Bill Pronzini

In Echo Park, in the small town of Santa Rita, California, the mutilated body of Martin Torrey is found by two passersby. A registered sex offender, Torrey has been a suspect in a string of recent rapes, and instant suspicion for his murder falls on the relatives and friends of the women attacked. Police chief Griffin Kells and detective Robert Ortiz are under increasing pressure from the public and from a mayor demanding results in a case that has...

Two missing bodies and two separate investigations take Carpenter and Quincannon from the heights above San Francisco Bay to the depths of Chinatown. John Quincannon is searching a Chinatown opium den for his client's husband, missing in a brewing tong war set to ignite over the stolen corpse of Bing Ah Kee. Meanwhile, his partner, Sabina Carpenter, unsure of the dark secrets her suitor might be concealing, searches for the corpse of a millionaire,...

Agreeing to investigate threats by a mysterious extortionist against a newly rich young woman, Jake Runyon makes a series of surprise discoveries that cause him to be wrongfully accused of a crime and his employers to be subjected to a vicious legal vendetta.

"In his 24th and most intriguing appearance, the "Nameless Detective" finds himself involved in two intricate and emotional investigations. The first is intensely personal: the unexpected death of his estranged friend and former partner, Eberhardt. Although there seems to be no question that Eberhardt committed suicide, "Nameless" becomes obsessed with the reasons behind the act." "Meanwhile, he is hired by a Santa Fe businessman to find his ex-wife,...

Shaken after a hair's-breadth escape from death, Nameless has made changes in his professional life, but he's not put himself out to pasture. Again he enters San Francisco's shadowy underworld, this time in a search for the identity of a gentle, mentally disturbed homeless man who has been found dead in an alley doorway. Clues are few, but Pronzini, working at the top of his form, takes his seasoned private-eye hero to a new phase of a still-evolving...

The "nameless detective" journeys behind the lush facade of the affluent California community of Greenwood when he investigates an unusual case of insurance fraud and uncovers a complex web of larceny, adultery, betrayal, and murder.

A haunted woman's suicide pulls a California man into the poisonous secrets of a bleak Nevada desert town in Bill Pronzini's masterful work of noir fiction. There is something about the sad woman eating alone night after night at the Harmony Café that intrigues San Francisco CPA Jim Messenger. Unfulfilled himself, Jim feels a kinship with her - and later, when she commits suicide, he resolves to find out why. His search leads him to Beulah, a middle-of-nowhere...

Four novellas that involve "Nameless" in cases of murder, missing persons, occultism, and fate.

Presents the original stories on which various western films were based.