When the world's most innovative computer chess software is stolen, wisecracking, jazz bass-playing PI August Riordan is hired to find it. Sifting through a San Francisco peopled with bruising, ex-NFL henchmen, transvestite techno geeks, and alluring, drug-addicted dominatrices, Riordan has got his work cut out for him. But with a smart-ass attitude like Riordan's, nothing is easy ... A darkly comic sojourn through a town unrecognizable from the Tony Bennett song and the Rice-a-Roni ads, The Immortal Game is a Shamus and Barry award nominee and a San Francisco Chronicle Book of the Year.

When venture capitalist Ted Valmont is belatedly informed that the chief scientist of NeuroStimix--a biotech firm in which he has invested--is missing, it's not just business, it's personal. Not only is the scientist an old school chum, but his disappearance jeopardizes the development of NeuroStimix's most important product: a device intended to aid spinal cord injury victims. Since Valmont's twin brother, Tim, was paralyzed in a college driving accident, finding the scientist and getting him back into harness is of utmost importance to both brothers. Valmont engages August Riordan to assist...

Caroline Stockwell has a secret: she and her best friend Monica are "cam girls." Soliciting cash donations and gifts via Amazon.com wish lists from anonymous admirers, the young women have put up a web site featuring still photographs, video and blogs to help pay their way through art college. But when Caroline goes missing and her mother Ellen engages jazz bass-playing PI August Riordan to find her, Riordan discovers her secret and it appears to everyone that someone she met through the web site is responsible for her disappearance. Set against the real-world backdrop of Internet predators...

"How much does it cost to fix an election?" August Riordan-private investigator, jazz bass player, smart ass with a foolish heart-is going to find out. He's been hired by Leonora Lee, the all-powerful "Dragon Lady" of San Francisco's Chinatown, to investigate the results of the city's recent mayoral election. It seems the Dragon Lady's candidate failed to even carry the Chinese precincts, and she's convinced that someone must have rigged the outcome by hacking the city's newly installed touch-screen voting machines. A runoff between the two remaining candidates is days away, but it takes...

The odyssey of Maria Eva Duarte de Peron--the Argentine first lady made famous in the play and the movie Evita--was as remarkable in death as it was in life. A few years after she succumbed to cervical cancer, her specially preserved body was taken by the military dictatorship that succeeded her deposed husband Juan. Hidden for sixteen years in Italy in a crypt under a false name, she was eventually exhumed and returned to Buenos Aires to be buried in an underground tomb said to be secure enough to withstand a nuclear attack. Or was she? When San Francisco private eye August Riordan engages...

If Mark Coggins's life were a supermarket, the stories from Prom Night and other Man-made Disasters would be the aisle markers. Meander through the nostalgic, riotous, and sometimes cringe-inducing wares Coggins offers up in his version of Whole Fool. Whether he's staking out the house of his two-timing, belly-dancing girlfriend, deep sea diving with equipment fashioned from tire chains, a trash can and a garden hose, or donning an oversize waterfowl outfit to win the heart of the one who got away, Coggins writes with honesty, self-effacing humor and warmth.

Winnie doesn't remember the last time she felt anything below her neck. Her spine is severed at the seventh vertebrae, but thanks to implants from a sabotaged biomedical start-up, she has regained mobility. She is a prototype: a living, breathing-walking-demonstration of revolutionary technology that never made it to market. Her disability has become her armor. Because she doesn't register fatigue, she has trained relentlessly. Her hand, arm, and leg strength are off the scales for a woman, and she has honed self-defense techniques to channel that strength. She's a modern-day Amazon who feels...