Nameless Detective Series by Bill Pronzini
Nameless Detective #1
Nameless Detective #3
Nameless Detective #4
Nameless Detective #5
Twospot
Bill Pronzini
Bill Pronzini's "Nameless" private eye and Collin Wilcox's Lieutenant Frank Hastings join forces to solve a grizzly case of murder and to crack a bizarre conspiracy surrounding an old California winemaking family.When "Nameless" is hired by Alex Cappellani, whose family owns the Cappellani Winery in the Napa Valley, it seems at first to be a routine investigation. But then the case veers in a deadly direction: there's a brutal murder in San Francisco. And Lieutenant Hastings is called in to investigate.As "Nameless" and Hastings delve deeper into the web of violence and mystery, the truth begins to unfold. A truth that will shock you. You're sure to enjoy this harrowing ride through the hills of San Francisco.
Read online
Nameless Detective #6
Nameless Detective #7
Hoodwink
Bill Pronzini
Former pulp writer and current hack Russell Dancer invites Nameless to the first annual Western Pulp Convention in San Francisco. He wants Nameless to help him locate the person who is trying to blackmail Dancer for a purported plagiarism of a story called "Hoodwink." Arriving at the convention, Nameless discovers that a group of former friends (and now uncomfortable colleagues) who wrote for the pulps called the "Pulpeteers" have all received blackmail notes. Nameless is in seventh heaven as he meets many of his favorite pulp writers, buys pulp novels for his collection and meets a stunning younger woman who is the daughter of two famous pulp writers. For once, Nameless has some luck with the ladies. But is Kerry Wade attracted to him, or to his job as a private eye? Is he really attracted to her, or to her connection to the pulps? The convention is unexpectedly disrupted when one of the guests is found dead in a locked room while Russell Dancer is holding a gun that's been recently fired. It looks like an obvious case of murder by Dancer, who has been feuding with the man. Dancer denies his guilt, and only Nameless is willing to believe him. As Nameless tracks down the guilty party, he finds himself faced with a second locked room mystery... and a target for a murderer.
Read online
Nameless Detective #7
Nameless Detective #8
Nameless Detective #9
Dragonfire
Bill Pronzini
It's a lazy mid-August Sunday afternoon. The "Nameless Detective" and his old friend Lieutenant Eberhardt are relaxing on the patio, drinking beer and shooting the breeze, when the doorbell rings. As Eberhardt answers the door, Nameless hears two sharp echoing reports—gunshots; they could only be gunshots. Rushing into the house, Nameless glimpses the bloody body of his friend sprawled on the floor—just before he feels a bullet strike his own chest. While Eberhardt lies in a coma, Nameless is released from the hospital and hits the San Francisco streets, determined to track down the gunman. Facing the toughest case of his career, Nameless doggedly pursues the secret behind his friend's shooting—only to find himself plunged into an action-packed intrigue involving murder, bribery, violence, and the forces of organized crime in San Francisco's Chinatown. The inimitable Nameless Detective, an overweight private eye of Italian descent with a penchant for pulp magazines, is in top form in this gripping, fast-paced tale. "Pronzini is a pro." —The New York Times**
Read online
Nameless Detective #10
Nameless Detective #11
Nameless Detective #12
Nameless Detective #14
Nameless Detective #15
Nameless Detective #18
Breakdown
Bill Pronzini
The "nameless" San Francisco detective and his partner Eberhardt are trying to prove that their client Thomas Lujack did not mow down his business partner with his car. Although he suspects his client's guilt early on, the 58-year-old gumshoe spends three weeks looking for flaws in the testimony of the hit-and-run's sole witness. Then Lujack is found murdered, the witness disappears, and the detective, instead of being asked to step up his investigation, is discharged by the victim's brother Coleman. In full moral outrage, the veteran detective bulldogs his way through the case, uncovering evidence about the brothers' employment of illegal immigrants.
Read online
Nameless Detective #18
Nameless Detective #20
Epitaphs
Bill Pronzini
"The bitterest of woes is to remember old happy days." At least that's what old man Pietro Lombardi thinks. He's got la miseria and can't even play a peaceful round of Sunday bocce with his friends at Aquatic Park. That is, until he sees the "Nameless Detective" at an opposite bench—another romantic taking in what's left of the Italian-American essence of the neighborhood. A shared burden being a lesser load, Pietro enlists his paesan's help with a troubling family matter. It seems his granddaughter, Gianna, is being harassed and needs some looking after. For old time's sake, Nameless agrees to check things out. Nameless quickly finds that Gianna is in hotter water than Pietro can imagine. The smarmy landlord who was hassling her is now black-and-blue and apologetic, her roommate is a little more than friendly in a very cheap sort of way, and Gianna is nowhere to be found. Even though his instincts tell him to leave well enough alone, Nameless searches for Pietro's "beauty of beauties" in the muck of a lascivious underworld full of loudmouthed liars, sleazy pornographers, and cold-blooded killers. After uncovering the horrific truth about Gianna, Nameless is far out of his depth. His investigative tracks have been spotted and leave him vulnerable to the wrath of Gianna's tormentors. Not only is Nameless a witness to the seedy behavior of the group, he has been reeled into a trap. In the end it's all Nameless can do to ensure that his epitaph will not be among those that are popping up around him.
Read online
Nameless Detective #21
Demons
Bill Pronzini
For the "Nameless Detective," investigations involving
matters of the heart are to be avoided. But when an old poker buddy asks him to
help frazzled and distraught Kay Runyon, whose husband, Victor, is having a
clandestine affair with a mystery woman named Nedra, Nameless relents. After
all, it seems like a simple matter: Find out just who Nedra is so Kay can
confront her in a last-ditch effort to save her marriage.
But Nameless soon discovers that there is much more at
stake than a simple affair. Nedra is a modern-day Circe who attracts men who
become obsessed with her, in some cases dangerously so. Victor Runyon is the
latest in a long line; others whose paths Nameless crosses include a violent
ex-convict, Nedra's jealous ex-husband, and a powerful San Francisco
politician.
Victor's obsession with Nedra takes a bizarre twist when
she suddenly vanishes without a trace. Did she disappear willingly or was she
the victim of one of her lovers' private demons? Nameless must find out before
it's too late to save Victor and Kay from tragic ends. And he do so while trying
to cope with a very personal and private demon of his own.
Demons is a powerful tale of psychological
suspense that builds inexorably to a chilling and shocking climax.
Read online
Nameless Detective #22
Hardcase
Bill Pronzini
A happy newlywed at last, the "Nameless Detective" returns from his honeymoon with the idea that he'll finally take it easy. And when the young, beautiful, and wealthy Melanie Ann Aldrich walks into his office, everything seems perfect. After rummaging through some old papers belonging to her dead parents, she's discovered that she's adopted. Now she wants to know who her real parents are and why no one ever told her the truth. Nameless could do this in his sleep, this case is so easy. But is it? Nameless delves easily enough into the past but no one there is talking... at first. As he starts to sort out the truth behind Melanie's mysterious history, he wonders how much his client will really want to know. Her real mother was an emotionally disturbed young woman, now deceased. Her real father was a teenage delinquent named Stephen Chehalis, who was chased out of town by his own father shortly after Melanie was born. But that's only the beginning. Now Melanie wants to meet her father and asks Nameless to arrange it. Easy enough, but after the arrangement is made, Nameless uncovers some disturbing information about the man—information Chehalis would kill to keep secret. Suddenly a routine case turns into a hardcase, and Nameless must risk his own life to protect a daughter from a vicious father with a deadly secret.
Read online
Nameless Detective #23
Sentinels
Bill Pronzini
Led by circumstances to accept the kind of case he dislikes—a "worried mother job"—"Nameless" reluctantly agrees to investigate the strange disappearance of college student Allison McDowell and her mysterious new boyfriend while on a driving strip from Oregon to San Francisco. The young couple vanished suddenly and without a trace after their car broke down and they were forced to spend a night in the tiny village of Creekside, in the remote Northwestern corner of California.When "Nameless" travels to Creekside and begins to question the locals, he encounters apparent apathy, hostility, and mounting evidence that suggests the couple may have met with foul play. Is one or more of the inhabitants of Creekside responsible? Is it Allison's boyfriend, whose identity is unknown even to her mother? Or is it forces of a far more sinister nature? "Nameless's" search takes him to Eugene, Oregon and then back to the Northern California wilderness. And it leads him from what seems to be a simple disappearance to a complex conspiracy of evil, one which reaches far beyond this remote backwater and threatens to destroy him as well before he can expose the truth.
Read online
Nameless Detective #25
Boobytrap
Bill Pronzini
Emotionally exhausted from the events surrounding his partner's suicide, "Nameless" welcomes the chance for a quiet vacation that comes when San Francisco Assistant District Attorney Patrick Dixon proposes that the burnt-out detective drive Dixon's wife and son to their summer cottage on a remote High Sierra lake. In exchange, "Nameless" will have a week's free use of a neighboring cabin.The same week, unknown to both the assistant D.A. and "Nameless," also among the vacationers at Deep Mountain Lake is a recently paroled explosives expert, Donald Michael Latimer. The timing is not coincidental, for Latimer has meticulously devised a warped plan for revenge against the men who sent him to prison. His viciously ingenious boobytraps have already claimed the lives of two of his intended victims, and at Deep Mountain Lake he has lined up his next three targets: Pat Dixon, Dixon's twelve-year-old son, and "Nameless" himself.
Read online
Nameless Detective #26
Crazybone
Bill Pronzini
Beyond the wrought-iron gates and behind the stuccoed facades of the Spanish-style houses in the affluent California community of Greenwood, a murderous maze of deceit, adultery, fraud, and betrayal awaits the private eye hailed by the Chicago Sun-Times as “the thinking man’s detective” in this ingeniously contrived mystery novel by two-time Shamus award-winner Bill Pronzini.
Not that larceny among the rich comes as a surprise to “Nameless.” Indeed, even before he visits the handsomely appointed offices of the blond, tanned insurance agent Rich Twining and the estate where the recently widowed Sheila Hunter lives uneasily with her wary ten-year-old daughter, the private investigator’s darker suspicions have been aroused. For why would anyone, no matter how moneyed and beautiful and bereaved, refuse to claim fifty thousand dollars due to her in life insurance?
The question is simple enough. The answer, though, lies several murders, many miles, ten years, a deviously contrived name game, and one baffling word clue — crazybone — away.
Read online
Nameless Detective #27
Bleeders
Bill Pronzini
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. So he contemplates with pleasure the prospect of putting another one or two of these parasites out of commission, and then returning the $75,000 in cash to its rightful owner. "Nameless" discovers, though, that he is not going to be able so easily to close his Cohalan file—not when he finds his client face down in the middle of a four-poster bed with a bloody, powder-scorched hole behind the right ear. And only by a hair's breadth does "Nameless" himself escape a similar fate. Aggrieved, cut to the psychological quick by his close brush with death, "Nameless" embarks on a relentless hunt for his unknown assailant in San Francisco's shadowy underworld. There he encounters bleeders of every ilk—like the loan shark Nick Kinsella, drug dealer Jackie Spoons, punch-drunk boxer Zeke Mayjack, and crankhead Charlie Bright—before he tracks down his quarry. At a deserted backcountry road stop "Nameless," packing his long-unused .38, attends to the last of a bad business and, in a climax as powerful as it is unexpected, finally confronts his own demons. He maybe even conquers them.
Read online
Nameless Detective #28
Spook
Bill Pronzini
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 eventually they bring the Nameless Detective to the small California town that drove the nameless victim tragically to murder and madness.
Read online
Nameless Detective #29
Nameless Detective #30
Nameless Detective #31
Nameless Detective #32
Nameless Detective #33
Nameless Detective #34
Nameless Detective #35
Nameless Detective #36
Nameless Detective #37
