Private Cities

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.

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.

Private investigator Gideon Rimes, a black Iraq War vet and a retired Army CID detective, thought he’d left behind the danger of the battlefield. He serves subpoenas, finds witnesses, and provides background checks for better pay and little use of his trusty Glock. But then he’s hired to protect sultry, young blues singer Indigo Waters from her stalker ex-boyfriend - a hotheaded cop who also serves as a driver and bodyguard for the Buffalo mayor.

Louise Wykoff is arguably the most recognizable woman living in Minnesota, known for her presence in over 100 paintings by the late and brilliant Randolph McInnis. Louise, known better as “That Wykoff Woman”, was just a young apprentice when her intimate representation and the fact of the McInnis’ marriage caused rumors to fly - and Louise to hide away for decades. All of McInnis’ paintings are in museums or known private collections, until Louise confesses to having three more that no one has ever heard of - and now they’ve been stolen.

Great War veteran and rising star Gene Hammons lost his job as a homicide detective when he tried to prove that a woman was wrongly convicted of murder to protect a well-connected man. Now a private investigator, Hammons makes his living looking for missing persons - a plentiful caseload during the Great Depression, when people seem to disappear all the time. But his routine is disrupted when his brother - another homicide detective, still on the force - enlists his help looking into the death of a young woman whose dismembered body is found beside the railroad tracks.

Rushmore McKenzie is a former cop, current millionaire, and an occasional unlicensed PI who does favors for friends. Yet he has reservations when his girlfriend’s daughter asks him to help her father, a man in serious trouble. En route from St. Paul to a Canadian blues festival on Highway 61, he met a girl, blacked out, and awoke hours later in a strange motel, with the girl’s murdered body on the floor. Slipping away unnoticed and heading home, he thought he’d got away - until he started getting texts with photos of the body and demands for blackmail payments he couldn’t pay.

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.

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.

Riley Brodin is the granddaughter of Walter Muehlenhaus - a man as rich, powerful, and connected as anyone since the days of J. P. Morgan. Despite her family’s connections, it’s McKenzie she reaches out to when her relatively new boyfriend goes missing. Despite his reservations about getting involved with the Muehlenhaus family - again - Mac McKenzie agrees to look for one Juan Carlos Navarre. What he finds, though, is a man who appears to be a ghost.

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 ...

Once a police detective in St. Paul, Minnesota, Rushmore McKenzie has become an unlikely millionaire and an occasional unlicensed private investigator, doing favors for friends. The favor, this time, is for a friend of a friend - Erin Peterson, a local business person and owner of a growing food company called Salsa Girl. Someone seems to have a beef with her: The outside locks on her factory having been systematically filled with superglue. But for some reason, Erin doesn’t want to report this harassment to the police.

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 ...

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.

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.

Freiheit und Demokratie, so der Investor Peter Thiel 2009, seien nicht länger kompatibel. Wer die Freiheit liebe, müsse daher versuchen, der Politik in all ihren Formen zu entkommen. Zuflucht suchen könnten Libertäre im Cyberspace, im Weltraum und auf dem offenen Meer. Das mag verblasen klingen, steht aber in einer jahrzehntealten Tradition marktradikaler Ideen: Denker wie Milton Friedman begeisterten sich für das noch unter britischer Oberhoheit stehende Hongkong; Margaret Thatcher träumte von einem Singapur an der Themse.

Stellen Sie sich vor, ein privates Unternehmen bietet Ihnen als „Staatsdienstleister“ Schutz von Leben, Freiheit und Eigentum in einem abgegrenzten Gebiet. Titus Gebel skizziert dieses Szenario in seinem Buch „Freie Privatstädte. Mehr Wettbewerb im wichtigsten Markt der Welt“ bis ins kleinste Detail.

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.

Gord Stewart, 40 years old, single, moved back into his sub­urban childhood home to care for his widowed father. But his father no longer needs care, and Gord is stuck in limbo. He’s been working in the movie business as a location scout for years, and when there isn’t much filming, as a private eye for a security company run by ex-cops, OBC. When a fellow crew member asks him to find her missing uncle, Gord reluctantly takes the job. The police say the uncle walked into some dense woods in Northern Ontario and shot himself, but the man’s wife thinks he’s still alive.

Duke Dempsey is a private investigator in 1938 Charleston, SC. He is thrust into the case of a lifetime when the Vatican comes calling and hires him to find an invaluable relic. Charleston is also hit with the mysterious murders of a prominent priest of St. Patrick's Cathedral and a local cop. Duke is forced into a partnership with the presiding detective, Johnny Stampkin, to find the relic and solve the murders. The case takes a multitude of twists and turns as they navigate through Roman Catholic puzzles, Civil War secrets, and a Nazi assassin.

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 ...