Private Detective Fiction

There are few people Nero Wolfe respects, and Lon Cohen of the New York Gazette is one of them. So when Cohen asks for a favor, Wolfe is inclined to listen. According to Cohen, someone wants to kill the Gazette's gossip columnist, Cameron Clay. Death threats are a regular hazard for Clay, who's hurled insults and accusations at every bold-faced name in the five boroughs. But the latest threats have carried a more sinister tone. The columnist has narrowed his potential killers down to five people.

Before he became a private investigator, before he served in the Detroit police, and long before he retreated to the wintry reaches of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, Alex McKnight played ball in the minor leagues. He doesn’t spend much time thinking about those days, at least not until a former teammate comes looking for him. The man is here to ask a favor. He wants Alex to help him find the woman with whom he had a brief, passionate affair three decades ago. But as the search deepens, McKnight begins to suspect that he hasn’t been told the full story.

The last thing Tree Callister wants is to get involved in the movie that is being shot on Sanibel Island. But the film deals with the Hollywood life of his best pal, Rex Baxter. Cast as Rex is the legendary movie star John Twist who was lured out of retirement to play the role. Twist is a nasty, difficult drunk who needs a minder to make sure he stays sober. Tree, against his better judgment, gets dragged into the job. As filming begins, everyone involved soon comes to despise Twist. Tree has his hands full trying to keep the aging star in line.

Gavin Law exposed a tragic case of medical malpractice but now he’s missing. It’s just another case for Glasgow PI Charlie Cameron, until he comes to believe Law was murdered. Did the disgraced surgeon abandon his sacred oath to become a killer? Or did the hospital itself have Law permanently silenced? As Charlie digs deeper, he discovers just how bad the world of medicine could be for his health.

In the fifth Leonid McGill novel, Leonid finds himself in an unusual pickle of trying to balance his cases with his chaotic personal life. Leonid is approached by an unemployed office manager named Hiram Stent to track down the whereabouts of his cousin, Celia, who is about to inherit millions of dollars from her father's side of the family. Leonid declines the case, but after his office is broken into and Hiram is found dead, he gets reeled into the underbelly of Celia's wealthy old-money family.

December, 1925. A dark, smog-filled London doesn’t seem very Christmassy or exciting, but then Posie Parker, London’s premier female private detective, receives an urgent call from one of her oldest friends: Rufus, Earl of Cardigeon. Summoned to The Mermaid, an ancient hotel in Rye on the Sussex Coast, in the heart of smuggling country, Posie, together with her husband Richard, finds her friend in a real state. As the snow falls and Christmas lights go up, secrets are revealed, and Posie becomes involved in perhaps her most personal case so far.

Phoebe Siegler first meets Charles Heist in a shabby trailer on the eastern edge of Los Angeles. She’s looking for her friend’s missing daughter, Arabella, and hires Heist to help. A laconic loner who keeps his pet opossum in a desk drawer, Heist intrigues the sarcastic and garrulous Phoebe. Reluctantly, he agrees to help. The unlikely pair navigates the enclaves of desert-dwelling vagabonds and finds Arabella is in serious trouble - caught in the middle of a violent standoff that only Heist, mysteriously, can end.

The year 1942 is a bad time to stage Madame Butterfly. Although Puccini's masterpiece is a perennial favorite of the San Francisco opera crowd, its sympathetic depiction of a Japanese girl causes tension in the dark months following Pearl Harbor. Newspaper editorialists rage against the production, opera buffs picket the theater, and a note appears nailed to the house door, threatening violence against the cast and crew. When the first workman dies, the maestro calls Toby Peters, a Los Angeles detective who works discreetly for Hollywood's rich and famous.

At the request of Her Majesty's government, private enquiry agent Cyrus Barker agrees to take on his least favorite kind of assignment - he's to provide security for a secret conference with the French government. But shortly after the parties land at the island, Lord Hargrave is killed by a sniper shot, and the French ambassador's head of security is found stabbed to death. The only means of egress from the island - a boat - has been sent away, and the means of signaling for help has been destroyed.

During a stifling summer in Sydney, the body of a chaplain’s daughter is found wrapped in black plastic on the deserted grounds of an elite boarding school. Is it the work of the killer who’s been stalking the privileged neighborhoods along the Parramatta River? Gut instinct tells Detective Sergeant Rose Riley something even more devious might be at play.

Date with Poison is the brilliant fourth novel in Julia Chapman's Dales Detective Agency series and is perfect of fans of M C Beaton's Agatha Raisin series and Gervase Phinn. A young teenager has gone missing. Can Samson O'Brien and Delilah Metcalfe find him? Spring is in the air in Bruncliffe. But not everyone is filled with the joys of the season. Implicated in the murder of a man in Leeds, the Dales Detective Agency’s Samson O’Brien is facing tough questions from the police....

After being imprisoned for two years, a former teacher enrolls in a course to learn how to become a Private Detective. What begins out of curiosity, turns into a serious business, until she is being threatened by someone who doesn't want her to continue her investigation….

Murder in the 11th House is the first novel in the mystery series that introduces a unique character in the annals of detective fiction. Astrological detective David Lowell gets involved in a new case thanks to his daughter, a young defense attorney who believes that a murder suspect is innocent. A judge has been murdered in a New York City parking garage, and Joanna “Johnny” Colbert, a tough and mouthy bartender, is accused of the crime. Lowell’s daughter, Melinda, believes that her client has been wrongly accused.

Liam Wolfe isn't having the best of days. He's being falsely accused of things he'd never even think of doing and is now facing the loss of his career because of it. He has an idea of who's behind the attempt at assassinating his character but can't put the pieces together by himself. Mark Masters isn't having any better of a time. He's sitting in his office at Stonewall Investigations, getting work done, when his boyfriend of a year walks in with the sole goal of breaking up with him. He's blindsided by the development and thinks not much else can surprise him. He was very wrong.

1950s Staffordshire. Within the clay tanks at the pottery company Shentall's, a body has been found. Amid cries of industrial espionage and sabotage of this leader of the pottery industry, there is a case of bitter murder to solve for Inspector Hedley Nicholson. Kelly's mystery won the CWA Gold Dagger Award in 1961 for its impeccable sense of place and detail, and for the emotional weight of its central crime. The novel is part of a shift from the cosiness of crime novels before to mysteries characterised by their psychological interest and affecting realism. An influential classic.

The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge is one of the fifty-six Sherlock Holmes short stories written by Arthur Conan Doyle. One of eight stories in the volume His Last Bow, it is a lengthy, two-part story consisting of "The Singular Experience of Mr. John Scott Eccles" and "The Tiger of San Pedro", which on original publication in The Strand bore the collective title of "A Reminiscence of Mr. Sherlock Holmes". Holmes is visited by a perturbed proper English gentleman, John Scott Eccles, who wishes to discuss something "grotesque".

The Adventure of the Devil's Foot is one of the 56 Sherlock Holmes short stories written by Arthur Conan Doyle. It is one of eight stories in the cycle collected as His Last Bow. Doyle ranked The Adventure of the Devil's Foot ninth in his list of his twelve favorite Holmes stories. Holmes and Dr. Watson find themselves at Poldhu in Cornwall one spring for the former's health, but the holiday ends with a bizarre event. Mr. Mortimer Tregennis, a local gentleman, and Mr. Roundhay, the local vicar, come to Holmes to report that Tregennis's two brothers have gone insane, and his sister has died.

Charles has been gone for months, and Mimi's not feeling like being a private detective anymore. She's had it with the liars and the cheats. Speaking of liars and cheats, when she takes on a missing person case for a new client, she's thrown into a web of lies and deceit that ends in murder. Come along as, once again, Mimi Capurro butts heads with her homicide detective boyfriend, Nick Christianson, when their cases cross paths. What surprises do her client and employees have in store?

Sherlock Holmes e il Dottor Watson devono affrontare uno dei loro nemici più terribili...

Photographer Todd Ellison is engrossed in a photoshoot deep in Alberta’s dinosaur country when he stumbles upon human bones buried in the sand of a remote coulee. Not far away, while driving through the Alberta prairie, Amanda Doucette glimpses an abandoned farmhouse that reminds her of an old photograph hanging on her aunt’s wall. Who is the cocky young cowboy in the photo? Could it be connected to Amanda’s uncle, who went missing in Alberta 30 years ago?