Loren D. Estleman's most popular characters, PI Amos Walker and hit man Peter Macklin, are together in one story for the first time in Black and White Ball!Hit man Peter Macklin forces private eye Amos Walker to furnish protection for Laurie, Macklin's estranged wife, while Macklin tracks down the party who has threatened to kill her. The man Walker's client suspects cannot be ignored; as his own grown son, Roger Macklin has inherited all the instincts, and acquired all the training, necessary to carry out his threat.Told partly by Walker in first-person and partly by Macklin in third, Black and White Ball places the detective squarely between two remorseless killers, with death waiting whether he succeeds or fails.At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Detroit private investigator Amos Walker has long been reluctant to embrace technology—he only recently got his first cell phone. Walker is hired to do a twenty-first-century job—recovering HDTV converter boxes stolen from a retailer whose shop also does a vintage resale business. Before long, the case turns old school: both a suspect and the man who lost the boxes are murdered, and Walker ends up working with both the local police and the feds.The converter boxes were being used to smuggle high-grade heroin that’s been killing off junkies left and right, and it’s up to Walker to track down the missing dope. Old friends and even older enemies resurface, and Walker has to take a few beatings if he wants to find out who has been trafficking the drugs and bring the crooks to justice. This old dog still has a few new tricks, and there hasn’t been a case yet that Walker couldn’t crack.

The second wacky comedic murder romp for Hollywood film detective ValentinoValentino wants to keep The Oracle, his beloved run-down movie palace, from being condemned before it even reopens, but murder keeps intruding into his otherwise quiet life. At a gala party held in memory of screen legend Greta Garbo, he’s having fun until the host, a hotshot developer named Matthew Rankin, tells Valentino about a certain letter from Garbo to his late wife. She and Garbo had been…close.Such a letter is of great interest to a film archivist like Valentino, but the the plot thickens when Rankin tells Val that his assistant, Akers, is using this letter to blackmail him. Val is appalled by the thought of blackmail…but that letter sounds juicier all the time. Returning to Rankin’s mansion after the party, Val finds Rankin sitting at his desk with a pistol in his hand, looking at Akers’s dead body on the floor.Valentino’s in a quandary. He’d love to see that letter, but he can’t. He’s gotten his girlfriend—who works for the police—in trouble, so his love life is, pardon the expression, shot to hell. Worse yet, the building inspector has kicked him out of his unfinished living space in the Oracle, so he takes his life in his hands and moves in with his eccentric mentor, the elderly, insomniac Professor Broadhead. No love, no sleep, no letter—life isn’t fair!

A remarkable new antihero, mob hit man Peter Macklin must end a hostage crisis on a tour boat in Lake Erie Siegfried, a terrorist group made up of a killer, a bassist, an ex-marine, a demolitions expert, a Black Panther, a national guardsman, and a couple of spoiled teenagers, is about to become Detroit's worst nightmare. The motley gang boards a river cruise boat armed with M16s and enough explosives to burn the city down. They have eight hundred hostages, and if they don't get what they want, Siegfried will kill every soul aboard. Rescue is impossible. No cop could get on the boat. The only man with the skills for the job is Peter Macklin, a professional killer with ties to the local mob. Hired by the FBI bureau chief to sneak aboard the ship and destroy Siegfried from the inside out, Macklin will find killers in front of him—and another on his tail. Set in Detroit, this fast-paced thriller introduces another great series...

Loren D. Estleman has been writing and publishing books and novels since 1976. His fiction includes westerns, mysteries, thrillers, and historical thrillers. Along the way, he's written a number of crime stories. Stories about the darker side of life, broken hearts, swindles, double-dealing and just plain evil men and women who define the title of this collection. No matter how many times you put it down...Evil Grows.In this collection of twelve tales, you'll find killers, cheats, liars, detectives, and more twists and turns than a country road. Contents include:Evil GrowsFlashHow's My Driving?Saturday Night at the Mikado MassageThe Pioneer StrainThe UsedThe Tree on Executioner HillLock, Stock, and CasketBad BloodState of GraceDiminished CapacityCabana

Based on the Nero Wolfe series—one of the longest running, critically acclaimed, and bestselling series in the crime fiction world—a collection of Nero Wolfe–inspired crime stories from one of the most prominent crime writers of his era.From 1934 until his death in 1976, Rex Stout entertained the world with the exploits of Nero Wolfe—the eccentric, organ-breeding detective genius—as related by Archie Goodwin, his irreverent legman. Nearly Nero is an affectionate, tongue-in-cheek homage to Stout's greatest creation. Claudius Lyon is a fanatic admirer of Wolfe. He has retrofitted himself and his townhouse after Wolfe's and has hired a man named Arnie Woodbine to serve as his Archie Goodwin. However, Lyon's naiveté and Woodbine's larcenous nature constantly put them in jeopardy—more than Wolfe and Goodwin ever faced. Somehow the imitator manages to find a solution from every problem. But can he and his assistant...

Detroit PI Amos Walker searches for a priceless medieval illuminated manuscript—and for evidence that can put his former partner's killer behind bars Hired by a curator at the Detroit Institute of Arts to serve as his bodyguard during a transaction involving a stolen illuminated manuscript, Amos Walker enters a darkened skin-flick theater where the exchange is supposed to take place. When the deal goes south, he's lucky to leave with his life . . . and a new lead to pursue in collaring the man who murdered his partner 20 years ago. In a case that features a wheelchair-bound pornographer and rare book collector, an ultra-slick art expert, a trophy wife, and a white-collar criminal, Walker faces one of the greatest challenges of his career as a present-day crime draws him back to one of the darkest episodes of his past. The Hours of the Virgin is the 13th book in the Amos Walker Mysteries, but you may enjoy reading the series in...

13-year-old David Grayle's mother owns a boardinghouse. A strange visitor, Jotham Flynn, fresh out of jail, has come to tell his story to Judge Blod, a writer of dime novels and a boarder at the Grayle home. As it turns out, Flynn has a treasure map that leads to a fortune in gold stolen from the Union Army back in '63 by Quantrill's Raiders, a band of outlaws. Flynn is murdered by a passel of persons unknown, the map falls into David's hands and Judge Blod, David and David's schoolteacher, ex-Union officer Henry Knox, decide to mount an expedition to the Dakota Badlands to recover the gold. Reminiscent of Treasure Island, sprinkled with just the right combination of desperados, oddball characters, and authentic western flair, Sudden Country will draw you into the badlands and hold you ther to the final word."Estleman has no rival in evoking the American Southwest."--Kirkus Reviews"Estleman rivals the finest American novelists."--The Washington Post Book WorldLoren D. Estleman is a four-time Golden Spur Award winner

Recently released from prison, former major league baseball player Doc Miller takes a job as driver and muscle man for a tough bail bondsman and finds himself in a world of guns, greed, and murder. Reprint. NYT. PW. From Publishers WeeklyThis final volume in Estleman's Detroit trilogy (after Whiskey River and Motown ) is a superb thriller that may cause an uproar in America's sixth-largest city. Doc Miller, once an ace reliever for the Tigers, is sprung after seven years in prison, a sentence he earned when a guest at a party he threw OD'ed on cocaine. Fat, flamboyant bail bondsman Maynard Ance offers six-foot-five Doc a job as escort while Ance goes after a skipped client, Wilson McCoy (last seen in Motown). McCoy, former Black Panther and leader of the Marshals of Mahomet--"revolutionaries" who raise money by selling drugs--eventually turns up a suicide. Accepting Ance's offer of full-time employment, Doc is plunged into an intricate series of events in a fast-moving narrative that veers from a black funeral to a fancy fund-raiser, with danger at every turn. The pleasure of the intricate plot is enhanced by the cast of vivid ? colorful an awk adj to use in describing a multiracial castgood point! characters, led by Ance, who likens a pesky reporter to "a prostate the size of Ohio." Other players include a genteel black former madam who knows where all the bodies are buried, Mahomet's elegant widow, and some ballplaying Marshals who run dope. Real-life Mayor Coleman Young is depicted in the last chapter as the owner of a crack house. As in the earlier Detroit books, the climax here is violent, the denouement cynical. Estleman, who also writes the Amos Walker mysteries, knows and somehow still loves Detroit, not unlike its other bard, Elmore Leonard. Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Kirkus ReviewsA paroled felon takes a walk on the wild side of the law in this relatively slight yet satisfying conclusion to Estleman's Detroit crime trilogy (Whiskey River, Motor City). Kevin ``Doc'' Miller isn't just any ex-con; he's a former Detroit Tigers pitching star sent to prison on a morals rap. Back on the streets after seven years, Doc finds a new, more dangerous Detroit--one fueled not by the illegal booze of Prohibition-set Whiskey River, or the corrupt unions of 60's-set Motor City, but by crack cocaine. As a parolee, Doc means to steer clear of crime, but his new job as a John Deere salesman pays little and bores him silly. So when tough bail bondsman Maynard Ance offers him a job as his driver, Doc jumps at the chance--and is soon helping Ance bail out Detroit's top black drug-dealers and political radicals. Doc's an amiable guy, as well as a celeb of sorts, so soon he's also organized a weekend sandlot baseball game played by his new acquaintances--drug-dealers, a cop, and his own nerdy nephew, whom he's trying to make a man of--and he's escorting the young widow of a legendary black radical martyr to a testimonial dinner, thus attracting the attention not only of a sexy journalist but also of longtime Detroit mayor Coleman A. Young. Beneath this newfound success, though, trouble brews: one of Ance's old clients, a top drug-dealing black radical, has killed a corrupt cop--and Doc, pressured by another cop to help find the killer, gets caught up in a dirty political war that eventually leads to a tragic death and takes him into a tense showdown with Mayor Coleman himself. Neither as colorful nor as vigorous as the earlier volumes- -but, still, a pleasing if rather rambling mystery-thriller boasting a likable lead, nice baseball metaphors, and a boldly chilling portrait of Coleman A. Young as a devil incarnate. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Dead Man's HandNo one paid any mind to Jack McCall as he unloaded a .44 caliber slug into Wild Bill Hickok's brain at point-blank range. Deadwood's legendary gunslinging marshal was dead, holding a poker hand of aces and eights, a dead man's hand.The question the law wanted to know: was McCall a hired killer or did he kill Hickok to avenge his brother's death?

In Puritan days, a "witchfinder" was the man responsible for accumulating the evidence that would put an accused witch on the gallows...or, rather, to manufacture it. At least according to Stuart Lund, the florid and flamboyant attorney for legendary architect Jay Bell Furlong, America's greatest designer since Frank Lloyd Wright...and the richest. The architect had had Wright's libido as well as his talent: he had married, over the age of eighty, an alluring young designer in his firm. Now, as he lies on his deathbed, his ex-wives and children wrangle over his fortune, and a photo arrives in the mail of Lily, his young wife, naked in the embrace of another man...Amos Walker's task: to find the witchfinder.Amazon.com Review"Stuart Lund came in at six-two and three hundred pounds in gray silk tailoring with a large head of wavy yellow hair, blue eyes like wax drippings, and a black chevron-shaped moustache he hadn't bothered to bleach." That description of a lawyer who summons private detective Amos Walker to a secret meeting with Jay Bell Furlong, a world-famous architect who is supposedly dying in Los Angeles, could have come straight from Raymond Chandler. So could characters with names like Royce Grayling and Lynn Arsenault. That's why Chandler fans should rejoice that Loren D. Estleman's Walker--who first appeared in 1997's Never Street--returns in grand style in The Witchfinder. Walking the wickedly hot streets of a Detroit described as vividly and lovingly as Chandler's Los Angeles, Walker searches for the nasty parties who faked a photo that shows Furlong's much younger lady friend in bed with another man, thereby scuttling the architect's last chance for romance. Walker takes a bullet to the head, sneaks out of the hospital too early, and generally behaves as though he hasn't heard that this classic branch of the mystery tree has been declared dead by so-called experts. Other Estleman outings in paperback include Red Highway, Stamping Ground, and Stress. From Publishers WeeklyMystery fans who think that Estleman's novels about the Detroit-based PI Amos Walker (returned after a seven-year retirement in 1997's Never Street) make him the natural heir of Raymond Chandler will have that conviction confirmed here. Walker's latest tale is so rich in Chandler-esque dialogue and description that it would likely elicit a boozy chuckle of recognition from the master himself: "Stuart Lund came in at six-two and three hundred pounds in gray silk tailoring with a large head of wavy yellow hair, blue eyes like wax drippings, and a black chevron-shaped moustach he hadn't bothered to bleach." Lund is a lawyer who summons Walker to a secret meeting at a Detroit airport hotel with Jay Bell Furlong, a world-famous architect who is supposedly dying in Los Angeles. Before he passes on, Furlong wants Walker to find the person who ended the architect's romance with a much younger woman eight years ago by sending him a photo of her in bed with another man. Furlong has just discovered that the photo was a fake. The possible suspects include various Furlong family members and several rivals. Struggling through an overheated Detroit described as vividly and lovingly as Chandler's L.A., Walker survives a bullet to his head and sneaks out of the hospital against doctors' orders to get on with the case, just as Philip Marlowe would have. There may be a few too many descriptions of staircases, buildings and old cars, but Estleman more than makes up for these digressions by drawing new life from one of the genre's classic resources. Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Detroit PI Amos Walker steps into a lethal family feud when the beautiful widow of a powerful industrialist hires him to find her late husband's illegitimate children Leland Stutch was building automobiles before Henry Ford ever dreamed up the Model T. He dominated Detroit for most of the 20th century as the auto industry soared and then began its long, slow descent. When Stutch's widow contacts Amos Walker, the private eye expects to meet a doddering old lady. Instead he encounters Rayellen, a 30-something beauty with washboard abs and 1 of the most unusual propositions he's ever heard. Unconcerned with matrimonial vows, the most powerful man in Detroit left mistresses—and love children—all over Michigan. To stave off any future paternity suits, Rayellen hires Walker to locate Stutch's illegitimate offspring and pay them off—a seemingly simple task that draws the detective into a dysfunctional family's war zone and a violent case of...