Showing results by author "Loren Estleman"

Ater a tour in Vietnam and several years working the streets of Detroit as a private investigator, Amos Walker has seen a lot. But he’s never encountered anything quite like his newest assignment. Ann Maringer, an aging stripper hard at work at one of the city’s many low-grade joints, hires him to find a missing person: herself. She expects to disappear any day now, she says, and she wants to be found.

It's 1966 and Detroit has entered its Golden Age. America throbs to the throaty rumble of Motor City's powerful road-eating machines. It'll never be this good again and Big Auto is fighting to keep it that way. Ex-cop Ricky Amery is hired to go undercover to put the brakes on runaway consumer advocacy that would legislate Detroit right out of business. They couldn't have chosen a more loyal disciple: Amery's god is horsepower and his house of worship is the open road.

Marla Bernstein is a pretty, dark-haired teenager who also happens to be the ward of Ben Morningstar - a semi-retired mobster who prefers to keep family business out of the newspapers. When Marla suddenly disappears, the gang boss is forced to call in private eve Amos Walker, who quickly learns his new employer doesn't take "no" for an answer when he offers a job opportunity. Unfortunately, the only clue to Marla's whereabouts is a pornographic photograph that clearly proves that she's become part of a world that disgusts even her criminal guardian....

Like nowhere else in America, Detroit flourished during Prohibition. The constant flow of liquor from across the Canadian border made Lake Erie a war zone, and lined the pockets of the men who ran the Purple Gang, the Unione Siciliana, and the Little Jewish Navy. But Prohibition was more than just a boon for gangsters. For newspapermen, it was a dream come true. It’s 1928, and the Detroit Times’ Connie Minor knows every thug, moll, and triggerman south of Eight Mile.

The area's premier book collector has been found bludgeoned to death on the floor of his family library. A fifth-generation resident of Good Advice, Lloyd Fister devoted his life to books, accumulating a collection of local history that date backs to the 16th century. In his library, a single volume is missing: a Spanish book with a sinister past. Is the missing volume a clue, a motive, or a murder weapon? It will take a collector’s eye to decide.

On screen, Sandy Broderick is everything a newscaster is supposed to be. He has a deep voice, a 10,000-watt smile, and the God-given ability to banter with weathermen until his ears fall off. But when the cameras turn off, he has a private problem: His 20-year old son, Bud, has disappeared. Amos Walker is going to find him. The boy and his junkie girlfriend are both gone, and Broderick is terrified - not for his son, but for his career. The station is about to do an exposé on drugs in Detroit, and the newscaster doesn’t want his boy’s addict girlfriend to get in the way of his Pulitzer.

In the private eye business, mistakes can be fatal. Just ask Amos Walker.

The most renowned American authors in Western fiction are brought together in one bang 'em-up, shoot-it-out collection! Including titles by Louis L'Amour, Brian Garfield, Marcia Muller, Bill Pronzini, Thomas Thompson, John M. Cunningham, Chad Oliver, Donald Hamilton, Loren D. Estleman and Owen Wister.

Legendary author Loren D. Estleman has built a distinguished career in both the Western and mystery genres. His historical Westerns are instant classics, and The Branch and the Scaffold is another triumph. Brutally efficient judge Isaac C. Parker is determined to rid Arkansas and the Indian Territory of all manner of criminals. But his quest for justice and liberal use of the gallows earn him just as many friends as enemies and take a toll on every aspect of his life.

Author Loren D. Estleman has won four Golden Spur Awards from the Western Writers of America, as well as the Western Heritage Award for Outstanding Western Novel from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame. He is also a Pulitzer Prize nominee. In Undertaker's Wife, he pens a dramatic tale set in the early 1900s about a retired undertaker, Richard Connable, and his wife, Lucy. In order to save the country from financial disaster, Richard must disguise the suicide of one of the most preeminent financiers.

Enter Valentino, a mild-mannered UCLA film archivist, who buys a decrepit movie palace and uncovers a skeleton in the secret Prohibition basement. He then makes a second discovery: long-lost, priceless, reels of film: Erich von Stroheim's infamous Greed. The LAPD wants to take the reels as evidence, jeopardizing the precious old film.

In 1944 Al Capone, the most notorious Mob boss in history, has already been released from prison. Though Capone is no longer the enormously powerful force who dominated Chicago’s underworld for years, he is still a thorn in the side of J. Edgar Hoover. The FBI chief knows that if he can somehow manage to get Capone to reveal details of crimes he and his Outfit committed, the Bureau has a good chance of nailing key members who now are active in the wartime black market.

The tabloids were full of it. Constance Thayer, after a night of clubbing, drinks, and drugs, had taken an automatic pistol from the collection of her industrialist husband Doyle Thayer Jr. and emptied it into his back, as he lay naked and unconscious in their Iroquois Heights home. The news of Constance Thayer's X-rated past breathed new life into the scandal for another month. Walker's job was to gather enough dirt on the late Mr. Thayer to make his widow look clean by comparison. What he found was a monstrous magnate, a dubious corpse, and a gang of country-style gunrunners.

America's richest legends come from the frontier - from the land where the events of a single moment might erase the lines between law and lawlessness, between safety and mortal danger, between heroes and villains. The carefully selected stories in this collection are vibrant proof that the great American West is a fertile ground to storytellers. Here's the most varied collection of short stories, by 17 highly acclaimed Western writers.

The winner of five Spurs, two Stirrups, and three Western Heritage Awards for his work, best-selling author Loren D. Estleman is among the greatest chroniclers of the American West. The eighth novel in Estleman’s popular and acclaimed Page Murdock series, this action-packed tale finds Murdock and his trusted five-shot Deane Adams revolver enforcing order in a world of chaos.

America's richest legends come from the frontier - from the land where the events of a single moment might erase the lines between law and lawlessness, between safety and mortal danger, between heroes and villains. The carefully selected stories in this collection are vibrant proof that the great American West is a fertile ground to storytellers. Here is the most varied collection of short stories by 17 highly acclaimed Western writers.

In You Know Who Killed Me, by multiple award-winning author Loren D. Estleman, Amos Walker is at low ebb. Just released from a rehab clinic, the Detroit private detective has to marshal his energies to help solve a murder in Iroquois Heights, his least favorite town. The area is flooded with billboards rented by the widow of Donald Gates, an ordinary suburbanite found shot to death in his basement on New Year's Eve: "You know who killed me!"

Who is Gilia Cristobal? On first appearance, Gilia Cristobal seems to be exactly what she claims: a bright, talented, blonde-bombshell Latina singer who has worked hard to rise to the pinnacle of popular acclaim while maintaining her artistic integrity and ideals. Amos Walker ought to know better. There's nobody that perfect and Gilia is just too good to be true. For starters, she's not really Gilia, and that's just the tip of a deadly iceberg of lies that threatens to sink him.

Tracking down a runaway wife is run of the mill. That's yesterday's blues. But finding the trombonist father of black, beautiful, reformed hooker Iris threatens to blow up into the case of a lifetime. The trail Amos Walker follows through Detroit's smoky music clubs leads him to dens of hard crime and harder drugs - where Iris and Amos will be lucky to escape with their lives, much less the truth about a past packed with menacing secrets. And that's no jazz.

Amos Walker is hired by Helen and Dante Gunner, a bohemian Ann Arbor couple, to find Jerry Marcus, a film director who has disappeared with their investment money. It's one of Walker's easiest jobs to date. In just a few short hours, Walker locates Marcus in his bedroom...murdered, his body shoved into a cupboard, a bullet through his head.