Annal:2001 Shamus Award for Best P.I. Novel
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Shamus Award in the year 2001. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
Havana Heat: A Lupe Solano Mystery
- 2001 Shamus-Novel winner
- Score: 10.51
Feisty, fiery Cuban-American p.i. Lupe Solana knows her way in and out of every tight corner of her tropical Miami home. But now things are about to get hotter for Lupe than they have ever gotten before.
A fabled art masterpiece allegedly left behind in Castro’s Cuba has Lupe Solana intrigued—and contemplating an undercover excursion into the deadly heart of out-of-bounds Havana. But when the murder of a shady business contact is followed closely by another criminally assisted death, Lupe is suddenly searching for connections between the two local homicides and her covert art-rescue mission. Because it’s beginning to look more and more as if Lupe’s own life depends upon her making them…
A Smile on the Face of the Tiger: An Amos Walker Mystery
- 2001 Shamus-Novel nominee
- Score: 6.51
The blonde wore a red slip and held a broken bottle in her hand. The man wore a trench coat and a fedora, and through the window flames were burning in the night….The paperback novel Walker carried in his pocket was fifty years old and-from its tawdry cover to its fiery prose-still red hot. A fictionalized tale of a real-life Detroit race riot in 1943, Paradise Valley was written by a man named Eugene Booth. With a New York publisher dying to reprint Booth’s pulp-fiction classic, Booth’s disappearance didn’t make any sense. At least not yet. While hunting down Booth, Walker finds this peaceful missing-person case developing into something much more deadly. For a notorious New York mob hit man, one in protective custody and promoting his own bestselling, tell-all book, is also trailing Booth, and a half-century-old murder is coming back to light. Between that killing and the story told in Booth’s Paradise Valley, Walker is sure Booth has good reasons to want to disappear, and some people have good reasons to see him dead. For Walker, it’s a question of separating fiction from…
The Deader the Better: A Leo Waterman Mystery
- 2001 Shamus-Novel nominee
- Score: 6.51
Seattle p.i. Leo Waterman isn’t looking for trouble when he and his forensic pathologist girlfriend Rebecca escape into the Washington wilder for a few days of relaxation—it just seems to find him. An old friend has purchased some choice property here in North America’s only rain forest and his posting of “No Trespassing” signs has incurred the wrath of every sportsman for miles around. But what starts as irksome harassment by the offended locals soon escalates into the real of the lethal. And it’s just Waterman’s luck to be in the epicenter of this murderous mess at the very moment it bursts into flames.
Listen to the Silence: A Sharon McCone Mystery
- 2001 Anthony-Novel nominee
- 2001 Shamus-Novel nominee
- Score: 12.51
For Sharon McCone, when one door opens, another shuts. In the midst of celebrating the joyous wedding of friends, she gets word that her father has suddenly died in San Diego. After making the sad journey home to help scatter his ashes, she also learns that her father quested that she, not any of her four brothers and sisters, be the one to sort through his personal effects. In a cardboard carton marked “Legal Papers,” McCone will discover why. A highly confidential document, long hidden, soon provokes a violent breach between McCone and her mother and sends McCone searching for the truth kept from her about the past. It’s a truth about four friends, a shattered love affair, and a violent murder. It’s a truth that no none wants her to find…
Now, from a reservation in Montana to locate Shoshone relatives to tracking down other kin at a sacred Indian lake in northern California, McCone will encounter old family secrets and modern disputes, an environmental lawyer in desperate trouble, and a ruthless developed who’s a bigot to boot. She will feel a widening reservoir of anger…
Ellipsis: A John Marshall Tanner Novel
- 2001 Shamus-Novel nominee
- Score: 6.51
Bodyguard to a glamorous, bestselling novelist?
It’s the last kind of case that San Francisco private investigator John Marshall Tanner would normally accept. But Chandelier Wells comes with a personal referral Tanner cannot refuse.
For all her money and fame, Chandelier is scared. Someone is sending anonymous notes: If you don’t stop, you will die! Stop what? She says she doesn’t know, and she has no time to find out before beginning the publicity tour for her new book, Shaloon.
Chandelier writes romantic suspense, but she takes on tough issues. Shaloon attacks the cosmetics industry, and next year’s book, just finished in manuscript, dissects the luxury cruise business. Could the research for her books have made her the kind of enemies who would wish her bodily harm?
Tanner’s inclined to think that the lady might exaggerate her peril, but when a car bomb explodes, leaving one person dead and another gravely injured, Tanner regrets he didn’t take Chandelier’s fears more seriously. She has annoyed many people over the years, but who would want her dead? As…
