Bill Pronzini

Young, newly rich Verity Daniels claims to be receiving threatening demands for money from a mysterious caller. When Jake Runyon agrees to investigate, it seems a relatively simple matter to expose the extortionist by setting a trap for him. The case, however, is nowhere near as clear-cut as it first appears. And, Verity Daniels is nowhere near the helpless victim she pretends to be. A series of surprise revelations culminates in Runyon being...

A simple case of blackmail gets lethally complicated when "Nameless" exposes a nasty scam that involves junior accounts executive Jay Cohalan, his unhappy wife, and a mistress with a serious drug problem. It's the kind of case Nameless likes, because bleeders—the blackmailers, extortionists, small-time grifters, and other opportunists who prey on the weak and gullible—sit near the top of his most-worthless-human-beings list. But soon

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Nameless Detective Investigations traces the disappearance of a mysterious woman.

Shaken after a hair's-breadth escape from death, Nameless has made changes in his professional life, but he's not put himself out to pasture. Again he enters San Francisco's shadowy underworld, this time in a search for the identity of a gentle, mentally disturbed homeless man who has been found dead in an alley doorway. Clues are few, but Pronzini, working at the top of his form, takes his seasoned private-eye hero to a new phase of a still-evolving

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So what if Nameless can't get his girlfriend, Kerry, to marry him? So what if he can't talk his partner, Eberhardt, out of his bitter funk? Skies are sunny, and the Nameless Detective wants them to stay that way. So he decides to do an old man a favor and find his missing granddaughter, Gianna.

But no one said it would be easy. It seems Gianna's roommate is turning tricks, and Nameless' search quickly leads him to a pimp, a murder, and into

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In response to a string of gold thefts in a Mother Lode mine, former Secret Service agent John Quincannon goes undercover as a newly hired miner to identify and capture the men responsible. Meanwhile, Sabina Carpenter finds herself not only making plans for her and Quincannon's wedding, but also investigating both an audacious real estate scam and an abusive young man's villainous secret.

When his wife goes missing from their Sierra foothills cabin after spotting a suspicious man, the Nameless Detective and his associate, Jake Runyon, launch a search and rescue mission that stretches legal boundaries.

A haunted woman's suicide pulls a California man into the poisonous secrets of a bleak Nevada desert town in Bill Pronzini's masterful work of noir fiction. There is something about the sad woman eating alone night after night at the Harmony Café that intrigues San Francisco CPA Jim Messenger. Unfulfilled himself, Jim feels a kinship with her - and later, when she commits suicide, he resolves to find out why. His search leads him to Beulah, a middle-of-nowhere...

In The Bughouse Affair, former Pinkerton operative Sabina Carpenter and her detective partner, ex-Secret Service agent John Quincannon, undertake what initially appear to be two unrelated investigations. Sabina's case involves the hunt for a ruthless lady "dip" who uses fiendish means to relieve her victims of their valuables at Chutes Amusement Park and other crowded places.

Quincannon, meanwhile, is after a slippery housebreaker

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