Loren D. Estleman

Working to overcome his technophobic inclinations to help recover stolen goods for an electronics retailer, Detroit private investigator Amos Walker is forced to team up with the local police and the FBI when two men connected to the case are murdered.

""Loren Estleman is my hero." --Harlan Coben. Desperate Detroit and Stories of Other Dire Places represents forty years of suspense writing in the short form. Previously published in a host of magazines and anthologies, with a new Preface and introductions to the stories written especially for this collection, these eighteen tales feature gangsters, private eyes, psychotic killers, hitmen, feuding families, prostitutes, prizefighters, bodyguards,...

Lurid paperback covers promised sex and danger, but what went on behind the scenes was nearly as spicy as the adventures between the covers. 1946. Fresh from the War in Europe, hack writer Jacob Heppleman discovers a changed world back home. The pulp magazines he used to write for are dying, replaced by a revolutionary new publishing racket: paperback novels, offering cheap excitement for the common man and woman. Although scorned by the critics,...

"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. This case is opened and shut quickly, but Walker can't quite let it go. When Dante is arrested for the murder...

"Bela Lugosi's Frankenstein screen test puts Valentino in the picture for murder. Everyone knows the Frankenstein monster was played by Boris Karloff. His portrayal is so famous that the play Arsenic and Old Lace was filled with Karloff/monster jokes--even when the part of the monstrously deformed villain was played by another actor. But before Karloff's memorable portrayal, another famous 1930s Hollywood icon, Bela Lugosi, tested for the part of...

"Locked in a deadly feud, cowboys Randy Locke and Frank Farmer have spent decades attempting to annihilate each other any time they are within shooting distance. So far, the men are even. One of Frank's bullets has given Randy a permanent limp. Vain Frank wears a prosthetic ear, his own lost to Randy's assault. If either of them remembers the original reason for the feud, it seems moot now. Their quest for revenge has led them on a merry chase through...

Valentino wants to keep The Oracle, his beloved run-down movie palace, from being condemned before it even reopens, but murder keeps intruding into his otherwise quiet life. At a gala party held in memory of screen legend Greta Garbo, he's having fun until the host, a hotshot developer named Matthew Rankin, tells Valentino about a certain letter from Garbo to his late wife. She and Garbo had been...close. Such a letter is of great interest to a film...

Dead Man's Hand No one paid any mind to Jack McCall as he unloaded a .44 caliber slug into Wild Bill Hickok's brain at point-blank range. Deadwood's legendary gunslinging marshal was dead, holding a poker hand of aces and eights, a dead man's hand. The question the law wanted to know: was McCall a hired killer or did he kill Hickok to avenge his brother's death? Find out in Loren D. Estleman's Aces & Eights.

Cut-Throat Dogs is a new Amos Walker novel from a Grand Master. “Loren D. Estleman is my hero.”—Harlan Coben “Someone is dead who shouldn’t be, and the wrong man is in prison.” Nearly twenty years ago, college freshman April Goss was found dead in her bathtub, an apparent suicide, but suspicion soon fell on her boyfriend. Dan Corbeil was convicted of her murder and sent to prison. Case closed. Or is it? At the Publisher's request,...

When Judge Isaac Parker first arrived in Fort Smith, Arkansas, the town had thirty saloons and one bank. Inheriting a corrupt court and a lawless territory roughly the size of Great Britain, he immediately put the residents on notice by publicly hanging six convicted felons at one time. For the next two decades, his stern and implacable justice brought law and order to the West . . . and made him plenty of enemies. As the sole law on the untamed...