Private Investigators Mysteries

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.

Reeling from her losses and trying to regroup, the Great White Shark of psychic investigation turns her focus on self-improvement, though her remaining friends call it self-flagellation. Marnie is determined to move forward at maximum warp, trauma be damned. A prospective client named Beau Boudreaux shows up in her office with a peanut butter addiction and a plea for Marnie to protect him from his ex-girlfriend: Pestilence, the First Horseman of the Apocalypse. His story is hard to swallow, but heading off Armageddon seems like a spiffy distraction.

A year has passed since Pete Fernandez’s latest, closest brush with death. After months of recovery, the newly sober Pete has managed to rebuild his life, contentedly running a small Miami bookstore and steering clear of the dangers of private eye work. So when an aging Cuban mobster asks Pete to find out who killed his drug-addicted jazz-pianist son and to locate his missing daughter-in-law, Pete balks. Until another victim suggests that the murder of the gangster’s son may be connected to the people who nearly ended Pete’s life.

A year after The Wizard of Oz's smash success, the yellow brick road is crumbling. The famous sets have been left standing on a soundstage in the depths of the MGM back lot in case the studio greenlights a sequel. But that doesn't explain what Judy Garland is doing there - or why she finds a Munchkin in full costume, lying facedown with a knife buried in his back.

A missing private investigator is found locked in a car hidden deep in the woods. Worse still - both for his family and the police - is that his body was in an area that had already been searched. Detective Inspector Siobhan Clarke is part of a new inquiry, combing through the mistakes of the original case. There were always suspicions over how the investigation was handled and now - after a decade without answers - it's time for the truth.

Scott and Lisa are enjoying their first cruise on the new sailboat when a call from a potential client interrupts their weekend in Saint Petersburg. Lionel Argus is the owner of Destiny Cruises, a successful Florida-based gambling cruise line. He’s been receiving racial threats against his life, and he needs private investigator Scott Jarvis to find out who’s behind it.

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.

A new case throws Leonie back into the arms of the man who broke her heart. While she'd rather stab him and get on with her life, her professional principles demand that she hunt down her client's fiendish assailant before innocent humans get caught in the crossfire. But when things take a sinister turn, Leonie finds herself in a deadly fight not just for her heart, but for her very soul.

Cut loose from his former life at the coroner’s office, Clay Edison has set up shop as a private investigator. It’s steady, safe work. Until it isn’t. The trouble begins when a young man, tasked with managing his grandmother’s estate, hires Clay to examine some minor financial discrepancies. What starts off as a case of simple fraud rapidly explodes into a web of deception, an elaborate con game stretching back decades and involving countless victims. All the evidence points to a tiny town on California’s rugged, remote Lost Coast.

Ex-police officer Sebastian Clifford is quickly finding that life as a private investigator is never quiet. His doors have only been open a few weeks when DCI Whitney Walker approaches him to investigate the brutal attack that left her older brother, Rob, with irreversible brain damage. For nearly twenty-five years, Rob had no memory of that night, but lately things are coming back to him. Whitney's worried that her brother might–once again–be in danger.

John Rebus stands accused: on trial for a crime that could put him behind bars for the rest of his life. But what drove a good man to cross the line? Detective Inspector Siobhan Clarke may well find out. Clarke is tasked with the city’s most explosive case in years, an infamous cop, at the center of decades of misconduct, has gone missing. Finding him will expose not only her superiors, but her mentor John Rebus. And Rebus himself may not have her own interests at heart, as the repayment of a past debt places him in the crosshairs of both crime lords and his police brethren.

Leonard Dyke's writing style didn't offend. But all of his work featured unhappy endings: murders. When four people die, including the author, police finally call on Nero Wolfe. Wolfe baits a trap, and when it springs shut, he finds that truth is stranger (and bloodier) than fiction.

While her parents are just yards away, thirteen-month-old Lily Hamilton is abducted from Ayr beach in Scotland. Three days later, her distraught father turns up at private investigator Charlie Cameron's office. Mark Hamilton believes he knows who has taken his daughter. And why. Against his better judgment, Charlie takes the case—and when bodies are discovered, he suspects this may not be an isolated crime. Is there a serial killer whose work has gone undetected for decades? Is baby Lily his latest victim?

The trials for the US swimming team to the games in Paris are in full swing when a young swimmer is found dead in the pool. It looks like suicide, but as detectives investigate, Miami Jones is drawn into the defense of the team's star athlete. Miami learns of a bizarre death of another swimmer eight years ago that might be linked, and might put his almost client in the crosshairs.

In noir master Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye, Philip Marlowe befriends a down on his luck war veteran with the scars to prove it. Then he finds out that Terry Lennox has a very wealthy nymphomaniac wife, whom he divorced and remarried and who ends up dead. And now Lennox is on the lam, and the cops and a crazy gangster are after Marlowe.

When Charley is rudely awakened in the middle of the night by her best friend who tells her to get dressed quickly and tosses clothes out of the closet at her, she can’t help but wonder what Cookie’s up to. Leather scrunch boots with a floral miniskirt? Together? Seriously? Cookie explains that a friend of hers named Mimi disappeared five days earlier and that she just got a text from her setting up a meet at a coffee shop downtown....

Six minutes in the wrong place at the wrong time—that’s all it took to ruin Sydney detective Ted Conkaffey’s life. Accused but not convicted of a brutal abduction, Ted is now a free man—and public enemy number one. Maintaining his innocence, he flees north to keep a low profile amidst the steamy, croc-infested wetlands of Crimson Lake. There, Ted’s lawyer introduces him to eccentric private investigator Amanda Pharrell, herself a convicted murderer.

Big-band frontman Johnny Favorite was singing for the troops when a Luftwaffe fighter squadron strafed the bandstand, killing the crowd and leaving the singer near death. The army returned him to a private hospital in upstate New York, leaving him to live out his days as a vegetable while the world forgot him. But Louis Cyphre never forgets. Cyphre had a contract with the singer, stipulating payment upon Johnny's death—payment that will be denied as long as Johnny clings to life. When Cyphre hires Harry Angel to find Johnny at the hospital, Angel learns that the singer has disappeared.

When an extra $5,000 shows up in her bank account, Kinsey Millhone puts it down to clerical error. But suddenly the deposit makes sense. It's not a mistake, it's a setup!

The darkest and most disturbing case report from the files of Kinsey Millhone, Y begins in 1979, when four teenage boys from an elite private school sexually assault a 14-year-old classmate - and film the attack. Not long after, the tape goes missing, and the suspected thief, a fellow classmate, is murdered. In the investigation that follows, one boy turns state's evidence, and two of his peers are convicted. But the ringleader escapes without a trace.