Private Eye Thriller

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.

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.

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.

Serious trouble is brewing in Brighton, California, a sprawling coastal community on the eastern edge of the Los Angeles Basin: Its Mayor has just been murdered, and the chief of police has resigned amid rumors of corruption in his department. Now, ex-police officer Joe Copp has been hired by an old friend, the current Brighton City administrator, to get to the bottom of the municipal mess.

It has always been said that three strands are strong and hard to be broken. But what if a fourth strand is added? Will it mess up the flow of the norm that already works? The female trio is all from different backgrounds. However, they have much in common, like sports bikes, fast cars, and crime-busting, while getting their diva side on. Ebony, brown-sugar female Kristi D. Steels, a noted ace detective, turns heads everywhere she goes. Katrina Dymes, a hot ass, blondie ex-military MPI investigator, she and her battle-blades are a force to be reckoned with in the streets.

Here are four hard-boiled detective short stories set in contemporary San Antonio, Texas. Nacho Perez, a former Marine drill instructor, uses his fists and his gun to get to the bottom of his cases. But he takes his lumps along the way.

Lester Caine, a highly decorated New York City Detective Lieutenant, retired after twenty-five years now in the Private Eye cop business, living 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 murder of Palm Beach Judge Desmond Vanderbilt (from book one, Lester Caine Private Eye-Murder on Palm Beach) drew Lester into the dark side of hunting a Nazi war criminal.

Raymond Whyte est journaliste d'investigation. Un bon journaliste d'investigation qui a déjà dénoncé de nombreux abus et s'est fait beaucoup d'ennemis. Alors qu'il vient de clore sa dernière affaire, il a l'impression que quelqu'un le suit... "Private Eye" est une nouvelle de Roger Jon Ellory issue du recueil "Regarder le noir".

Jack might be a polished, Harvard-educated lawyer on paper, but everyone in the down-at-the-heels, if picturesque, village of Onset, Massachusetts, knows his real job: moving people on the run from powerful enemies. The family business—co-managed with his father, a retired spy—is smooth sailing, as they fill up Onset’s holiday homes during the town’s long, drowsy off-season and help clients shed their identities in preparation for fresh starts.

Jack Drake shares a Malibu beach mansion with a gorgeous movie star but hates his life. The depressed private eye can't shake the death of his wife and can't end his toxic relationship with Hollywood heartthrob Amanda Bigelow. But an at-risk sixteen-year-old who is injured in an inner-city shooting gets Jack unstuck. As a favor to a friend, Jack sequesters Game in the mansion, keeping him safe.

Delaney Detective Agency gets a taste of the spotlight when they are called to a case on a movie set in Greenville, MS, right on the Mississippi River. Marlon Brandon, heir to a wealthy and influential political family, has brought a film crew to town to film a drama about the 1927 flood that submerged a great deal of Greenville. Marlon wants the world to know the story of the flood—and the heroic role the Brandon ancestors played in rescuing dozens of local residents from drowning. Or at least that was the plan until he disappeared.

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.

The Sternwood family, immortalized in Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep, is in trouble again. Lovely Vivian's psychotic sister, Carmen, has disappeared from the sanitarium, and Vivian herself has once again fallen into the clutches of the shady underworld character Eddie Mars. Enter Philip Marlowe, the original tough-but-tender private eye, resurrected by Robert B. Parker, creator of his own phenomenally popular Spenser mystery series. He saved the Sternwoods once before. The question is: Can he do it again?

A rapist on the loose, a young girl missing, a robbery at a leisure complex run by a low life, and an old man knocked down by a driver who wouldn't stop. Detective Inspector Jack Frost knew that there would be lots more to come.

The crime novel at its compelling best as David Jason, the star of the television series of the same name, reads R. D. Wingfield's A Touch of Frost.

In Alaska, people disappear every day. In Aleut detective Kate Shugak's Park, they've been disappearing a lot lately. Hikers head into the wilderness unprepared and get lost. Miners quit without notice at the busy Suulutaq Mine. Suicides leave farewell notes and vanish. Not only are Park rats disappearing at an alarming rate, but so is life in the Park as Kate knows it.

A music therapist who thrives on helping others, Kendra Michaels cherishes the ordinary life she has achieved after stem cell surgery restored her sight. The skills she perfected during those sightless years - the ability to pick up the most subtle audio, olfactory, and tactile cues in the world around her - coupled with her laser-sharp mind - have made her a uniquely potent observer and problem solver. Kendra’s uncanny way of connecting the dots is as baffling to law enforcement as it is legendary.

The Pool sisters have gone into business together: a down-home if unequal P.I. enterprise. That is, until Lila is tipped off to an explosive piece of news. An old friend of their Aunt Ruth's—a lawyer and academic who’d committed suicide years ago—believes that Ruth was murdered. Prior to her death, Ruth had represented a chemist who’d been struggling to patent a dangerous synthetic opioid. But once the client, Travis Nutt, was poised to lose, he went rogue and unleashed the adulterant as a street drug with the power of cartel funding behind him.

Ex-FBI profiler River Ryland still suffers from PTSD after a case went horribly wrong. Needing a fresh start, she moves to St. Louis to be near her ailing mother and opens a private investigation firm with her friend and former FBI partner, Tony St. Clair. They're soon approached by a grieving mother who wants them to find out what happened to her teenaged son, who disappeared four years ago. River knows there's almost no hope the boy is still alive, but his mother needs closure, and River and Tony need a case, no matter how cold it might be.

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.

Former pro wrestler "Hammerhead" Jed Ounstead, now a fully fledged private investigator, is riding high after his first successful case. In this second episode, Jed leaves the wrestling realm to enter a new arena: women's flat-track roller derby. When old acquaintance Stormy Daze seeks his help finding her team's missing coach, Jed discovers that the turnbuckle-and-metal-chair mayhem of the wrestling ring pales in comparison to roller derby's four-wheeled ferocity.