Our home was full of books. My mother routinely passed books to her firstborn, me. While she read widely, she loved mysteries, so I grew up devouring both classics and lesser-known whodunnits. Many of those novels had strong enough descriptions of their cities that I felt like a visitor. But most were set in places like New York and Los Angeles, never my home town, Buffalo, and never with an African-American hero. After my 2013 retirement from an English professorship, I began writing the Nickel City mysteries to add a new hero to the PI pantheon and showcase my birthplace, nicknamed for the buffalo head nickel.
As the father of the hard-boiled PI novel, Dashiell Hammett takes the reader through San Francisco, using full advantage of the fog, the streets and intersections, the drug stores and eateries, and the horn on Alcatraz Island to create an indelible sense of the city circa 1930. Many sites still stand, including John’s Grill on Ellis Street, a steakhouse where detective Sam Spade eats a meal near the end of the novel. Several years ago I visited John’s Grill. After I showed my Mystery Writers of America membership card and said how thrilled I was to be there, the server gave a Home of the Maltese Falcon glass to each member of our party.
One of the greatest crime novels of the 20th century.
'His name remains one of the most important and recognisable in the crime fiction genre. Hammett set the standard for much of the work that would follow' Independent
Sam Spade is hired by the fragrant Miss Wonderley to track down her sister, who has eloped with a louse called Floyd Thursby. But Miss Wonderley is in fact the beautiful and treacherous Brigid O'Shaughnessy, and when Spade's partner Miles Archer is shot while on Thursby's trail, Spade finds himself both hunter and hunted: can he track down the jewel-encrusted bird, a…
Street names, the Charles River, bridges, the Back Bay, the Public Gardens, actual hotels and restaurants—Robert B. Parker’s forty Spenser novels make Boston so much a character that Parker wrote Spenser’s Boston. The sixth novel in the series, published in 1980, has Spenser searching for a missing lesbian activist who’s been kidnapped by an anti-gay group. Like Buffalo, Boston sometimes gets a lot of snow. Unlike Buffalo, which is not the snowiest city in New York but is depicted as such, Boston is not known as a snow capital. That Spenser must search during a blizzard is a welcome dose of realism.
“Crackling dialogue, plenty of action, and expert writing.”—The New York Times
Rachel Wallace is a tough young woman with a lot of enemies.
Spenser is a tough guy with a macho code of honor, hired to protect a woman who thinks that kind of code is obsolete. Privately, they will never see eye to eye.
But when Rachel vanishes. Spenser is ready to lay his life on the line—to find Rachel Wallace.
This book is a literary historical novel. It is set in Britain immediately after World War II, when people – gay, straight, young, and old - are struggling to get back on track with their lives, including their love lives. Because of the turmoil of the times, the number of…
With V.I. Warshawski, Sara Paretsky gives the world a hard-boiled woman detective as tough and driven as any male PI. In the series’ second novel (1984), Warshawki’s Chicago is as detailed and engaging as Spenser’s Boston. A feminist of note, Paretsky is unafraid to depict the Windy City’s love of hockey, its politics, its neighborhoods, its quirks, and the particulars of Great Lakes shipping. Like Buffalo, Chicago is a Rust Belt city with character to add to its characters. Paretsky showcases them all deftly and lovingly.
'Who're you working for then, Warshawski?' 'My cousin.' 'Boom Boom? He's dead.' 'I know. That's why I'm working for him.'
Boom Boom's body was found floating near the docks, chewed up and spat out by a ship's propeller. More like brother and sister than cousins, Vic and Boom Boom looked out for each other. Boom Boom grew up to be an ice hockey hero, and Vic a private eye. And now V.I. Warshawski would like to know how, exactly, her cousin died . . .
In 2009, after years of writing Easy Rawlins novels set in a past Los Angeles, Walter Mosley began a new series set in contemporary New York. African-American Leonid McGill is a hard PI, with a complex seamy past who aspires to become a better person, despite the pressures of being a husband and family man caught in a near-loveless marriage. The New York in which McGill lives and struggles is the upscale but still gritty descendant of earlier versions of the city in the Mike Hammer novels of Mickey Spillane and the Matthew Scudder novels of Buffalo-born Lawrence Block. It is a land of wealth and culture but danger and deceit.
The widely praised New York Times bestseller, and Mosley's first new series since his acclaimed Easy Rawlins novels...
Leonid McGill is an ex-boxer and a hard drinker looking to clean up his act. He's an old-school P.I. working a New York City that's gotten a little too fancy all around him. But it's still full of dirty secrets, and as McGill unearths them, his commitment to the straight and narrow is going to be tested to the limit...
Coyote weather is the feral, hungry season, drought-stricken, and ready to catch fire. It’s 1967, and the American culture is violently remaking itself while the country is forcibly sending its young men to fight in a deeply unpopular war.
Jerry has stubbornly made no plans for the future because he…
Unlike the Los Angeles of, say, Michael Connolly’s Harry Bosch novels, the city in Kellye Garrett’s 2017 Detective by Day debut is a superficial, brighter place full of influencers, social media excesses, fashion, a home burglary crew, and Hollywood aspirations that, for many, refuse to die. At the center of this delightfully humorous mystery about death from a hit-and-run is an accidental detective, Dayna Anderson, a once successful African-American star of TV commercials. Dayna has fallen on hard times and is scraping by in a city that doesn’t tolerate scraping, at least not without a smirk. But she has the instincts of a natural sleuth and won’t let go until she finds the killer.
Dayna Anderson doesn t set out to solve a murder. All the semi-famous, mega-broke black actress wants is to help her parents keep their house. After witnessing a deadly hit-and-run, she figures pursuing the fifteen-grand reward isn t the craziest thing a Hollywood actress has done for some cash. But what starts as simply trying to remember a speeding car soon blossoms into a full-on investigation. As Dayna digs deeper into the victim s life, she wants more than just reward money. She s determined to find the poor woman's killer too. When she connects the accident to a notorious…
In my series’ 2017 opener, Iraq War vet turned PI Gideon Rimes bodyguards a blues singer stalked by her cop ex-boyfriend. When the cop is murdered, Rimes is the chief suspect. The effort to clear his name takes him through various parts of the vibrant Nickel City, from the Anchor Bar (home of Buffalo wings) and other landmarks to storied neighborhoods (Elmwood Village, Allentown, and the East Side). His discovery of a conspiracy to gain control of a half billion in federal funds leads to a deadly confrontation amid the perfect place to hide a body, the disused grain silos near the historic waterfront.
Third Wheel is a coming-of-age thriller about a misguided teen who struggles to fit in with a pack of older troublemakers. In this fast-paced page-turner, Brady Wilks is a root-worthy underdog who explores the complexities of identity, belonging, and betrayal.
Third Wheel won seven literary awards, including Literary Thriller of…
Enter a captivating world where science fiction and thrilling suspense converge. After plummeting from the roof of Helix Unbound, Amanda awakens to a life devoid of memories. Desperately longing to fit in, yet sensing she harbors an extraordinary secret beneath her seemingly ordinary facade, she explores the unfamiliar world in…