After serving time for armed robbery, Ernest "Stick" Stickley is back on the outside and trying to stay legit. But it's tough staying straight in a crooked town - and Miami is a pirate's paradise, where investment fat cats and lowlife drug dealers hold hands and dance. And when a crazed player chooses Stick at random to die for another man's sins, the struggling ex-con is left with no choice but to dive right back into the game. Besides, Stick knows...

Nancy receives a letter meant for a British heiress who has the same name and, in her attempts to contact the other young woman, faces danger from a man who operates a Lonely Hearts Club mail fraud.

Tough, cynical PI Sam Spade, a man who, as his creator explained, is "able to take care of himself in any situation, able to get the best of anybody he comes in contact with," is hired by the story's irresistible femme fatale, Brigid O'Shaughnessy, to locate the client's sister by tailing her companion. Spade's partner, Miles Archer, takes on the assignment, and quickly both he and the man he was shadowing are murdered. As Spade pursues the mystery...

"A year has passed since LAPD detective Renée Ballard quit the force in the face of misogyny, demoralization, and endless red tape. But after the chief of police himself tells her she can write her own ticket within the department, Ballard takes back her badge, leaving "the late show" to rebuild and lead the cold case unit at the elite Robbery-Homicide Division. For years, Harry Bosch has been working a case that haunts him--the murder of an entire...

"A reputedly wealthy and eccentric old man dies in Vermont. His home [in Indiana], the House of a Thousand Candles, so called for the owner's preference to candle light, is left empty save a faithful servant -- his fortune mysteriously vanished, though rumored to still have been hidden in the house somewhere. John Glenarm, the late old man's grandson, stands to inherit the estate (and so the secret fortune) under the stipulation that he live in the...

Isaiah Quintabe is no longer IQ, the genius of East Long Beach; instead, he's a man on the road and on the run, hiding in a small Northern California town when his room is broken into by a desperate young man on the trail of the state's most prolific serial killer. His old partner, Juanell Dodson, must go straight or lose his wife and child. His devil's bargain? An internship at an LA advertising agency, where it turns out the rules of the street...

The Reverend Marcus Mallabee had an unusual ambition. He wanted to open a Christian-themed casino in Las Vegas. That might be why he was murdered.John Holiday, reporter turned author, has just finished interviewing Mallabee when the minister is shot by a sniper. Holiday is deeply shaken by the experience, but soon finds that witnessing a murder is only the beginning of his troubles.The Heavenly Casino is a fast-paced mystery featuring a reluctant...

When a killer strikes in the midst of a hot contest between South Lake Tahoe residents who are lobbying for a new shorefront dog park and those who want a luxury housing project, basset-hound owner Elsie MacBean develops leads that point away from the prime suspect.