novel
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Shamus Award in the year 1994. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
The Devil Knows You're Dead: A Matthew Scudder Crime Novel
- 1994 Shamus-Novel winner
- Score: 10.44
In this city, there is little sense and no rules. Those who fly the highest often come crashing down the hardest—like successful young Glenn Holtzmann, randomly blown away by a deranged derelict at a corner phone booth on Eleventh Avenue. Unlicensed p.i. Matt Scudder thinks Holtzmann was simply in the wrong place at the worst time. Others think differently—like Thomas Sadecki, brother of the crazed Vietnam vet accused of the murder, who wants Scudder to prove the madman innocent. But no one is truly innocent in this unmerciful metropolis—including Matther…
Foursome: A John Cuddy Novel
- 1994 Shamus-Novel nominee
- Score: 6.44
At a quiet getaway cabin on a peaceful pond in rural Maine, three people are dead. Someone using Steven Shea’s crossbow savagely murdered Steven’s wife and the couple’s best friends, Vivian and Hale Vandermeer. To the police, Steven Shea is the prime suspect. Shea’s lawyer, an law school buddy of detective John Cuddy’s girlfriend, hires Cuddy to find a weakness in the overwhelming evidence against his client.
Wolf in the Shadows: A Sharon McCone Mystery
- 1994 Anthony-Novel winner
- 1994 Edgar–Novel nominee
- 1994 Shamus-Novel nominee
- Score: 22.44
Successful in her investigative work for All Souls Legal Cooperative, happy with her newly renovated house, and feeling somewhat more secure in her relationship with the mysterious environmental activist, Hy Ripinsky, Sharon is shocked to find herself suddenly faced with a wrenching ultimatum.
No longer a small, informal co-op, All Souls has grown. New legal partners, exasperated with Sharon’s free-wheeling ways, want to kick her upstairs with a raise, perks, and a “career opportunity” that will chain her to a desk forever. Offered a take-it-or-leave-it deal,…
Moth: A Lew Griffin Mystery
- 1994 Shamus-Novel nominee
- Score: 6.44
Lew Griffin has quit the detective business and withdrawn to the safety of his old home in New Orleans’ Garden District, where he copes with his past by transforming it into fiction. Following the death of a close friend, he returns to the streets—not only the urban ones he has conquered but also those of the rural South that he escaped long ago—to search for the runaway daughter he didn’t know that his friend had. Griffin discovers that we rarely know anyone, even those closest to us. And he now finds that he must also face two things he most fears: memories of…
The Lies That Bind: A Neil Hamel Mystery
- 1994 Shamus-Novel nominee
- Score: 6.44
Early in the morning of November 1, Neil and her boyfriend, the Kid, are shaken out of their postcoital bliss when they find a surprise visitor at Neil’s apartment door. The visitor is Martha Conover, a pinched, elegant older woman who looks askance at Neil’s “just-had-sex aura” but still pleads for her help. Martha’s been accused of running over Justine Virga, the girl who accidentally killed her grandson, Michael, in a car crash three years—to the day—earlier. Though Justine’s crushed corpse is found outside Martha’s home and Martha’s car bears an incriminating…
