Private Investigators Fiction

A car accident in upstate New York strands Nero Wolfe, America's largest detective, and Archie Goodwin, his confidential assistant, in the midst of a family feud. The feud, over $45,000 worth of prize bull, turns ugly when the beef in question is found pawing the mangled body of a family scion. Solving the mystery is no problem - but, alas, the evidence keeps disappearing.

With novels like Mystic River and Shutter Island, Dennis Lehane has dramatically altered the landscape of the crime thriller—while boldly overstepping the boundaries that have long separated mystery from literature. Now two of his sensational early novels have been combined in a single volume—two gritty and mesmerizing masterworks of suspense featuring the private eye duo of Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro.

The aging millionairess has a problem: where is her young playboy husband getting all his money? To help find the answer, Archie infiltrates a party at her palatial estate. But her late-night murder ruins the festive mood...and a letter bomb from a powerful crime boss makes Nero Wolfe do the unthinkable - run for his life. Suddenly Archie finds himself on his own, trying to find a killer without the help of his old mentor. For to all appearances, Wolfe has vanished. The career of the world’s most famous detective has ended in cowardice and disgrace...or has it?

As a part-time PI and full-time grim reaper, Charley Davidson has asked a lot of questions throughout her life: Why can I see dead people? Who is the hot supernatural entity following me? How do I get gum out of my sister's hair before she wakes up? But "how do I trap not one malevolent god but three?" was never among them. Until now. And since those gods are on earth to kill her daughter, she has little choice but to track them down, trap them, and cast them from this dimension. There's just one problem. One of the three stole her heart a very long time ago.

When the daughter of a powerful businessman dies as a result of her meth addiction, her father, strong-willed and brutal Buck Reinhardt, vows revenge. His target is the Red Boyz, a gang of Ojibwe youths accused of supplying the girl's fatal drug dose. When the head of the Red Boyz and his wife are murdered in a way that suggests execution, the Ojibwe gang mobilizes, and the citizens of Tamarack County brace themselves for war, white against red. Both sides look to Cork O'Connor, a man of mixed heritage, to uncover the truth behind the murders.

I’m Jinx. As a private investigator, being a walking, talking lie detector is a useful skill—but let’s face it, it’s not normal. You’d think it would make my job way too easy, but even with my weird skills, I still haven’t been able to track down my parent’s killers. When I’m hired to find a missing university student, I hope to find her propped up at a bar—yet my gut tells me there’s more to this case than a party girl gone wild.

Joe Pike didn't expect to rescue a woman that day. He went to the bank same as anyone goes to the bank, and returned to his Jeep. So when Isabel Roland, the lonely young teller who helped him, steps out of the bank on her way to lunch, Joe is on hand when two men abduct her. Joe chases them down, and the two men are arrested. But instead of putting the drama to rest, the arrests are only the beginning of the trouble for Joe and Izzy.

New York Times best-selling author William Kent Krueger delivers yet another "punch-to-the-gut blend of detective story and investigative fiction" (Booklist) as Cork O'Connor and his son Stephen work together to uncover the truth behind the tragic plane crash of a senator on Desolation Mountain and the mysterious disappearances of several first responders. This is a heart-pounding and devastating mystery the scope and consequences of which go far beyond what father or son could ever have imagined....

Martin Cruz Smith has written nine previous novels featuring Arkady Renko, one of modern detective fiction’s most popular characters. These novels, beginning with 1981’s international sensation Gorky Park, have collectively traced Russia's evolution over the last half-century. Now, with Independence Square, Smith focuses on the fraught and frenzied days leading up to Vladimir Putin’s war against Ukraine.

Jesse McDermitt is back, just as he promised. This time, he is thrust into the heart of the Florida Panhandle's Tate's Hell State Forest, where the tranquil surroundings belie a dangerous secret—a network of clandestine meth labs hidden against the backdrop of the Forgotten Coast’s natural beauty. Jesse, a retired Marine turned charter boat captain, has brought his family to Apalachicola “for the oysters.” But being who he is, the leisurely cruise soon spins into a gripping quest to unravel the truth behind the illicit operations threatening the region.

After 17-year-old Charlotte Kane, the beautiful, brilliant, and brooding daughter of a rich widower, disappears on a drunken New Years' Eve snowmobile ride, a raging blizzard soon snuffs out all search efforts. When her body is found during the spring thaw four months later, preliminary evidence implicates her ex-boyfriend: Ojibwe bad-boy Solemn Winter Moon. But then a second Charlotte Kane turns up dead, and Cork isn't sure of anything any more.

Childbirth can be dangerous even for the wealthy. So when opera singer Claire Buchanan shows Prudence and Geoffrey a postmortem cabinet photograph of her deceased twin sister and newborn niece, they express sadness but not surprise. The popular black-bordered portraits are the era's way of coping with the devastating losses that plague every family. What makes this death different is that Claire is convinced Catherine and her child were murdered.

An actor is brutally murdered while sitting alone in his fully locked car. A note arrives claiming responsibility and explaining the man died not for who he was, but for who he pretended to be. He played Dr. Watson in a production of Sherlock Holmes. The note promises to kill everybody in Hollywood currently playing Dr. Watson: a surprisingly long list.

Matthew Scudder and his wife, Elaine, talk of the night they met while listening to music in various places around their part of New York.

Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro's latest client is a prominent Boston psychiatrist running scared from a vengeful Irish mob. The private investigators know something about cold-blooded retribution. Born and bred on the mean streets of blue-collar Dorchester, they've seen the darkness that lives in the hearts of the unfortunate.

Shortly after private eye Howard Moon Deer decides to settle down with his latest lady love, he accepts a new case that takes him away from the home front and introduces him to the dangerous passions that drive San Geronimo's thriving art scene. Howard and ex-police commander Jack Wilder have been hired to investigate Sherman Stone, a man notorious for his torrid liaisons and low-life friends. Rumor has it that he's planning to have his wealthy wife killed. But before Howard can separate fact from fiction, a local hobo is murdered, and then Sherman himself meets an untimely end.

Private investigator Thomas Austin is enjoying a relaxing holiday vacation in picturesque Port Townsend, Washington, accompanied by an intriguing new friend. But his tranquility is shattered when the nearby community of Mystery Bay is rocked by the death of a revered musician at an infamous counterculture festival: The Rabbit Hole.

Charley Davidson, Grim Reaper extraordinaire, is pissed. She’s been kicked off the earthly plane for eternity - which is the appropriate amount of time to make a person stark-raving mad. But someone’s looking out for her, and she’s allowed to return after a mere hundred years in exile. Is it too much to hope for that not much has changed? Apparently it is. Bummer.

This is the world of the undercover operative: a world of lies, treachery, and deception. A world where violence erupts without warning, like a ticking time bomb on a crowded bus. It isn't a matter of if that bomb will go off - it is a matter of how close you are to it when it does.

The year is 1918, the war on the Western Front all but over. An ambitious officer, Lieutenant Henry D'Aulnay-Pradelle, sends two soldiers over the top and then surreptitiously shoots them in the back to incite his men to attack the German lines. When another of D'Aulnay-Pradelle's soldiers, Albert Maillard, reaches the bodies and discovers how they died, the lieutenant shoves him into a shell hole to silence him. Albert is rescued by fellow soldier, the artist Edouard Péricourt, who takes a bullet in the face.