Private Eye Mysteries

Lavender House, 1952: the family seat of recently deceased matriarch Irene Lamontaine, head of the famous Lamontaine soap empire. Irene’s recipes for her signature scents are a well guarded secret—but it's not the only one behind these gates. This estate offers a unique freedom, where none of the residents or staff hide who they are. But to keep their secret, they've needed to keep others out. And now they're worried they're keeping a murderer in. When your existence is a crime, everything you do is criminal, and the gates of Lavender House can’t lock out the real world forever.

One of the best mystery books of the 21st century, this volume features outstanding new stories of crime, derring-do, fast-paced adventures, and puzzles, featuring hardy amateur detectives ranging from young to old and grizzled private eyes whose patches cover the city streets, all in the hallowed tradition of Sherlock Holmes, Miss Marple, Hercule Poirot, and Philip Marlowe.

Ellis Alves is no angel. But his lawyer says he was framed for the murder of college student Melissa Henderson...and asks Spenser for help. From Boston's back streets to Manhattan's elite, Spenser and Hawk search for suspects, including Melissa's rich-kid, tennis-star boyfriend. But when a man with a .22 puts Spenser in a coma, the hope for justice may die with him.

It’s early fall when a heatwave descends on Los Angeles. Private Detective Philip Marlowe is called to the Montgomery estate, an almost mythic place sitting high on top of Beverly Hills. Wealthy socialite Chrissie Montgomery is missing. Young, naïve, and set to inherit an enormous fortune, she’s a walking target, ripe for someone to get their claws into. Her dying father and his sultry bottle-blonde girlfriend want her found before that happens. To make sure, they’ve got Anne Riordan—now head of her own all-female detective agency—on the case, too.

The late, great Jack Steels, his daughter Kristi D. Steels, Katrina Dymes, her partner, and the dynamic Asian SWAT officer Mina Lang from the elite special police division share a relentless pursuit: to crack cold cases and solve unsolved crimes. Whether they serve in uniform or operate in private practice, their commitment to justice is unwavering. They find themselves against a monstrous serial killer who transforms his heinous acts into a disturbing art form, preying on victims of every age and gender.

Fred Berr's Lester Caine hard-boild noir fiction, finds the detective tracking another murderer. Someone hung the Silver Screen's top female box office attraction from the balcony of her Palm Beach mansion. Lester Caine and his associate, Scarecrow, must hunt a murderer from the Florida beaches to the glitter and sometimes sinister make-believe world of a foreign film martial arts stuntman and other luminaries of the Hollywood film industry.

In January, New York City inaugurates its first female mayor. In April, her son disappears. Called in by the mayor’s chief aide—a former girlfriend of private investigator Bill Smith’s—to find the missing fifteen-year-old, Bill and his partner, Lydia Chin, are told the boy has run away. Neither the press nor the NYPD know that he’s missing, and the mayor wants him back before a headstrong child turns into a political catastrophe. But as Bill and Lydia investigate, they turn up more questions than answers.

In noir master Raymond Chandler's The Little Sister, a movie starlet with a gangster boyfriend and a pair of siblings with a shared secret lure private eye Philip Marlowe into the less than glamorous and more than a little dangerous world of Hollywood fame. Chandler's first foray into the industry that dominates the company town that is Los Angeles.

When PI Dave Wakeland is hired by a terminally ill woman to discover the whereabouts of her adopted child, who disappeared as an adult more than a decade earlier, it seems like just another in a string of poor career decisions. Wakeland is a talented private investigator with next to zero business sense. And even though he finds himself with a fancy new office and a corporate-minded partner, he continues to be drawn to cases that are usually impossible to solve and frequently don’t pay. But it turns out this case is worse than usual, even by his standards.

Is there such a thing as a good sociopath? Newly minted private investigator Annalisa Vega is skeptical, but her first client, Mara Delaney, insists that some sociopaths are beneficial to society. Mara has even written a book titled The Good Sociopath that is centered around Chicago neurosurgeon Craig Canning. Dr. Canning has saved hundreds of lives so it shouldn’t matter that he doesn’t actually care about his patients, should it? But Mara has a more urgent problem, which is that she is now concerned that Canning might not be such a good sociopath after all.

New Orleans--September 1947. World War II has been over for only two years, the Civil War for slightly more than eighty. Segregation and racism are still running rampant in the Southern United States, including Louisiana. “Duke” Jefferson, an injured Black war vet and somewhat successful nightclub owner, receives a call from an old war buddy, who tells him he is in trouble. When Duke seeks him out, he discovers that the man has been dead and buried for more than three weeks.

Lester Caine, retired as a highly decorated New York City lieutenant detective after 25 years is now in the private eye cop business settling in West Palm Beach, Florida. He thought it was the perfect place for him, his Cadillac convertible, and the tanned socialites of Palm Beach. The PI business drew Lester into the shadowy side of murder.

Before he became a private investigator, before he served in the Detroit police, and long before he retreated to the wintry reaches of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, Alex McKnight played ball in the minor leagues. He doesn’t spend much time thinking about those days, at least not until a former teammate comes looking for him. The man is here to ask a favor. He wants Alex to help him find the woman with whom he had a brief, passionate affair three decades ago. But as the search deepens, McKnight begins to suspect that he hasn’t been told the full story.

Private investigator Atticus Priest is employed by a disgruntled ex-husband to dig up dirt on his estranged wife. But when she goes missing after swimming in the River Avon, Atticus uncovers a conspiracy between five lifelong friends that goes back years. The friends did something when they were younger that they're not proud of. It's something that would land them in a world of trouble if it ever came to light. Something they've been trying to bury ever since. But Atticus finds one secret and then the next.

The Eye of the Beholder is a cult classic that inspired both French and English film adaptations. Joanna Eris has a bad habit of marrying men that wind up dead. An unnamed private detective, known simply as The Eye is hired to investigate the death of her husband. The story charts the development of the detective s dangerous obsession with a femme fatale, as he pursues her across the United States.

Through 14 books, listeners have been fed short rations when it comes to Kinsey Millhone's past. This time, Grafton feeds you an entire feast, including the juice about Kinsey's first husband!

The Block In the year 2050, the world has experienced a near total economic collapse, destroying the global monetary system. After years of struggle, a new form of exchange arose: cryptocurrencies called scripts, digital IOUs centrally managed through programs called blockchains. And the ambitious Proctors, who control the blocks, restlessly seek to expand their power. Milt Bruckner investigates blocks to counter fraud and is struggling to keep his script-chasing business afloat when a mysterious woman enters his establishment in need of his help.

No one knows what happened to Tabitha Sorenson, a brilliant but troubled college student who vanished in the aftermath of a scandal involving millions of dollars in school funds. Hired to find the missing young woman by her professor Dana Essex, private investigator Dave Wakeland is tossed into a world of suburban gangsters, corrupt authorities, and a contract killer with an unhealthy fondness for blades—all of them ready to guard their secrets at any cost. When the investigation takes a deadly turn, the young PI crosses borders—and lines—in his hunt for a sadistic killer.

Baltimore prosecutor Daphne Montgomery pulled herself out of a damaged past to build a solid life for herself and her son. But after she helps to convict a killer, her confidence is shattered once again by the news that her son has been kidnapped. Daphne believes it’s connected to the recent high-profile trial, and at first FBI special agent Joseph Carter agrees. But together they find the reality to be even more troubling, and it runs deeper than Daphne fears. With her son’s life in jeopardy, she must unlock a dreadful secret about her past.

Returning home to Chicago after spending the summer with her Meme Augustine in New Orleans, Opal is nervous to begin school. Despite her parents’ confidence, they worry about her making new friends and dealing with her Retinitis Pigmentosa, a degenerative eye disease. When Opal gets paired with a new student, Ivy, to work on their history project together, she is hesitant—after all, she only needs her cousin, Frank, and her best friend, Madison. But school quickly becomes the least of her worries.