Private Cities

David Stalin was one of the best detectives in the business, running head-to-head with data-jackers, organ thieves, and the tech-enhanced gangs who ruled the shadowy streets of Los Angeles. He could do no wrong, until what seemed like an easy case got out of control, and left his wife dead among the abandoned ruins of old LA.

A whole lotta shakin’ is going on in the quirky and page-turning mystery series featuring Jack McCoul, an ex-con artist who solves murders. “Loaded with one liners. Keeps the plot turning.” — Kirkus Reviews As earthquakes threaten California, recovering con artist Jack McCoul must dodge killers and turn the tables on a gang of greedy developers and crooked politicians who will stop at nothing to sell the heart and soul of San Francisco to the highest bidder. Read as a standalone or as part of the series. What readers are saying: ★★★★★ The characters are delicious. The ...

As a graduation present for her daughter, Tammy, Samantha Moon and the gang head down to South America for the vacation of all vacations. Next stop: El Dorado—The Lost City of Gold It all begins shortly after Sam and company arrive in Colombia, when a disembodied head awakens them in the middle of the night. Turns out, the head belongs to the famous explorer, Sir Walter Raleigh, who lost it to an executioner’s ax 400 years earlier. The very essence of determination, the intrepid explorer isn’t about to let a little thing like death stop his search for the legendary City of Gold. And ...

Rushmore McKenzie, former St. Paul police detective and unexpected millionaire, does the occasional, unofficial private detective work - mostly favors for friends. He’s faced kidnappers, domestic terrorists, art thieves, among others, and had a hand in solving some of the most perplexing mysteries of the Twin Cities. But this time, his prodigious luck and intuition may have finally failed him: He was shot in the back by an unknown assailant and lies in a coma.

Collected here are intersecting tales not just about Rimes but about friends, antagonists, and passersby who move through his world. Included are his first case as a PI, two pieces written by Bobby Chance, the backstory of a trial that shaped a friendship, the whereabouts of the Spider after his departure from Buffalo, and a novelette (inspired by two historic murder cases) that puts Rimes in the presence of someone truly demonic.

When the ATF gets a lead on a much-sought-after cache of illegal guns near the Canadian border, they call millionaire private detective Rushmore McKenzie in to help them track down the gunrunners. Their only lead is a guy who is part of a small-time gang of armed robbers working north of the Twin Cities. Their idea is for McKenzie to infiltrate the group and wait for them to lead him to the guns. Which seemed like a bad idea to McKenzie at the time, but even he had no idea just how bad things were going to get.

Homicide cop Bobby Dunston’s daughter has been kidnapped, taken in broad daylight on a city street in the middle of September. The kidnappers demand a million dollars and force Dunston to get the ransom from his friend McKenzie. It soon becomes apparent to the two of them that one of the kidnappers is childhood pal Scottie, a once aspiring drummer now gone astray, and that the kidnapping is payback for “crimes” committed in their past.

In December 1941 an enemy attack launched the United States of America into World War II when the Imperial Army of Japan surprised the Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. Americans had been watching the Europeans battle for two years already; hopes were high that the US could remain out. But on December 7 all that changed. Later that week Germany and Italy declared war against the US. For Dorie Lennox, a private detective in Kansas City, like all Americans, the sudden and tragic entry into the war was traumatic. This short story takes place two weeks after Pearl Harbor, as the country ...

Summer, 1962. A scorching heat wave is suffocating LA. PI Jim Keegan is offered a small fortune to find a beautiful woman from a set of photographs. He refuses; the job seems suspicious. But the next day the same woman, Eve, turns up, unbidden, on his doorstep. Eve fears for her safety. She is being watched. Before Keegan knows it, someone has been killed with Keegan’s own gun, and he gets sucked into a world of suspicion and betrayal where he’s never quite sure where the truth lies....

Murder is never pretty In the vibrant chaos of French Quarter Fest in Orleans, P.I. Wyatt Thomas faces a daunting task—recovering a stolen treasure that transcends the boundaries of mere literature. The missing item is no ordinary book; it’s the priceless first edition of Mosquitos, William Faulkner’s legendary tale of New Orleans dynasties. As Wyatt delves into the underbelly of the city’s secrets, he discovers that a powerful patriarch from the Garden District is willing to pay a staggering million dollars for its return. The question looms: What dark revelations lie within the ...

From New York Times bestselling author Liliana Hart comes an out-of-print book that has been revised and updated, with new scenes and a new ending. "From fires to shootouts [and] car chases to bombs, this book has it ALL. Every sequence was written with the perfect amount of detail..." (Goodreads). New Orleans is a place of sultry music and shadowed streets—A city where people go to get lost and leave their troubles behind. It's the City that Care Forgot. Ex-FBI sniper Shane Quincy is just trying to survive one day to the next since his wife’s death—a death he blames himself for. The ...

As an amateur PI with a bent moral compass, Ash McKenna is good at finding people - but not at staying out of trouble. Between his own violent tendencies, the shadow cast by his father's death, and a self-destructive revenge quest, he made a mess of his life in NYC. Figuring it was time for a change of scenery Ash relocated to Portland, taking a job as a bouncer in a vegan strip club. And he hasn't had to hit anyone in six months. So when one of the club's dancers asks Ash for help finding her daughter, he declines, content to keep the darkness in his past.

Once a police detective in St. Paul, Minnesota, Rushmore McKenzie became an unlikely millionaire and an occasional unlicensed private investigator, doing favors for friends. But this time, he finds himself in dire need of working on his own behalf. His dear friend and first love Shelby Dunston attends a public reading by a psychic medium with the hope of connecting with her grandfather one final time. Instead, she hears McKenzie’s name spoken by the psychic in connection with a huge sum of stolen - and missing - money.

Rushmore McKenzie, a retired St. Paul policeman and unexpected millionaire, often works as an unlicensed PI, doing favors as it suits him. When two graduate students show up with a story about $8 million in missing stolen gold from the ’30s, McKenzie is intrigued. In the early 20th century, St. Paul, Minnesota, was an open city - a place where gangsters could stay unmolested by the local authorities. Frank “Jelly” Nash was suspected of masterminding a daring robbery of gold bars in 1933, but, before he could unload it, he was killed in the Kansas City Massacre.

When a priest is brutally gunned down in front of St. Jerome's Chinese-American Catholic Church, Father Luis Chavez is asked by the archdiocese to lead an inquiry. With the confessed killer already in custody, it looks like an open-and-shut case. That is, until Father Chavez digs deeper. As the killer's confession unravels, Father Chavez teams up with Deputy District Attorney Michael Story to get to the bottom of it. Together, they discover a conspiracy leading back to one of the world's oldest criminal organizations.

Right up until they put him in jail, McKenzie thought the cops were kidding. After all, he did them a favor by stopping a rookie cop from roughing up a distraught woman at a murder scene. But the next thing he knows, he’s in jail, missing an important date with his girlfriend and reliving nightmares he thought he had left far behind him - and vowing payback for all of it. If that means sticking his nose into an ongoing murder investigation, well, he’s done it before.

During one of the first heavy snows of the winter, on the interstate outside the Twin Cities, Rushmore McKenzie is behind a truck behaving erratically when the man in the truck bed dumps a body out onto the road, right in front of McKenzie’s car. McKenzie avoids hitting the body, a bound woman who is just barely alive, but his stopped car in the middle of the road starts a chain of accidents, resulting in a 37-car pile-up. By the time the police arrive, and the EMTs and ambulances have taken care of the immediate injuries, the truck is long gone.

A missing girl. A shell-shocked soldier. A wife stepping out on her husband. Two women beaten to death. A sinister sabotage plot. A wounded, relentless private eye who will stop at nothing to protect those he loves. Picking up right at the thrilling conclusion of "The Big Bout," "The Big Blast" finds Soldier working three new complex cases and taking care of his friends in wartime Panama City. History. Mystery. Romance. Action. Thrills. Suspense. Noir. “Michael Lister writes some of the best hard-boiled prose going. Nothing short of amazing!” Booklist Starred Review. “Lister’s hard-...

The shot is impossible. In the middle of a blizzard, down a busy New York avenue, into a moving car. The agent in charge knows of only one man with the skills to work out where the bullet came from. Lucas Page, former child prodigy and physics professor, sees crime from a different angle - his ability to read a scene is uncanny. Page quit the FBI after it nearly cost him his life. He swore to stay away, but this victim is his former partner, and he can't resist the call to help.

Private Investigator Gideon Rimes knows he’s lucky, a survivor over the years. Now months after the first anniversary of the pandemic, a sense of mortality lingers over Nickel City. The changed landscape includes word of crime lord Lorenzo Quick’s passing whose regime is imploding as a Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act case is being avidly built by the ADA. Yet in the territorial vacuum, opportunistic and unpredictable successors emerge. The case takes a twist when a drive-by shooting at an outdoor concert shares a link and jeopardizes Rimes’s personal world.