Bill Pronzini

A series of seemingly random murders have been happening along a fifty mile stretch of the rugged northern California coast, committed by an unknown dubbed the "Coastline Killer." A young couple with marital problems, Shelby and Jay Macklin, decide to spend the week between Christmas and New Year's at a friend's remote coastal cottage. Two couples in a neighboring home, whose relationships are thick with festering menace, and a fierce winter storm...

We're told that there are seven deadly sins; not on the list is the deadliest of them all: Betrayal. For each of the detectives at the agency, a betrayal-personal, against a child, against the elderly-becomes not only the driving force behind an investigation, but the source of the kind of resolve that cannot be derailed by threats of any kind. Tamara's case began as something personal but explodes as her investigation of her former lover Lucas Zeller...

Nameless may not like David Virden, but the case is simple enough: find his ex-wife - and they know where she is. Deliver some papers to her and it's all done. But she refuses the papers, sends a message to Virden never to contact her again, and slams the door. Virden threatens to sue, stops payment on his checks, and claims the woman they located isn't his wife. Then he disappears, and his fiancée hires Nameless to find out why. Clearly, someone...

The police said it was an accident, the dead woman's sister said it was murder... and that she knew who did it. Nameless isn't certain, but the more he learns about Nancy Mathias's life, the more inclined he is to accept the likelihood of murder-especially as the players still alive become more and more distasteful. Combine that with the situation Jake Runyon, one of the agency's partners, is facing as he searches for a young man who is either a murderer...

On his third day in Death Valley, Rick Fallon comes upon a deserted Toyota Camry, and soon thereafter, the almost-dead body of Casey Dunbar. Having rescued her, Fallon soon learns what had driven her to give up on life--and, his own life on hold, he resolves to unravel the twisted and dangerous strands of hers, a quest that leads him to the glitter-dome of Las Vegas.

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...

Old Man Hass is concerned by the near-catatonic behavior of his daughter, Grady. The young woman showed up at his doorstep a few days earlier, refused to admit that anything was wrong, and has been wandering around the farm, not talking and barely eating. The Nameless Detective thinks the old farmer would have been better off calling a psychiatrist-but he's at least willing to ask a few questions. As Nameless begins to investigate, he discovers that...

The Nameless Detective has taken many cases over the years, and this is one for the books. Or rather, two cases that will test his agency's resources. Love is in the air... more to the point, love gone awry. One case involves a woman whose husband died accidentally in a remote cabin in the Sierras. The wife isn't buying that her husband was alone, and is determined to find out his secret and get closure, in spite of any potential heartbreak. The other...

"Nameless" had seen enough death in his years; spending his time watching someone drive to several funerals a day, funerals for people he didn't know, was more than he could take. And, he had a non-professional problem of his own: his relationship with his wife, Kerry, had hit a wall and nothing he did got him over it and to the other side. There was one possibility, one thing he'd done (or not done), but knowing that didn't seem to help... Also...

Give-a-Damn Jones arrives in a small Montana town rife with tensions related to a convict's efforts to prove his innocence, a cattleman's demand for respect, a snooping editor, and a feud between a dentist and a blacksmith.