Honor roll:Shamus Award for Best Paperback Original P.I. Novel

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Each of these books has been nominated for a Shamus Award for Best Paperback Original P.I. Novel. They are ranked by honors received.

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The James Deans: A Moe Prager Mystery

Reed Farrel Coleman

It’s 1983 and Reaganomics is in full swing. But beneath the facade of junk bonds and easy money, New York remains a gritty metropolis offering Nirvana with one hand and desolation with the other. Moe Prager, ex-NYPD cop turned reluctant P.I. is too busy reeling from a family tragedy to see what’s coming. He’s about to be sucked into a case that might deliver him what he’s always wanted or plunge him into purgatory.

Two years earlier, Moira Heaton, a young intern for an up-and-coming politico, vanished without a trace. Although there is no evidence supporting…

 

Butchers Hill: A Tess Monaghan Mystery

Laura Lippman

Tess Monaghan has finally made the move and hung out her shingle as a p.i.-for-hire, complete with an office in Butchers Hill. Maybe it’s not the best address in Baltimore, but you gotta start somewhere, and Tess’s greyhound Esskay has no trouble taking marathon naps anywhere there’s a roof. Then in walks Luther Beale, the notorious vigilante who five years ago shot a boy for vandalizing his car. Just out of prison, he says he wants to make reparations to the kids who witnessed his crime, so he needs Tess to find them. But once she starts snooping, the witnesses…

 

In Big Trouble: A Tess Monaghan Mystery

Laura Lippman

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.

 

Charm City: A Tess Monaghan Mystery

Laura Lippman

As a practiced reporter until her newspaper went to that great pressroom in the sky, P.I. Tess Monaghan knows and loves every inch of her native Baltimore, even the parts being slobbered on by the sad-sack greyhound she’s minding for her uncle. It’s a quirky city where baseball reigns, but lately homicide seems to be the second most popular local sport. Business tycoon “Wink” Wynkowski is trying to change all that by bringing pro basketball back to town, and everybody’s rooting fro him—until a devastating, muckraking expose of his lurid past appears on the front…

 

Fade Away: A Myron Bolitar Mystery

Harlan Coben

The home was top-notch New Jersey suburban. The living room was Martha Stewart. The basement was Legos—and blood. For sports agent Myron Bolitar, the disappearance of a man he’d once competed against was bringing back memories—of the sport he and Greg Downing had both played and the woman they both loved. Now, among the stars, the wanna-bes, the gamblers and groupies, Myron is unraveling the strange, violent life of a sports hero gone wrong, and coming face-to-face with a past he can’t relive, and a present he may not survive.

In novels that crackle with wit…

 

Blood of Paradise

David Corbett

El Salvador: America’s great Cold War success story and the model for Iraq’s fledgling democracy–if one ignores the grinding poverty, the corruption, the spiraling crime, and a murder rate ranked near the top in the hemisphere. This is where Jude McManus works as an executive protection specialist

Ten years before, at age seventeen, he saw his father and two Chicago cop colleagues arrested for robbing street dealer. Now the past returns when one of his father’s old pals asks a favor–not for himself, but for the third member of his dad’s old crew.

Even though it’s ill-considered, Jude agrees, thinking he can oblige the request and walk away, unlike his father. But he underestimates the players and the stakes and he stumbles into a web of Third World corruption and personal betrayal where everything he values–and everyone he loves–is threatened. And only the greatest of sacrifices will save them.

 

Fulton County Blues: A Sunny Childs Mystery

Ruth Birmingham

“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…

 

Murder Manual

Steven Womack

All I really need to know about murder, I learned in Nashville…

The bestselling toast of Tennessee, author Robert Jefferson Reed has made big bucks with his little book of folksy homilies like “Never go to bed angry” and “Eat your vegetables.” He should have included “Don’t commit murder.” For when Reed’s wife hires P.I. Harry James Denton to catch her hubby in a tryst with a sexy secretary, Harry finds the author of Life’s Little Maintenance Manual strangled and drowned in his own hot tub.

Caught at the scene of the crime, Harry is pegged as the…

 

The Widower's Two-Step

Rick Riordan

Tres Navarre has just hours of apprenticeship time to serve before he can go for his P.I. license. Staking out a musician suspected of stealing a demo tape should be a piece of pan dulce. But his attention wanders just long enough for fiddle player Julie Kearnes to be gunned down before his eyes. He should just back away and let the cops investigate, but backing away has never been Tres’s strong point.

The missing demo and Julie’s murder are just two of the problems besetting Miranda Daniels, a pint-sized singer with Texas-sized talent. She’s the prize in a…

 

Back Spin: A Myron Bolitar Mystery

Harlan Coben

Kidnappers have snatched the teenage son of super-star golfer Linda Coldren and her husband, Jack, an aging pro, at the height of the U.S. Open. To help get the boy back, sports agent Myron Bolitar goes charging after clues and suspects from the Main Line mansions to a downtown cheaters’ motel—and back in time to a U.S. Open twenty-three years ago, when Jack Coldren should have won, but didn’t. Suddenly Myron finds him self surrounded by blue bloods, criminals, and liars. And as one family’s darkest secrets explode into murder, Myron finds out just how rough this…

 
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