Annal:2000 Shamus Award for Best P.I. Novel
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Shamus Award in the year 2000. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 2000 Shamus-Novel winner
- Score: 10.5
An insurance claims investigator, Jack Wade speaks the language of fire. He can walk into charred remains and know where the flames ignited and why. Now Jack is investigating a claim he knows isn’t just fraudulent, it’s murder.
The house was a multi million-dollar beauty looking out over the Pacific. The woman died in her bedroom, her alcohol-soaked blood baked on to a $350,000 canopied bed. It’s a case Jack could turn away from but won’t—because old scores need to be settled. So Jack takes the plunge into a world of crime, ambition, and evil he never knew existed under the bright California sun. And for Jack, getting out again is going to mean fighting fire with fire….
- 2000 Anthony-Novel nominee
- 2000 Barry-Novel nominee
- 2000 Edgar–Novel nominee
- 2000 Macavity-Novel nominee
- 2000 Shamus-Novel nominee
- 1999 Hammett nominee
- Score: 36.5
The day starts like any other in L.A. The sun burns hot as the Santa Ana winds blow ash from mountain fires to coat the glittering city. But for private investigator Joe Pike, the city will never be the same again. His ex-lover, Karen Garcia, is dead, brutally murdered with a gun shot to the head.
Now Karen’s father calls on Pike and his partner, Elvis Cole, to keep an eye on the LAPD as they search for his daughter’s killer—because in the City of Angels, everyone has something to hide. But what starts as routine turns into a deadly game of cat-and-mouse. For a dark web of conspiracy threatens to destroy Pike and Cole’s twelve-year friendship—if not their lives.
Monster: An Alex Delaware Novel
- 2000 Shamus-Novel nominee
- Score: 6.5
A second-rate actor is found mutilated in a car trunk. Then a psychologist at a Los Angeles hospital for the criminally insane is murdered in a similar grisly fashion. Suddenly the incoherent ramblings of an inmate at the presumably secure institution begin to make chilling sense—they are, in fact, horrifying predictions.
Yet how can a barely functional psychotic locked behind asylum walls possibly know such vivid details of crimes committed in the outside world?
Drawn into a labyrinth of secrets, revenge, sex, and manipulation, Dr. Alex Delaware and Detective Milo Sturgis set out to unlock this enigma and put an end to the brutal killings—before the madman predicts their own demise….
- 2000 Barry-Novel nominee
- 2000 Shamus-Novel nominee
- Score: 12.5
What if a total stranger was watching your every move? What if he read your mail, listened in on your phone calls, knew what you spoke of only to your most trusted confidants? What if he learned Your routines? Your weaknesses? And, most important, what if he discovered those things you love and cling to…and then he stripped you of them? And sat back to watch while you self-destructed?
Boston private investigator Patrick Kenzie is about to anger such a man.
When Patrick first meets Karen Nichols, she strikes him as the kind of woman who irons her socks—an innocent from a protected upbringing, untouched by tragedy. But six months later Karen commits suicide by leaping from one of Boston’s most cherished monuments. Patrick finds himself wondering what can alter someone so drastically, so quickly, that suicide seems her only option. Yet what begins as idle curiosity soon becomes obsessive as Patrick suspects that the tragic events that befell Karen during the last months of her life—an “accident” that destroyed her fiancé; the loss of her job, her apartment, and eventually…
Stone Quarry: A Novel
- 2000 Shamus-Novel nominee
- Score: 6.5
