The Private Eye Writers of America (PWA) has announced its nominees for the 2001 Shamus Awards. Books and short stories first published in the 2000 calendar year were eligible. In each work, the main character had to be a person not employed by a unit of government but who is paid for services rendered in investigative work. In accordance with this definition, licensed private investigators, newspaper reporters and lawyers doing their own investigations, and other hired, private agents satisfy the eligibility requirement. However, law enforcement officers and amateur & uncompensated sleuths do not.
The PWA was founded by Robert J. Randisi in 1981 to honor authors in this genre of mystery writing. The Shamus Awards will be presented at the PWA's 20th Anniversary Banquet held at Bouchercon 2001 in Washington D.C. this November.
The nominees are:
Best Hardcover Private Eye Novel
- A Smile on the Face of the Tiger by Loren Estleman - "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 fact, and keeping the key players alive long enough to know the truth. And that includes himself.
- The Deader the Better by G.M. Ford - Seattle PI Leo Waterman isn't looking for trouble when he and his forensic pathologist girlfriend Rebecca escape into the Washington wilderness 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.
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