Private Investigators Mysteries

The year 1920: Flying in the face of convention, legendary American adventuress Beryl Helliwell never fails to surprise and shock. The last thing her adoring public would expect is that she craves some peace and quiet. The humdrum hamlet of Walmsley Parva in the English countryside seems just the ticket. And, honestly, until America comes to its senses and repeals Prohibition, Beryl has no intention of returning stateside and subjecting herself to bathtub gin.

Attorney Rhonda Bird returns home after a long estrangement when she learns her father has died. There she makes two important discoveries: Her father stopped being an accountant and had opened up a private detective agency, and she has a teenage half sister named Baby. Baby brings in a client to the detective agency, a young man who claims he was abducted.

"Pour Sherlock Holmes, elle est toujours la femme. Il la juge tellement supérieure à tout son sexe, qu'il ne l'appelle presque jamais par son nom ; elle est et elle restera la femme. Aurait-il donc éprouvé à l'égard d'Irène Adler un sentiment voisin de l'amour ? Absolument pas ! Son esprit lucide, froid, admirablement équilibré répugnait à toute émotion en général et à celle de l'amour en particulier. Je tiens Sherlock Holmes pour la machine à observer et à raisonner la plus parfaite qui ait existé sur la planète ; amoureux, il n'aurait plus été le même."

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.

The bursts of orange, yellow, green, and red pop on the falling leaves, creating a colorful path along the trails for all guests at Happy Trails Campground is a real life picture that could never be captured by a camera. It's a dead body that chills everyone to the bone! When Hanks asks Mae and the Laundry Club Ladies to snoop, they are the first to put on a costume to bring this haunting tale to an end.

A wealthy woman needs to find her sister to settle a will. It looks routine...boring. Still, business is slow and even a private investigator has bills to pay, so Kinsey Millhone takes the case. But this is not routine and the deeper Kinsey digs the trickier things get. The client tries to call Kinsey off, an accusing husband surfaces, and a double murder turns the case sinister.

Sue Grafton's X: Perhaps her darkest and most chilling novel, it features a remorseless serial killer who leaves no trace of his crimes. Once again breaking the rules and establishing new paths, Grafton wastes little time identifying this sociopath. The test is whether Kinsey can prove her case against him before she becomes his next victim.

Madeline Fraser, radio talk show host extraordinaire, had a natural dread of dead air. So when one of her on-air guests signed off at the mike after drinking a glass of a sponsor’s beverage, it was a broadcaster’s nightmare come true.

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.

Vitus Adamson is falling apart. As a pre-deceased private investigator, he takes the prescription Atroxipine hourly to keep his undead body upright and functioning. Whenever he is injured, he seeks Niko, a bombshell mortician with bedroom eyes and a way with corpses, to piece him back together. Decomposition, however, is the least of his worries when two clients posing his most dangerous job yet appear at his door looking for their lost son.

Private Investigators Liz Talbot and Nate Andrews have worked their share of domestic cases. So when Tammy Sue Lyerly hires them to find out what her husband is hiding, they expect to find something looney but harmless. After all, this is the guy who claims to have been a DEA agent, a champion bull rider, and a NASCAR driver. But when he turns up dead the morning after Liz and Nate deliver incriminating photos, Tammy Sue becomes the prime suspect.

In this 12th entry in the award-winning series, Carolyn Haines' intrepid PI Sarah Booth comes up against porn-star-turned-psychic Sherry Cameron, who runs a medium business from a haunted estate on the edge of town. After growing suspicious that Sherry might be exploiting her emotionally vulnerable - and extremely wealthy - clients, Sarah disguises herself as a maid and sneaks onto Sherry's estate. But what she discovers there is deadlier than she could have imagined.

Somebody pushed Shelby Poinsett out her second-floor library window, and it wasn't her husband. At least that's what Charleston's most prestigious law firm wants Liz Talbot to prove. Liz must run the spectrum of Southern society, from the local homeless shelter where Shelby volunteered to the 100-year-old book club where Charleston's genteel ladies are dying to join, to bring a killer to justice.

Depressed after losing her unborn child, PI Sarah Booth Delaney distracts herself by checking out a beauty pageant with her friend and partner, Tinkie. This works fine—until the pageant’s top contender is poisoned. The prime murder suspect asks Sarah and Tinkie to investigate, and they agree—but their decision has grave consequences.

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.

Disgraced ex-cop Robert Hoon has crossed the wrong people for the last time. Having struck a humiliating blow against the criminal network known as the Loop, Hoon has been targeted by the Alphas, an elite squad of assassins who will not stop until he is dead. Outnumbered, outgunned, and on unfamiliar territory, Hoon’s only chance of survival lies several hundred miles north, in a place he knows better than anyone else on Earth. He swore he’d never set foot there again, but almost four decades after he left, Bob Hoon is finally going home.

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.

The citizens of Concord, Massachusetts, never tire of their heritage. For decades, the intellectuals of this little hamlet have continued endless debates about Concord’s favorite sons: Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau, and their contemporaries. Concord’s latter-day transcendental scholars are a strange bunch, but none is more peculiar than Homer Kelly, an expert on Emerson and on homicide. An old-fashioned murder is about to put both skills to the test.

Winner of both the Harper Lee Award and the Richard Wright Award for Literary Excellence, Carolyn Haines has thrilled countless readers with her Sarah Booth Delaney mysteries. Here, Sarah investigates when two wealthy heiresses claim a four-million-dollar family necklace was stolen. All the evidence points to insurance fraud, but when Sarah starts poking into the family’s dark secrets, one of the heiresses disappears.

Les-Eyzies-de-Tayac is known for three things: pâte de fois gras, truffles, and prehistoric remains. The little village, in fact, is the headquarters of the prestigious Institute de Prehistoire, which studies the abundant local fossils. But when a pet dog emerges from a nearby cave carrying parts of a human skeleton - by no means a fossilized one - Chief Inspector Lucien Anatole Joly puts in a call to his old friend, Gideon Oliver, the famed “Skeleton Detective.”