Private Cities

Summer, 1962. A scorching heat wave is suffocating LA. PI Jim Keegan is offered a small fortune to find a beautiful woman from a set of photographs. He refuses; the job seems suspicious. But the next day the same woman, Eve, turns up, unbidden, on his doorstep. Eve fears for her safety. She is being watched. Before Keegan knows it, someone has been killed with Keegan’s own gun, and he gets sucked into a world of suspicion and betrayal where he’s never quite sure where the truth lies....

February 1940. In San Francisco's Chinatown, fireworks explode as the city celebrates Chinese New Year with a Rice Bowl Party, a three-day-and-night carnival designed to raise money and support for China war relief. Miranda Corbie is a thirty-three-year-old private investigator who stumbles upon the fatally shot body of Eddie Takahashi. The Chamber of Commerce wants it covered up. The cops acquiesce. All Miranda wants is justice - whatever it costs.

When a priest is brutally gunned down in front of St. Jerome's Chinese-American Catholic Church, Father Luis Chavez is asked by the archdiocese to lead an inquiry. With the confessed killer already in custody, it looks like an open-and-shut case. That is, until Father Chavez digs deeper. As the killer's confession unravels, Father Chavez teams up with Deputy District Attorney Michael Story to get to the bottom of it. Together, they discover a conspiracy leading back to one of the world's oldest criminal organizations.

Private eye Sharon McCone receives an email asking for help from her emotionally disturbed half-brother, Darcy Blackhawk, but he fails to reply to her response. As Sharon digs deeper, she discovers that Darcy sent his message from an Internet café in San Francisco, a city he's never been to before. Sensing that Darcy is in terrible danger, McCone begins a search for him throughout the city. The investigation leads her to the body of a woman at the Palace of Fine Arts, where a witness told her Darcy was headed. As her search widens, Sharon uncovers a connection to an unsolved murder....

The black-veiled witch Anya and her army of ghouls aren’t used to being hunted—especially by her prodigies. In the final installment of the Moonlight City Drive trilogy, all the players are forced into a final showdown. Killers vs. Detectives. Warlocks vs. Vultures. Teenagers vs. Witches. Psychics vs. Ghouls. Everyone knows it’s the end of the road, and the city is certainly alive tonight.

Private Investigator Gideon Rimes knows he’s lucky, a survivor over the years. Now months after the first anniversary of the pandemic, a sense of mortality lingers over Nickel City. The changed landscape includes word of crime lord Lorenzo Quick’s passing whose regime is imploding as a Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act case is being avidly built by the ADA. Yet in the territorial vacuum, opportunistic and unpredictable successors emerge. The case takes a twist when a drive-by shooting at an outdoor concert shares a link and jeopardizes Rimes’s personal world.

As an amateur PI with a bent moral compass, Ash McKenna is good at finding people - but not at staying out of trouble. Between his own violent tendencies, the shadow cast by his father's death, and a self-destructive revenge quest, he made a mess of his life in NYC. Figuring it was time for a change of scenery Ash relocated to Portland, taking a job as a bouncer in a vegan strip club. And he hasn't had to hit anyone in six months. So when one of the club's dancers asks Ash for help finding her daughter, he declines, content to keep the darkness in his past.

Great War veteran and rising star Gene Hammons lost his job as a homicide detective when he tried to prove that a woman was wrongly convicted of murder to protect a well-connected man. Now a private investigator, Hammons makes his living looking for missing persons - a plentiful caseload during the Great Depression, when people seem to disappear all the time. But his routine is disrupted when his brother - another homicide detective, still on the force - enlists his help looking into the death of a young woman whose dismembered body is found beside the railroad tracks.

Pete Fernandez is a mess. He’s on the brink of being fired from his middle-management newspaper job. His fiancée has up and left him. Now, after the sudden death of his father, he’s back in his hometown of Miami, slowly drinking himself into oblivion. But when a coworker he barely knows asks Pete to locate a missing daughter, Pete finds himself dragged into a tale of murder, drugs, double-crosses, and memories bursting from the black heart of the Miami underworld - and, shockingly, his father’s past.

Dean Jeremy Drake, a six-five, biracial private eye, nicknamed D.J., is once again up to his neck in danger, deception, and murder as he works three cases in Portland, Oregon, in the mid-1990s. The former Police Bureau homicide detective reluctantly agrees to be the bodyguard for a gorgeous lady named Bailey Carlyle, who claims to be on the run from her abusive boyfriend. When the boyfriend turns up dead and is identified as running a high-end call girl operation, the authorities point the finger at Bailey as a leading suspect in his murder, labeling her a jealous prostitute.

A cross between Shaft, Mike Hammer, and Body Heat, Dead in the Rose City is a taut, hard-boiled detective novel in which nothing is quite what it seems. Dean Jeremy Drake, nicknamed D.J., is a Jamaican-Italian private investigator and ex-homicide detective for the Portland Police Bureau. He is six-five, hip, tough, armed with a .40 caliber Glock, and courts danger and romance with equal abandon. Those qualities are put to the test when Drake is framed for murder in the midst of two seemingly unrelated cases.

When an old friend comes calling, Caroline finds herself embroiled in a case involving clandestine meetings, bank robberies, a shady import-export business, and the murder of an FBI agent. And where this fearless female sleuth goes, Tupper Jones is sure to follow—only this time, following her could mean a long walk off a short pier into Lake Michigan.

Jasper Hellman, the surviving spree killer taken down by then Buffalo State security officer Gideon Rimes, is plotting payback from his Attica cell. In addition to busily watching his back after Hellman’s reach manages to get past the prison walls, private investigator Rimes is hired to ensure the safety of Drea Wingard, a best-selling author and cultural lightning rod who’s headed to Buffalo as the keynote speaker of a major diversity and inclusion conference.

Holidays are the time of new beginnings. Still on the mend from a bullet to the shoulder, private investigator Gideon Rimes is embracing his budding relationship with attorney Phoenix Trinidad and the Buffalo Police Department’s tenuous new respect. But the honeymoon period is cut short when a missing person case comes to Driftglass Investigations.

Private investigator Gideon Rimes, a black Iraq War vet and a retired Army CID detective, thought he’d left behind the danger of the battlefield. He serves subpoenas, finds witnesses, and provides background checks for better pay and little use of his trusty Glock. But then he’s hired to protect sultry, young blues singer Indigo Waters from her stalker ex-boyfriend - a hotheaded cop who also serves as a driver and bodyguard for the Buffalo mayor.

Duke Dempsey is a private investigator in 1938 Charleston, SC. He is thrust into the case of a lifetime when the Vatican comes calling and hires him to find an invaluable relic. Charleston is also hit with the mysterious murders of a prominent priest of St. Patrick's Cathedral and a local cop. Duke is forced into a partnership with the presiding detective, Johnny Stampkin, to find the relic and solve the murders. The case takes a multitude of twists and turns as they navigate through Roman Catholic puzzles, Civil War secrets, and a Nazi assassin.

David Stalin was one of the best detectives in the business, running head-to-head with data-jackers, organ thieves, and the tech-enhanced gangs who ruled the shadowy streets of Los Angeles. He could do no wrong, until what seemed like an easy case got out of control, and left his wife dead among the abandoned ruins of old LA.

Gord Stewart, 40 years old, single, moved back into his sub­urban childhood home to care for his widowed father. But his father no longer needs care, and Gord is stuck in limbo. He’s been working in the movie business as a location scout for years, and when there isn’t much filming, as a private eye for a security company run by ex-cops, OBC. When a fellow crew member asks him to find her missing uncle, Gord reluctantly takes the job. The police say the uncle walked into some dense woods in Northern Ontario and shot himself, but the man’s wife thinks he’s still alive.

Collected here are intersecting tales not just about Rimes but about friends, antagonists, and passersby who move through his world. Included are his first case as a PI, two pieces written by Bobby Chance, the backstory of a trial that shaped a friendship, the whereabouts of the Spider after his departure from Buffalo, and a novelette (inspired by two historic murder cases) that puts Rimes in the presence of someone truly demonic.

They say difficult roads lead to beautiful destinations, but has Luke Botha gotten on a road beset with diabolical characters, unsolvable challenges, and limited time before his hunting expeditions for the truth make him the hunted one?