Showing results by author "Loren Estleman"

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.

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.

Countless tragedies occurred during the 1967 Detroit riots, and one of them belonged to Richard DeVries. A 22-year-old black man about to play for the Pistons, he was spotted tossing a Molotov cocktail at an abandoned building, arrested on the spot, and then charged with robbing an armored car. 20 years later he’s free, and the first man he calls on is Amos Walker. With 20 years of savings he buys a month of Walker’s time, asking for help finding the men who robbed the armored car. DeVries has already paid for stealing that $200,000, and now it’s time to collect it.

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!"

A tough town in a tough time: Detroit, during World War II, where the U.S. furiously tried to out-manufacture the Germans and Japanese. Industry imported workers to replace men gone to war - Southern whites and blacks working side by side for the first time. Through this tense, troubled world cuts a killer, a self-appointed soldier savaging ordinary people, the defenseless. Lieutenant Zagreb’s most important job is to keep the city from exploding, but his job doesn’t stop there....

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.

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.

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.

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.

Everyone knows the Frankenstein monster was played by Boris Karloff. But before Karloff’s memorable portrayal, another famous 1930s Hollywood icon, Bela Lugosi, tested for the part of the monster. The screen test footage was lost for decades, until Valentino, the never-say-die film archivist, gets a hot tip about the whereabouts of the incriminating (for really bad, heavily accented acting) footage. But it comes with a price far greater than the money he’ll have to pay.

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....

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.

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.

In Burning Midnight, master of the hard-boiled detective novel Loren D. Estleman gives listeners a hot new Amos Walker mystery. Amos Walker knows Detroit, from the highest to the lowest, and that includes the gangs of Mexicantown. When a friend asks Walker to get his son’s brother-in-law out of one of two feuding gangs, Walker gets in trouble fast. First, dead bodies start to pile up; then come suspicious fires and the bottle bombs. Walker is caught in the middle of a gang war.

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.

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.

Loren D. Estleman, one of America’s most critically acclaimed authors, is a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award nominee who has won three Shamuses, four Golden Spurs, and three Western Heritage Awards. One of Estleman’s most unique works, Billy Gashade follows the adventures of a 16-year-old vagabond who wanders the Old West, crossing paths with such legends as “Billy the Kid,” Jesse James, Chief Crazy Horse, and “Wild Bill” Hickok.

Spring has come to Detroit's Sugartown enclave, and Amos Walker would like to feel kindly toward the human race. Unfortunately, his first case of the new season immediately leads him into trouble among the Polish settlers of neighboring Hamtramck, when old Martha Evancek hires him to look for her missing grandson. But even before Walker gets a chance to investigate, he's presented with a second case: an eminent Russian novelist who fears that someone is out to kill him.

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