Showing results by author "Joseph Hansen" in All Categories

Fadeout is the first of Joseph Hansen’s twelve classic mysteries featuring rugged Dave Brandstetter, an insurance investigator who is contentedly gay. When entertainer Fox Olson’s car plunges off a bridge in a storm, a death claim is filed, but where is Olson’s body? As Brandstetter questions family, fans, and detractors, he grows certain Olson is still alive and must find him before the would-be killer does. Suspenseful and wry, shrewd and deeply felt, Fadeout remains as fresh today as when it startled readers more than thirty years ago.

It spread fast - no time to understand it - let alone learn how to fight it. Once it reached you, it was too late. All you could do is run. Rumored safe zones and potential for a cure drifted across the populace, forcing tough decisions to be made. They say only the strong survive. Well, they forgot about the smart, the inventive, and the lucky.

New to the Hot Springs PD, Lisa Reynolds was not all that welcomed by her coworkers, especially those who were passed over for the position. But it didn't matter anymore. Her 30-day probation period ended on the same day of the Z-poc's arrival. Overnight the world goes from bad to worse as thousands die in the initial onslaught. National Guard and regular military units deployed the day before to the north leave the city in mayhem. All directions lead to death until one unlikely candidate steps forward with a plan.

Serenity ran away from home when her father was convicted of bribery. For two years, she drifted around the American Southwest, finally finding refuge in the arms of Azrael, a charismatic cult leader whose religion was founded upon blood. Long after Serenity's disappearance, the police find a mass grave containing six dead girls on Azrael's property. Thinking his daughter has been murdered, Serenity's father claims her life insurance and promptly disappears. Now it's Dave Brandstetter's problem.

When Ben Orton's head is found bludgeoned by a heavy flower pot, the people of La Caleta are stunned - not because their police chief has been murdered, but because no one thought to do it sooner. A bruising, violent man, Ben had a commitment to order, but often not law. But as insurance investigator Dave Brandstetter is about to find out, the corruption in Ben's police force did not die with him. By the time Dave arrives, a young activist has already been arrested for the murder. Only Dave seems to care that the evidence against the accused is laughably thin.

In his decades as an insurance investigator, Dave Brandstetter has never shied away from violence, and he’s had more than his share of close calls. Time's catching up with him, his body's slowing down, and his wit isn't as sharp as it used to be. But he will forgo retirement once more for the sake of a puzzle no detective could resist. Walking on the beach, a friend finds a bedraggled child who claims he's witnessed a murder. The victim is a drug-addicted pop star, and the obvious suspect is the dead man’s ex-girlfriend - a junkie whom the child saw standing over the body.

Death Claims is the second in Joseph Hansen's acclaimed mystery series featuring the ruggedly masculine Dave Brandstetter, a gay insurance investigator. When John Oats' body is found washed up on a beach, his young lover April Stannard is sure it was no accident. Brandstetter agrees: Oats's college-age son, the beneficiary of the life insurance policy, has gone missing.

El Paso wasn’t the Promised Land that Ian and his crew had hoped for, but it wasn’t a total bust either. The concept of a safe haven in today’s world was a fool’s errand at best. This was the consensus of their tiny band and to keep moving their only salvation. While others waited in their pens, the four from the private security company moved on, taking on as many they could help, in hopes that they too would join the fight. Their journey was long and arduous, but it was worth it...they hope.  

The cataclysm broke the world, tectonic plates shifting for several millennia’s before forming the new continents. Humanity and all life reduced to the barest minimum, dying the slow agonizing deaths of starvation or exposure in this barren yet violent world. They took refuge in cave or crevasse with the hope that another day may yet be seen. The age of sentience faced annihilation and barely survived to wait once again evolutions process. Not as it had once been, for everything and everyone had split many times since the world was whole.

Ian and crew had reached the end of their road. Hundreds of enemy invaders expending all resources to seize the small sanctuary left to the crew. With hundreds of thousands of infected bearing down on the enemy forces from behind, the situation had turned desperate. Their mission, to stop the invaders from taking the base, their survival...secondary. With more than half their numbers already killed or consumed they fought with a ferocity that only those who had survived this long could possess.

Life is not what it used to be. The goodwill of a stranger is a godsend that must be questioned as a necessary risk. Trust and safety, once taken for granted, are now the barest necessity for survival.... Lisa and Krupp had accomplished their mission to stop the horde, but at what cost? Little Rock's booty was still the objective as multiple truck and tractors headed down the road toward their dangerous goal. The survival of all is at stake as they come up against gangs and stubborn homeowners in their quest for resources....

Normal was still less than a week in the past; those who still fought felt as though it was much, much more. The quest for resources has begun as does the hunt for the Good Doctor who plans his greatest feat. The majority of the living left to bear witness of his macabre utopia as a new predator takes up his trail. Survivors flee the capital city of Little Rock drawing a horde of a magnitude never imagined. They flowed like a river with nothing but two Hot Springs cops to lead the willing against insurmountable odds. Brawn and steel blended into creative intellect would have to be enough against a quarter million marching dead.

Rick Wendell's ranch is far from town. A remote, dusty hideaway, its only inhabitants are Rick, his aging mother, and her horses. One night, Rick's mother returns from the movies to find Rick lying on the floor, stark naked and with a gaping bullet wound in his chest. Standing over him is his lover, a mustachioed hippie, who swears he did not fire the gun that he's holding. The case seems open-and-shut, but Dave Brandstetter is not satisfied.

The group that bound them together, letting them know that not all family was lost in this untamed world, has been split and scattered across the country. Kinsey, left alone to face her own demons, accepts her own regrets and faces the world on the terms that only she can live with. She had lost so much, and she struggled with feelings for people now dead, that she didn’t know she had. She had a good life, once. Now her life had become nothing but rage and hatred that consumed her every waking moment.

Dave Brandstetter's afternoon does not begin well: His ex-boyfriend picks him up at the airport, and the ride home - in bumper-to-bumper Los Angeles traffic - is one long argument between them. The insurance investigator's day gets worse when he finds a man - bloody, rain-soaked, and ice cold - lying on his porch, killed by a stab wound while Dave was out of town. There is a serial killer loose in Los Angeles, and this man is his sixth victim. Like the others, he had already been marked for death - by the unforgiving plague known as AIDS.

Gifford Gardens has gone to hell: Persistent flooding has reduced the neighborhood to a slum, a battleground for rival gangs. Anyone who can afford to leave has already pulled up stakes, and Paul and Angela Myers are among those who are left. To make ends meet, Paul takes on long-haul truck driving, which is as dangerous as it is lucrative, and it's not long before the job gets him killed. One night, Paul's truck flies off a cliff and explodes in midair. Did he fall asleep at the wheel, or was he murdered? Keen-eyed insurance investigator Dave Brandstetter suspects a conspiracy.

His father's death left Dave Brandstetter with a hole in his heart and an inheritance in his bank account. The money allowed him to venture out on his own, launching a freelance insurance investigation agency that specializes in suspicious deaths. His first case is potentially explosive. If he isn't careful, it could be his last. Crusading evangelist Gerald Dawson believes that piety and violence go hand-in-hand. To clean up his local skid row, he has taken to vigilante justic. When Gerald is found with his neck snapped, the police finger smut peddler Lon Tooker, but Dave disagrees.

Cold Spring is a sleepy little town that had known its share of heartache. A school shooting, a murdered cop were just a few things that marred the nature of this little community. Nestled between foot hills of granite and a chain of lakes this picturesque little town will come to know evil of a magnitude unseen since the earliest days of man. Jerry just bought his first truck, an important feat for a Midwestern farm kid caught between his first year of college and the distractions of young love. 

The age of plenty is dead. Wars and rumors of wars - from economic collapse to cult driven genocide. Flesh eating cannibals were blamed but no one really knew the truth, no one really wanted to know the truth. Where there was once life and hope there is now only suffrage, where the remnants; struggle onward, attempting to squeeze something of worth from a dying world. Every decade brings a new war, new battles and conflicts from newly formed factions - ideologies that were previously unknown.

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