Annal:2007 Shamus Award for Best P.I. Novel
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Shamus Award in the year 2007. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
The Dramatist: A Jack Taylor Novel
- 2007 Shamus-Novel winner
- 2005 Barry-British nominee
- Score: 16.57
Seems impossible, but Jack Taylor is sober. One reason hes been able to keep clean: his dealers in jail, which leaves Jack without a source. That dealer calls him to Dublin and asks a favorthe mans sister is dead and the guards have called it death by misadventure. But he says that cant be true and begs Jack to have a look, check around, see what he can find. Jack agrees, though he cant possibly know the shocking, deadly consequences that granting this simple request will bring. Jack will understand soon, in the dark, lethal fourth entry in Ken Bruens award-winning Jack Taylor series.
The Darkest Place: A Novel
- 2007 Shamus-Novel nominee
- Score: 6.57
The cold of winter has come to the far reaches of Long Island, New York. The summer people are gone. So is the sunshine. And in the dark, a man carries a body to the water’s edge. It’s not his first—and he’s not done yet…
The police are talking about suicides. But a handful of people suspect something darker is going on. One is a college teacher drowning himself in booze and dangerous sex. One is a former high school football star who wants a second chance. And between them is a mysterious private investigator who believes that a beautiful, amoral young woman is connected to the killings.
Soon, things will spin out of control. Clues will point in all the wrong directions. Then, it will be up to a few lost souls—men and women who know all about monsters—to bring a killer into the light….
Days of Rage: A Smokey Dalton Novel
- 2007 Shamus-Novel nominee
- Score: 6.57
As racial tensions mount during the 1969 celebrity trial of the Chicago Eight, African American PI Smokey Dalton is keeping a low profile with his son, Jimmy, who knows a dark secret about the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. When Smokey finds a group of skeletons hidden in the wall of a building hes inspecting for investor Lara Hathaway, his investigation leads him into Chicagos racist past and implicates some of the nations most powerful people in a deadly 1919 riot.
- 2007 Shamus-Novel nominee
- Score: 6.57
It’s late summer, 1972, up in California’s redwood forests. Clifford Hickey, scheduled to perform a guitar gig at the local folk festival before trucking off to law school, arrives at his brother Alvaro’s peaceful woodland campsite. And within moments Alvaro, combat trained, is faced with six armed men in badges crashing the camp, and runs. Clifford, surprised, is arrested and brutally cuffed. He then learns that a young man, one of the sheriffs’ nephews, has just been murdered. Alvaro is the posse’s quarry.
So here’s Clifford, on the brink of adult life, pitched into not just a murder but what develops into a duel between the Hickeys—for his father and mother soon drive up—and the law, between the Hickeys and the Cossacks—who seemingly have their own agenda for Alvaro and, between the Hickeys and the locals, and finally between the Hickeys and their own past.
Vanishing Point: A Sharon McCone Mystery
- 2007 Shamus-Novel nominee
- Score: 6.57
In the latest installment in this critically acclaimed series, McCone is hired to investigate one of San Luis Obispo Countys most puzzling cold cases. A generation ago, Laurel Greenwood, a housewife and artist, inexplicably vanished, leaving her young daughter alone. Now, new evidence suggests that the missing woman may have led a strange double life. But before McCone can penetrate the tangled mystery, she must first solve a second disappearancethat of her client, the now grown daughter of Laurel Greenwood. The case, which forces Sharon to explore the darker sides of two marriages, comes uncomfortably close on the heels of her own marriage to Hy Ripinsky, and she begins to doubt the wisdom of her impulsive trip to the Reno wedding chapel.
