Showing results by author "Edward Cline" in All Categories

It is June 1929. The Roaring Twenties are still roaring, but the period is doomed. San Francisco's celebrated Cyrus Skeen, private detective and scion of Eastern wealth, is secure in his solvency; he has never bought stock on margin. He is as finicky about what stocks to invest in as he is in the kind of client he is willing to accept and work for. He is approached by Susan Harker, wife of Hosanna Harker, a noted local novelist accused of murdering his publisher, Marc Pearson.

Book Two introduces the second young hero, Hugh Kenrick, a member of the British aristocracy. While he has all the advantages that his rank bestows on him – family, wealth, prestige, and an assured future – his quest to preserve his self identity, his liberty, and his independence clashes violently with the demands of his station.

Cyrus Skeen, private detective, scours 1928 San Francisco in search of the man who stole a priceless medieval artifact. The thief, who is also a pathological killer, is not Skeen's only obstacle. The exquisite Frenchwoman and retured British colonel who are searching for the artifact also prove to be obstructions. Helping him in his search is his loyal and adoring secretary, Dilys Jones. Complicating the search are two Yale classmates, one of whom has penned a hit play that is headed for Broadway, but who has a secret about its true authorship. This is the other side of Sam Spade's San Francisco.

The time of The Circles of Odin is early September, 1929, after Skeen's case of the Daedàlus Society in July and before he discovers in November a Nazi Bund in Palo Alto, south of San Francisco, Skeen's main venue of his adventures.

After having some breathing room from his last case, which brought him up against Islamic operatives in San Francisco in The Black Stone, Cyrus Skeen and his wife take a short vacation on a luxury bus, the Pickwick Stage. But the bus is held up by gangsters. Skeen goes into action and foils the hijacking. But his heroism engenders even more problems and perils.

In this new case, Skeen confronts a new kind of nemesis that has been gestating in the Middle East for centuries and is now being enabled by oil companies and careless foreign policies: Islam. While investigating three murders whose savagery is unprecedented in the annals of San Francisco crime, he begins to understand that nemesis and the threat it holds.

Cyrus Skeen is hired by Edgar Freund, the defense attorney of Enoch Paige, a notorious lecturer charged with the savage murder of his ex-wife, to find evidence that will exonerate his client of the crime. Skeen soon finds himself at odds with Freund, as well as with Detective Sergeant Robert Hoile of the San Francisco police, who is determined to send Paige to the electric chair, and with Reverend Oswald Hoxley, the pastor of a popular church. More murders are committed.

It is February, 1929. Cyrus Skeen is hired by an Austrian aristocrat whom Skeen calls a "One-Worlder Gadabout", Count Paul Axel Heinrich Joachim von Wormuth-Esterházy, of Vienna, to find out who is trying to kill him. He gives Skeen a list he has compiled of 20 attempts to murder him, including flowerpots are dropped from above, a bottle of poisoned schnapps is given to him in a "welcome basket", and nearly being run over by a speeding automobile.

When Merritt Fury, a fiercely independent American entrepreneur, returns to Hong Kong on business, little does he know that he has become enmeshed in a conspiracy to confiscate his investment and render the Crown colony a dependency on the Mainland dictatorship to the north. While he suspects foul play by some of his business partners in Bluelist TungstenTrading, he also learns that he is the object of scrutiny by an underground group combating the conspiracy. He meets Amber Lee.

Merritt Fury is the unconquerable American entrepreneur who, in Whisper the Guns, foiled a Red Chinese conspiracy in Hong Kong and in We Three Kings gave a Saudi sheik his just desserts. Now, in Run from Judgment, he finds himself the target of a mysterious assassin who is eliminating, one by one, the financial enablers of the world's terrorists. He is also the object of another entrepreneur's malice and finally the subject of a captivating portrait painter.