Valentino wants to keep The Oracle, his beloved run-down movie palace, from being condemned before it even reopens, but murder keeps intruding into his otherwise quiet life. At a gala party held in memory of screen legend Greta Garbo, he's having fun until the host, a hotshot developer named Matthew Rankin, tells Valentino about a certain letter from Garbo to his late wife. She and Garbo had been...close. Such a letter is of great interest to a film...

Hit man Peter Macklin battles divorce attorneys, mobsters, and hired assassins in this action-packed, hard-boiled thriller   For years, Donna ignored the guns in her husband's safe, his long hours, and all the cash he couldn't possibly have made as an "efficiency expert." But finally she was forced to admit that Peter Macklin is a killer for hire. Donna wants a divorce, and she wants to take her husband for all he's worth. But she won't get a penny...

UCLA film archivist Valentino discovers priceless reels of film, as well as a dead body, in the basement of his newly acquired movie palace, and must help the police solve the murder if he has any hoping of saving the reels from being destroyed.

A killer is reenacting the deaths of Hollywood's blond bombshells, and Valentino must stop him before it's too late in Loren D. Estleman's Brazen. UCLA film archivist and sometime film detective Valentino doesn't take friend and former actress Beata Limerick very seriously when she tells him that she quit acting because of the curse on blond actresses. Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield, Thelma Todd, Sharon Tate... they all had more fun, but none of...

Hired to promote the new American dream car, a former reporter finds himself mired in a deadly conspiracy against a union boss and Ford Motors itself It's only been two decades since Connie Minor was on top, but it feels like centuries. Once a journalist, Minor spent Prohibition with his finger on gangland's pulse, a confidant of every rumrunner, boss, and triggerman in Detroit. But as the gangsters fell, Minor went with them, replaced by a generation...

Detroit PI Amos Walker steps into a lethal family feud when the beautiful widow of a powerful industrialist hires him to find her late husband's illegitimate children. Leland Stutch was building automobiles before Henry Ford ever dreamed up the Model T. He dominated Detroit for most of the 20th century as the auto industry soared and then began its long, slow descent. When Stutch's widow contacts Amos Walker, the private eye expects to meet a doddering...

As featured in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal Desperate Detroit and Stories of Other Dire Places represents forty years of suspense writing in the short form. Previously published in a host of magazines and anthologies, with a new Preface and introductions to the stories written especially for this collection, these eighteen tales feature gangsters, private eyes, psychotic killers, hitmen, feuding families, prostitutes, prizefighters,...

Locked in a deadly feud, cowboys Randy Locke and Frank Farmer have spent decades attempting to annihilate each other any time they are within shooting distance. So far, the men are even. One of Frank's bullets has given Randy a permanent limp. Vain Frank wears a prosthetic ear, his own lost to Randy's assault. If either of them remembers the original reason for the feud, it seems moot now. Their quest for revenge has led them on a merry chase through...

A missing boy forces Detroit PI Amos Walker to investigate a long-cold case It is hardly unusual for an elderly woman to ask Amos Walker to search for her grandchild. As a private detective in one of the country's roughest cities, tracking missing persons is the way he makes most of his money. But Martha Evancek's grandson Michael has been missing for nearly twenty years, having disappeared in the aftermath of a murder.   When Michael's father was...

Calling upon his considerable novelistic skills, Loren D. Estleman exposes the black heart of a seemingly stable, well-run city suddenly pitched into violence and chaos. A delicate balance of forces-greed and corruption, ambition and desire-run out of control in the wake of a serial killer's grisly rampage. A power struggle-between a police chief who has looked the other way for too long, a Mafia boss who holds the city's vices in his powerful grasp,...