Annal:2000 Shamus Award for Best Paperback Original P.I. Novel

In Big Trouble: A Tess Monaghan Mystery

Laura Lippman

• 2000 Anthony-Paperback winner
• 2000 Shamus-Paperback winner
• 2000 Edgar-Paperback nominee
• 1999 Agatha–Novel nominee
• Score: 32.5

Edgar Award-winner Laura Lippman is developing a reputation as one of the most exciting new detective fiction authors in years. Now she delivers her most suspenseful novel yet, and places Baltimore’s Tess Monaghan…In Big Trouble.

First as a reporter and then as a p.i., Tess Monaghan has learned how to survive and thrive on the streets of Baltimore. But a new case will force her to confront her own past, and a man she loved and lost. It starts when she gets a newspaper photograph of her old boyfriend with a tantalizing shard of headline attached: In Big Trouble. The answers lie far from Baltimore, deep in a world of good-time music, old-fashioned ambiiton, and rich people’s games. For Tess must find out what happened to a man she thought she knew, to a woman who may have changed him forever, and to the victims of a killer who dances to a different—and deadly—drummer.

Fulton County Blues: A Sunny Childs Mystery

Ruth Birmingham

• 2000 Edgar-Paperback winner
• 2000 Shamus-Paperback nominee
• Score: 16.5

“Sunny Childs is…a wham-bam thank you ma’am great read.” —J.A. Jance, author of Name Withheld Sunny investigates the death of her late father’s friend, another Vietnam vet—and finds clues suggesting her dad isn’t the war hero she grew up believing in. And when survivors slam doors in her face, Sunny is determined to find the answers. But those answers may be more painful than Sunny ever dreamed…

The Last Song Dogs: A Trade Ellis Mystery

Sinclair Browning

• 2000 Barry-Paperback nominee
• 2000 Shamus-Paperback nominee
• Score: 12.5

Trade Ellis is a dirty-shirt cowgirl—part Apache, part rancher, and all private eye. Unfortunately, there’s not much call for investigators on horseback. But as her 25th high school reunion approaches, someone starts thinning the ranks of the old cheerleading squad. Trade has enough suspects to fill a yearbook: the fading beauty, the rich girl, the loser, the nerd. Because someone wants her to join the cheerleading squad—in the morgue.

Steel City Confessions: A Mystery

Thomas Lipinski

• 2000 Shamus-Paperback nominee
• Score: 6.5

Nobody promised Carroll Dorsey it would be easy, slogging it out as a p.i. in a gritty town built of steel. But then, nobody knows the mean streets of Pittsburgh quite like Dorsey, who has to use his first-class wits and blue-collar instincts to dig up the kind of info that does its best to stay buried.

Parish priest Tom Crimmins denies gunning down the husband of the lovely, lascivious lady with whom he’d been having a decidedly non-celibate affair. But his motives were powerful, his alibi’s puny, and a vindictive ex-nun insists she can prove he was the murderer. What’s more, Dorsey’s become the target of a virulent vendetta: District Attorney Douglas Turner plans to use his enormous power to see that the detective he loathes loses his clients, his license…and maybe his life.

Deadbeat

Leo Atkins

• 2000 Shamus-Paperback nominee
• Score: 6.5

His name is Connor Gibbs. His past is shady, but his present is rosy. He enjoys the simple pleasures of a well-turned phrase and finding lost souls. He’s a gentle giant—until he’s crossed. Then he becomes a six-foot-seven human hammer. Gibbs isn’t sure that the kid who just walked in can read the sign on his door. Yet there he is, nine years old and ready to plunk down his life savings—all $67 worth—if Gibbs can find his long-lost father. But this is one father who’ll go a long way to stay lost.