His 25th case pits the "Nameless Detective" against a vengeance-mad bomber in a nightmarish battle of wits. 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...

Deception turns deadly in the twenty-sixth case featuring Bill Pronzini's "Nameless Detective." 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...

John Frederick Quincannon, a former United States Secret Service agent, and Sabina Carpenter, one of the first female Pinkerton operatives, joined forces to form the firm of CARPENTER AND QUINCANNON, PROFESSIONAL DETECTIVE SERVICES. Their various cases take them all over the American West in the 1890s. Now they're back in four new adventures. In "The Bughouse Caper," Quincannon matches wits with Sherlock Holmes to solve a series of burglaries and a baffling locked-room murder. "The Cloud Cracker" finds Quincannon called to a small California town to expose an itinerant rainmaker as a...