Historical Private Investigators

A con man always has a bag of tricks, ready to fool the unsuspecting, and almost everyone is unsuspecting until they get taken. When that happens, they turn to Carpenter and Quincannon, Professional Detective Services, to recover their money and what’s left of their dignity, and perhaps even to save their lives.

Newly minted private investigator William Fletcher is having trouble finding clientele. He's not the only man out of work, but his past as a former heavyweight contender with a few shady connections - not to mention the color of his skin in race-obsessed New Orleans - isn't helping lure clients to his door. Stuck without any viable alternative, he takes a case from an old criminal acquaintance, Storm.

When Depression-era private eye Maggie Sullivan is invited to dine with a millionaire, she doesn't expect the first course to be a gun in her face. It draws her into a gold-plated web of theft, revenge, double crosses, and murder. A big-time swindle has made fools of some of the city's wealthiest businessmen. The man behind it has vanished. When Maggie begins asking questions, he reappears - dead in the river. But she's already learned too much. Someone's out to silence her too.

In response to a string of gold thefts in a Mother Lode mine, Quincannon goes undercover as a newly hired miner to identify and capture the men responsible. Meanwhile, Sabina 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.

A debutante's missing body, murder most foul, and weird spectrallights in the fog make for a thrilling gas light-era tale of mystery and detection. In 1895 San Francisco young debutantes don't commit suicide at festive parties, particularly not under the eye of Sabina Carpenter. But Virginia St. Ives evidently did, leaping from a foggy parapet in a shimmer of ghostly light.

He can out shoot, out think, out fight, and out love any other secret agent on the planet - get out of the way James Bond before your tux gets rumpled! McHugh lands a Caribbean island assignment: Stir up a revolution, topple the world's most brutal dictator, smash the secret police whose methods start with torture and get a lot worse from there, help the revolutionaries, and stop the revolution before it goes too far in the other direction. It's just another days' work for McHugh.

Thirty-year-old society matron Lola Woodby has survived her loveless marriage with an unholy mixture of highballs, detective novels, and chocolate layer cake until her husband dies suddenly, leaving her his fortune, or so Lola thinks. As it turns out, all she inherits from Alfie is a big pile of debt. Pretty soon Lola and her stalwart Swedish cook, Berta, are reduced to hiding out in the secret love nest Alfie kept in New York City.

Thirty-year-old society matron Lola Woodby has survived her loveless marriage with an unholy mixture of highballs, detective novels, and chocolate layer cake, until her husband dies suddenly, leaving her his fortune. Or so Lola thought. >As it turns out, all she inherits from Alfie is a big pile of debt. Pretty soon, Lola and her stalwart Swedish cook, Berta, are reduced to hiding out in the secret love nest Alfie kept in New York City.

You can't trust a man who's dressed as Mae West, especially not in Mae West's house. One of Hollywood's earliest sex symbols, the whip-smart blonde's star has fallen since the Hays Code cracked down on the racy repartee that made her famous. Her latest project is a thinly veiled autobiographical novel, whose only copy is stolen just after she finishes her first draft. Tonight she's having a Mae West party, with every guest a man dressed as her. The thief is among those in drag, and P.I. Toby Peters has come to tear off his wig. He's there as a favor to his brother, a brutal cop who had a fling with West when she first moved to Hollywood.

The sleek high-rises of Park Avenue make Frank Clemons uneasy. The former Atlanta homicide detective came to New York after a sickening murder case soured him on the South, but despite the glitz and excitement of his new surroundings and the beauty of the woman he shares them with, the city makes his skin crawl. Now a private eye, he is only at ease in the city's darker corners, among the whores, gamblers, and pimps who call Eighth Avenue home. That affinity for the socially isolated is what draws him to the case of Hannah Karlsberg, an elderly seamstress who deserved a better death than she got.

After four years of horror the Great War has ended, and president Woodrow Wilson's arrival in Paris in December 1918 unites the city in ecstatic celebration. Major Jamie Fraser, an army physician who has spent 10 months tending to American soldiers, is among the crowd that throngs the Place de la Concorde for Wilson's visit. As an expert on the Spanish influenza, Fraser is also called in to advise the president's own doctor on how best to avoid the deadly disease.

A deathbed confession and a long-hidden conspiracy are at the heart of a riveting historical mystery centered on the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. In March 1900, as former Congressman John Bingham of Ohio lies dying, he begins to tell a strange tale to his physician, Dr. Jamie Fraser. Bingham famously prosecuted eight members of John Wilkes Booth's plot to kill Lincoln. But during the 1865 trial, conspirator Mary Surratt divulged a secret so explosive it could shatter the republic.

It was Friday, April 11th, 1941. A mysterious flying object crashes near the town of Cape Girardeau, Missouri. Three alien-like bodies are found. One survives. Thus begins Cable Denning’s extraordinary adventure of government intrigue, murder, and jam-packed action in a fast-paced mystery filled with colorful characters, beautiful babes, and riddles to the question: Are we alone in this cosmos of endless stars? The charming, beautiful, and sophisticated Eleanor Winston enters Cable’s life on a missing sisters case and things begin to tear at the seams and rip wide open.

An extraordinary debut novel - dark, fast-paced, thrilling - set in contemporary and 19th-century Europe, the United States, and Scotland, involving the true inventor of moving pictures, his lost film made in Edinburgh in 1888, and a shocking series of crimes terrorizing the city in present time.

In post-revolution Paris, an old man signs a letter in blood, then hides it in a secret compartment in a sailor's chest. A messenger arrives to transport the chest and its hidden contents, but then the plague strikes and an untimely death changes history. Two hundred years later, Hugo Marston is safeguarding an unpredictable but popular senator who is in Paris negotiating a France/US dispute. The talks, held at a country chateau, collapse when the senator accuses someone of breaking into his room.

When a corpse turns up at his favorite tavern, Crispin Guest-disgraced knight turned detective - begins an inquiry, but the dead man turns out to be a Templar knight, an order thought to be extinct for 75 years, charged with protecting a certain religious relic which is now missing. Before he can begin to investigate, Crispin is abducted by shadowy men who are said to be minions of the French anti-pope.

Alessandria d'Egitto, I secolo d. C. Per il senatore Publio Aurelio Stazio la metropoli più importante dopo Roma, strategica terra di confine tra Oriente e Occidente, non è solo la città più bella del mondo ma lo scenario della missione segreta che deve compiere per conto dell'imperatore Claudio. Per assicurare un lungo periodo di pace all'Impero, Publio Aurelio deve giocare d'azzardo sul tavolo della diplomazia e negoziare con i Parti, imbattibili guerrieri da sempre nemici dei romani.

The Witch of Maple Park is compelling fiction inspired by a true story. The True Story: On Christmas Eve, 1843, on Staten Island, N.Y., Emeline Houseman and her baby are gruesomely axe murdered and dismembered. Her sister-in-law, Polly Bodine is accused of the crime and branded "The Witch of Staten Island." The New Story: On Christmas Eve, 1993, in a Detroit suburb, Kathy Black Marlowe, a blind jazz singer and her dog, are similarly axe murdered and dismembered. Her sister-in-law, Polly Marlowe, is accused of the killing and branded "The Witch of Maple Park."

February 1940. In San Francisco's Chinatown, fireworks explode as the city celebrates Chinese New Year with a Rice Bowl Party, a three-day-and-night carnival designed to raise money and support for China war relief. Miranda Corbie is a thirty-three-year-old private investigator who stumbles upon the fatally shot body of Eddie Takahashi. The Chamber of Commerce wants it covered up. The cops acquiesce. All Miranda wants is justice - whatever it costs.

Cave canem , "Attenti al cane". Nelle ville patrizie dell'antica Roma era uso scriverlo all'ingresso dell'abitazione, e non sfugge all'abitudine anche la ricca dimora di Gneo Plauzio, mercante di origini plebee che, dopo aver fatto fortuna con il commercio del pesce, si è trasferito sulle rive del lago Averno. Ma in questo caso, forse, c'è davvero qualcosa a cui stare attenti. Lo scopre il senatore Publio Aurelio Stazio che, di ritorno a Roma dopo avere trascorso un periodo di vacanza a Baia, si ferma ospite di Plauzio.