Showing results by publisher "Crossroad Press" in Hard-Boiled

When his own goddaughter becomes the latest victim of a serial killer wielding an ice pick, New York City Detective Frank Janek knows he must get inside the mind of a serial killer to locate this monster.

After he failed to find his missing sister, whose remains finally turned up in a bag in an overgrown field, Texas PI Truman Smith retired to become a housepainter on Galveston Island. But when an alligator is killed and its carcass left on display on a family friend's property, Tru is persuaded to search for the culprit. Soon the brooding gumshoe is stumbling over the bodies of dead humans, is shot at and run down by a souped-up four-by-four as he's embroiled in a plot complete with crooked police, a possible land-grabbing sheme and assorted "bad guys".

Big, sort-of-sloppy, brew-loving P.I. opens up his files on some of his most fascinating cases. Here are 10 stories and two novelettes, giving Nameless fans a page-turning potpourri of his toughest and most dangerous adventures. Case File is a 12-pack to be popped open and enjoyed on an off-duty afternoon. So sit back and spend some time with one of America's favorite P.I.'s who has caught more criminals - an imaginations - than any other gumshoe in recent American fiction.

Detective Frank Janek investigates a bizarre double murder in which the killer had decapitated the victims - a call girl and a teacher - at an exclusive private school - and switched their heads.

PI Truman Smith has become a loner after failing to find his sister Jan during a recent search of Galveston Island. He jogs on the Seawall, plays with his cat, and reads lots of Faulkner books. He is pulled from his self-imposed retirement when his old high school football buddy Dino asks him to find a young girl named Sharon. As Tru begins his investigation, dead bodies begin to appear and Tru himself is attacked.

In this enjoyable fourth series entry, Galveston PI Truman Smith (When Old Men Die, 1994) is hired by Lance Garrison, his still unpleasant but now rich high-school classmate, to investigate the shooting of a prairie chicken (really a kind of grouse) on Garrison's federally protected land in Picketville, Tex. Smith reluctantly agrees, largely because his high-school sweetheart, Anne Lindeman, now lives in Picketville.

The West Coast crime cartel known as "The Organization" has been beset by a series of problems: members are being murdered and merchandise hijacked. In walks troubleshooter Flagg, whose methods are those of a sharp-witted detective rather than a criminal. Soon he lays bare a plot behind the Organization's front - and now everyone is in danger.