Books by Loren D. Estleman

Shoot: the latest in Loren D. Estleman's Valentino mysteries! Valentino, a mild-manner film archivist at UCLA and sometime film detective, is at the closing party for the Red Montana and Dixie Day museum when he is approached by no less than his hero and man-of-the-hour Red Montana, western film and television star. Red tells Valentino that he is being blackmailed over the existence of a blue film that his wife, now known throughout the world as the wholesome Dixie Day and the other half of the Montana/Day power couple, made early in her career. With Dixie on her deathbed, Red is desperate to save her the embarrassment of the promised scandal, and offers Valentino a deal-find the movie, and he can have Red's lost film, Sixgun Sonata, that Red has been hiding away in his archives. Don't accept, and the priceless reel will go up in flames. Feeling blackmailed himself, Valentino agrees and begins to dig. In the surreal world of Hollywood, what is on screen is rarely reality. As he races to uncover the truth before time runs out, his heroes begin their fall from grace. Valentino desperately wants to save Sixgun Sonata...but at what cost?

Murdock's law. While on the trail of a wanted criminal, Special Deputy Page Murdock finds himself appointed marshal in a lawless Montana town that is ready to plunge into a full-scale range war.

The Sundown Speech, a hot new Amos Walker mystery by Loren D. Estleman, the master of the hard-boiled detective novel. Amos Walker is hired by Helen and Dante Gunner, a bohemian Ann Arbor couple, to find Jerry Marcus, a film director who has disappeared with their investment money. It's one of Walker's easiest jobs to date. In just a few short hours, Walker locates Marcus in his bedroom...murdered, his body shoved into a cupboard, a bullet through his head. This case is opened and shut quickly, but Walker can't quite let it go. When Dante is arrested for the murder Walker finds himself again in Helen's employ, this time trying to prove that Dante didn't do it. When Walker interviews Holly Zacharias, a college student who was the last person to see Marcus alive, things get interesting. Because if Marcus is dead, and Dante is his killer, then who is driving by in the Crown Vic, shooting at Walker and Holly? Jerry Marcus just might still be alive, and his plans may be worse than anything Walker can imagine. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Detroit PI Amos Walker steps into a lethal family feud when the beautiful widow of a powerful industrialist hires him to find her late husband's illegitimate children Leland Stutch was building automobiles before Henry Ford ever dreamed up the Model T. He dominated Detroit for most of the 20th century as the auto industry soared and then began its long, slow descent. When Stutch's widow contacts Amos Walker, the private eye expects to meet a doddering old lady. Instead he encounters Rayellen, a 30-something beauty with washboard abs and 1 of the most unusual propositions he's ever heard. Unconcerned with matrimonial vows, the most powerful man in Detroit left mistresses—and love children—all over Michigan. To stave off any future paternity suits, Rayellen hires Walker to locate Stutch's illegitimate offspring and pay them off—a seemingly simple task that draws the detective into a dysfunctional family's war zone and a violent case of kidnapping and murder. Sinister Heights is the 15th book in the Amos Walker Mysteries, but you may enjoy reading the series in any order.

Detroit PI Amos Walker searches for a priceless medieval illuminated manuscript—and for evidence that can put his former partner's killer behind bars Hired by a curator at the Detroit Institute of Arts to serve as his bodyguard during a transaction involving a stolen illuminated manuscript, Amos Walker enters a darkened skin-flick theater where the exchange is supposed to take place. When the deal goes south, he's lucky to leave with his life . . . and a new lead to pursue in collaring the man who murdered his partner 20 years ago. In a case that features a wheelchair-bound pornographer and rare book collector, an ultra-slick art expert, a trophy wife, and a white-collar criminal, Walker faces one of the greatest challenges of his career as a present-day crime draws him back to one of the darkest episodes of his past. The Hours of the Virgin is the 13th book in the Amos Walker Mysteries, but you may enjoy reading the series in any order.

Two books-in-one in the Page Murdock series from award-winning author Loren D. Estleman The High Rocks U.S. Deputy Page Murdock rides into the Bitterroot Mountains of Montana in the dead of winter to bring in Bear Anderson, known as "Mountain That Walks" to the local Native Americans. Murdock, having grown up with Anderson, figures he owes it to the man to try to bring him in alive and give him a chance at a fair trial. But Murdock may have all he can handle in getting himself back down alive. Stamping Ground Deputy U.S. Marshall Page Murdock isn't happy when Judge Blackthorne decides to send him on an assignment to North Dakota, a land of sudden blizzards and spring floods. And to make matters worse he has been handed the nearly impossible job of apprehending the renegade responsible for several massacres in the area. This edition of the book is the deluxe, tall rack mass market paperback. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Locked in a deadly feud, cowboys Randy Locke and Frank Farmer have spent decades attempting to annihilate each other any time they are within shooting distance. So far, the men are even. One of Frank's bullets has given Randy a permanent limp. Vain Frank wears a prosthetic ear, his own lost to Randy's assault. If either of them remembers the original reason for the feud, it seems moot now. Their quest for revenge has led them on a merry chase through the Old West—through soon-to-be ghost towns and major cities; cattle ranches and mountain cabins; brothels and fishing boats; jailhouses and movie sets. Even their marriages have fallen victim to the feud. The story of their long-term hatred well known throughout the country, Frank and Randy are approached (separately, of course) by Abraham Cripplehorn with a proposition. With the popular Buffalo Bill's Wild West show a raging success, why not publicize their next duel and sell tickets to the event? Winner take all, in more ways than one. Frank and Randy make a date for death...but will they be able to wait for the show? And could it be that their decades-long thirst for revenge is the only thing they are living for? Loren D. Estleman's The Long High Noon takes the reader on a thrilling adventure, touring the Old West from the days of the trains and cattle to roads and film sets.

The place: Detroit. The time: World War II. While most of the police department is fighting overseas, the four men of the Racket Squad struggle to keep a lid on a powderkeg stuffed with draft-dodging troublemakers, Black Market gangsters, enemy saboteurs, and a mixed bag of racial and ethnic groups working uneasily side by side in defense plants run by the automobile industry. With blackjacks, brass knuckles, tommy guns, and their bare fists, Lieutenant Max Zagreb, Sergeant Starvo Canal, and detectives McReary and Burke--known collectively as the "Four Horsemen"--battle their way through ten gritty stories in the hardest-boiled town during the twentieth century's hardest-boiled decade.

In You Know Who Killed Me, by multiple award-winning author Loren D. Estleman, Amos Walker is at low ebb. Just released from a rehab clinic, the Detroit private detective has to marshal his energies to help solve a murder in Iroquois Heights, his least favorite town. The area is flooded with billboards rented by the widow of Donald Gates, an ordinary suburbanite found shot to death in his basement on New Year's Eve: "YOU KNOW WHO KILLED ME!" they read, above the number of the sheriff's tip line. Complicating matters is a $10,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the murderer, offered by an anonymous donor through the dead man's place of worship. Initially hired by the sheriff's department to run down anonymous tips, Walker investigates further. The trail leads to former fellow employee Yuri Yako, a Ukrainian mobster, relocated to the area through the U.S. Marshals' Witness Protection Program. Shadowed by government operatives, at odds with the sheriff, and struggling with his addiction, Walker soldiers on, in spite of bodies piling up and the fact that almost everyone involved with the case is lying to him. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

A master practitioner’s view of his craft, this classic survey of the fiction of the American West is part literary history, part criticism, and entertaining throughout. The first edition of The Wister Trace was published in 1987, when Larry McMurtry had just reinvented himself as a writer of Westerns and Cormac McCarthy’s career had not yet taken off. Loren D. Estleman’s long-overdue update connects these new masters with older writers, assesses the genre’s past, present, and future, and takes account of the renaissance of western movies, as well. Estleman’s title indicates the importance he assigns Owen Wister’s 1902 classic, The Virginian. Wister was not the first writer of Westerns, but he defined the genre, contrasting chivalry with the lawlessness of the border and introducing such lines as “When you call me that, smile!” Estleman tips his hat to Wister’s predecessors, among them Ned Buntline, the inventor of the dime novel, and Buffalo Bill. His assessments of Wister’s successors—Zane Grey, Walter Van Tilburg Clark, and Louis L’Amour, to name but three—soon make clear the impossibility of differentiating great western writing from great American writing. Especially important in this new edition is the attention to women writers. The author devotes a chapter each to Dorothy Johnson—author of “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance”—and Annie Proulx, whose Wyoming stories include “Brokeback Mountain.” In his discussion of movies, Estleman includes a list of film adaptations that will guide readers to movies, and moviegoers to books. An appendix draws readers’ attention to authors not covered elsewhere in the volume—some of them old masters like Bret Harte and Jack London, but many of them fascinating outliers ranging from Clifford Irving to Joe R. Lansdale.

Summoned out of his quiet retirement by Wyatt Earp, former Pinkerton Charlie Siringo of prohibition-era Los Angeles becomes entangled in a conspiracy involving a powerful corrupt politician.

Private investigator Amos Walker finds himself caught between the mafia and the porn industry when he is hired by a businessman, whose wife has disappeared leaving only a note saying "don't look for me".

From award-winning author Loren D. Estleman, a spellbinding collection of Sherlock Holmes stories, authorized by the Estate of Arthur Conan Doyle—an essential follow-up to The Perils of Sherlock Holmes, praised as “an excellent collection of short stories and essays” by The New York Review of Books. "One of the best of the wish-it-were-so pastiche anthologies..." —Booklist Award-winning author Loren D. Estleman has curated a collection of Sherlock Holmes stories from some of the finest authors in Sons of Moriarty and More Stories of Sherlock Holmes. This is the first time that these stories appear together in one anthology, including "Sons of Moriarty," a Sherlock Holmes novella, appearing here for the first time.

DIVDIVA collection of stories featuring a UCLA film archivist who searches for lost footage—and finds trouble instead/divDIV Though he shares his name with the most famous heartthrob of the silent era, Valentino is not part of film history. Rather, he is a scholar of it, working at UCLA to help find and preserve rare films. But not all movies are lost because of careless storage. Some were hidden deliberately, and there are those who will kill to ensure they stay that way. In these short stories, Valentino’s searches for missing motion pictures become dangerous investigations, and he is forced to decide what’s more important—preserving film history, or preserving his own neck./divDIV Comprised of timeless short stories that have appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Loren D. Estleman’s Valentino: Film Detective shows why Estleman is considered a master not just of film history, but of the enduring art of murder, which golden-age Hollywood did so much to perfect. /divDIV/div/div

Multiple award-winner Loren D. Estleman has produced a major biographical novel on the infamous Mobster known as Scarface, rigorously researched and deftly nuanced to offer an intimate portrait of the gangster whose terrible crimes and larger-than-life persona have both fascinated and appalled the world for nearly a century; whose legacy is still widely debated; and whose brutally ambitious career in the Mafia continues to inspire filmmakers and writers to plumb its excesses and its contradictions. In 1944, after Al Capone has been released from prison, J. Edgar Hoover assigns an FBI junior agent to insinuate himself into Capone's life and gain his trust so that Hoover can nail as many of Capone's Mob confederates as possible. Capone, suffering from the neurological effects of syphilis, is alternately lucid, full of the passion and energy that fueled his rise to the pinnacle of American crime...and rambling or ranting, the broken shell of a man released from prison so he could die at home with his family. With the superb narrative gifts honed in dozens of novels, Estleman has captured the essence of this American icon as never before. With subtly nuanced portrayals of those in Capone's circle—his underrated wife Mae Capone, members of the Chicago Outfit including the deadly Frank Nitti—as well as his nemesis, J. Edgar Hoover, Hoover's secretary Helen Gandy and others, The Confessions of Al Capone is a major literary achievement. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Bela Lugosi's Frankenstein screen test puts Valentino in the picture for murder Everyone knows the Frankenstein monster was played by Boris Karloff. His portrayal is so famous that the play Arsenic and Old Lace was filled with Karloff/monster jokes—even when the part of the monstrously deformed villain was played by another actor. But before Karloff's memorable portrayal, another famous 1930s Hollywood icon, Bela Lugosi, tested for the part of the monster. The screen test footage was lost for decades, until Valentino, that never-say-die film archivist, gets a hot tip about the whereabouts of the incriminating (for really bad, heavily accented acting) footage. But it comes with a price far greater than the money he'll have to pay. Someone would kill to get that reel of film, and that makes Valentino a mortal obstacle who would rather not die for art. People have already been murdered for the film, and Val doesn't want to push his luck...but boy, that reel is too good to let go.... Enter a crew of steampunk fans. Loving the arcane strangeness that is Valentino's life—not to mention the completely glam prospect of seeing the original filmic Count Dracula as the Frankenstein monster—they will find a way to save Valentino and Lugosi's infamous screen test. Or if they can't do that, have a great party anyway. Val just hopes it's not a wake.... In Alive!, Loren D. Estleman delivers a mystery that only he can. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

In his exciting twentieth mystery, hardboiled detective Amos Walker is hired to help free a mobster who once tried to kill Barry Stackpole, Walker's only true friend.

"An excellent collection of short stories and essays." --New York Review of Books "An entertaining and diverting read." --BookPleasures.com "Estleman's style as Watson is better than many." --BestofSherlock.com "Readers are transported back to another place and time during the series of short stories that pay homage to the legend that is Sherlock Holmes." --Pop Culture Guy "The Hound of the Baskervilles." "A Scandal in Bohemia." "The Sign of the Four." These are just a few of the well-known mysteries solved by the one and only Sherlock Holmes. The legendary detective is one of the most enduring literary characters of all time, and he appears once more in The Perils of Sherlock Holmes. Each of these adventurous tales has been authorized by the estate of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. While you may recognize some of these stories, others--such as "The Serpent's Egg"--are revealed for the very first time. Other works in this collection include three previously published essays that delve deeper into the daring world of Sherlock Holmes and the imaginative mind of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

In Burning Midnight, master of the hard-boiled detective novel Loren D. Estleman gives readers a hot new Amos Walker mystery. Amos Walker knows Detroit, from the highest to the lowest, and that includes the gangs of Mexicantown. When a friend asks Walker to get his son's brother-in-law out of one of two feuding gangs, Walker gets in trouble fast. First, dead bodies start to pile up; then come suspicious fires and the bottle bombs. Walker is caught in the middle of a gang war. Whether or not a middle-aged gringo like him can cool things off between the Maldados and the Zapatistas, he's got to try; he did promise his friend. Once he gets involved, he realizes there's something else going on; the specter of an international conspiracy threatens to make this local trouble blow sky-high. And if he ends up dead or in jail for murders he didn't commit, he might have to put that promise on hold. It's tough being Amos Walker. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

DIVIn the tense summer before Detroit’s 1967 race riots, a former cop faces off against some of the city’s most dangerous forces/div DIVRage simmers beneath the tranquil surface of 1960s Detroit. As the auto industry enjoys its last moments of prosperity, widespread discrimination infuriates the city’s black middle class. One of the most destructive riots of the twentieth century is around the corner, and Rick Amery is going to be right in the middle./divDIV /divDIVA longtime cop forced out of the department on trumped-up graft charges, Amery shares Detroit’s obsession with muscle cars. It was the temptation of a white ’64 Thunderbird that cost him his badge, and it is for the sake of General Motors that he takes his first job as a private investigator, digging up dirt on a consumer advocate who calls GM cars death traps. Amery must work quickly, for no hot rod on Earth is fast enough to outrun the trouble that’s gaining on the Motor City./divDIV /divDIVThis ebook features an illustrated biography of Loren D. Estleman including rare photos from the author’s personal collection./div

DIVFresh out of jail, an ex-ballplayer stumbles into the world of bounty hunting and murder in urban Detroit/div DIVEven prison couldn’t stop former big-league pitcher Doc Miller from playing baseball. Jailed after a teenage girl overdosed on cocaine at one of his house parties, the former Detroit Tigers ace became a star at the Michigan State Prison, bringing home the institution’s first Midwestern Penal System championship. Now out on parole, his days of ballpark heroics are over for good./divDIV /divDIVMiller’s brother gets him a job selling tractor parts for John Deere, work Doc finds even duller than life in the joint. While moonlighting as a cab driver, he meets a bail bondsman who offers work as a bounty hunter. On their first job together, they find their target savagely murdered. His name was Ambrose X. Dryce, formerly Wilson McCoy, a Black Panther turned drug lord. Sucked back into the criminal underworld, Doc will need to make his best plays to stay alive without violating his parole./divDIV /divDIVThis ebook features an illustrated biography of Loren D. Estleman including rare photos from the author’s personal collection./div

Edgar Award Finalist: In the throes of Prohibition-era Detroit, one reporter follows the gripping and violent life of a man who helped keep the booze flowing. Like nowhere else in America, Detroit flourished during Prohibition. The constant flow of liquor from across the Canadian border made Lake Erie a war zone, and lined the pockets of the men who ran the Purple Gang, the Unione Siciliana, and the Little Jewish Navy. As the mob bosses got rich, they mingled with the upper crust like never before. But Prohibition was more than just a boon for gangsters. For newspapermen, it was a dream come true. It’s 1928, and the Detroit Times’ Connie Minor knows every thug, moll, and triggerman south of Eight Mile. He’s drinking rotgut whiskey in a speakeasy on Vernor when he meets Jack Dance for the first time, and watches as the preening young hothead joins Joey Machine’s mob. Over the next few years, the two mobsters will fight a battle for the soul of Detroit’s underground, and Connie Minor will be there to cover every shot. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Loren D. Estleman including rare photos from the author’s personal collection.

DIVHired to promote the new American dream car, a former reporter finds himself mired in a deadly conspiracy against a union boss and Ford Motors itself/div DIVIt’s only been two decades since Connie Minor was on top, but it feels like centuries. Once a journalist, Minor spent Prohibition with his finger on gangland’s pulse, a confidant of every rumrunner, boss, and triggerman in Detroit. But as the gangsters fell, Minor went with them, replaced by a generation of reporters more interested in the Nazi Party than the inner workings of the Purple Gang./divDIV /divDIVNow it’s the 1950s, and after years writing mindless ad copy, Minor fears that his brain may be permanently atrophied—that is, until an exciting new job drops on his desk. Minor is hired to sell Ford’s most original creation, the Edsel, meant to take America by storm. But the job quickly reintroduces him to some ugly old Detroit faces. When he uncovers a conspiracy against both a union leader and the new car, his reporter’s instincts kick in. It’s been years since Minor gabbed with mobsters, but it’s never too late for an old newspaperman to get whacked./divDIV /divDIVThis ebook features an illustrated biography of Loren D. Estleman including rare photos from the author’s personal collection./div

A “tour de force” novel of crime and corruption in the early days of Detroit’s auto industry (Kirkus Reviews). At the turn of the twentieth century, Detroit is still decades away from becoming the “Motor City.” The budding manufacturing town is little more than a confederation of tightly knit ethnic enclaves, ruled over by men like Abner Crownover III, horse-coach baron, and James Dolan, a portly politician who runs the city government from behind the scenes. They had thought their grip on this young city was secure, but internal combustion is about to destroy their empire. An industrial wizard named Henry Ford has come to Detroit with a dream of making a fortune from horseless carriages. Twice bankrupted, he has lost the faith of every investor in town, save for Crownover’s son Harlan. When Dolan and his father refuse to finance Harlan’s new business venture, Harlan turns to the Mafia for the money. In the battle for its future, Detroit’s streets will run with blood. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Loren D. Estleman including rare photos from the author’s personal collection.

DIVMasquerading as a soldier, a serial killer savages wartime Detroit; it’s up to one detective and his ragtag team to stop him/div DIVAs the United States enters World War II, Detroit converts its factories to an “arsenal of democracy,” fueling the American war machine. The city’s sons leave to join the fight, but one man does not follow. Declared too unstable for combat, he steals an Air Force corporal’s uniform. Using the uniform to inspire trust, he talks ration stamp-hoarders into letting him into their homes, where he slits their throats with a bayonet. The newspapers call him Kilroy./divDIV /divDIVOn his tail is police Lieutenant Maximilian Zagreb, whose task it is to keep order in a city whose police department has been stripped of everyone but pensioners and army-rejects. Chasing Kilroy will force him far outside the bounds of legal police procedure, but Zag doesn’t mind cracking skulls to get results. In wartime, a little bloodshed is inevitable./divDIV /divDIVThis ebook features an illustrated biography of Loren D. Estleman including rare photos from the author’s personal collection./div

Much like author Loren D. Estleman, private detective Amos Walker has long been reluctant to embrace technology; it was not until recently that Walker got his first cell phone. Now, in Infernal Angels, Walker is hired to do a twenty-first–century job—recovering stolen HDTV converter boxes. Before long, the case turns old-school: All the suspects and the man who lost the boxes are murdered, and Walker ends up working with both the local police and the feds of Detroit. The converter boxes were being used to smuggle high-grade heroin that's been killing off junkies left and right, and it's up to Walker to track down the missing dope and the person behind the trail of dead bodies. Old friends and even older enemies will resurface before this story is done, and Walker will have to take a few beatings if he wants to bring the drug smugglers to justice. This old dog still has a few new tricks, and there hasn't been a case yet that Walker couldn't crack. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

This anthology collects all thirty-two previously published Amos Walker stories, a previously unpublished story written for the collection, and an introduction by Mr. Estleman.

In this installment of Loren Estleman's signature PI series, Amos Walker, the quintessential hard-boiled detective, proves that he's mortal after all. Jeff Starzek, an old friend who smuggles cigarettes for a living, saves Walker's life, getting him to the hospital after he's taken a bullet in the leg. A month later, still convalescing, Walker gets a panicked phone call from Starzek's sister. Jeff is missing. One of the few leads is a Homeland Security agent who's after Starzek, in connection with a counterfeiting operation that may have terrorist ties. Though Walker doubts Starzek is a terrorist, he finds treasury paper at a church run by Starzek's brother. Then Starzek's brother disappears too. Back to square one, Walker follows his best hunch, driving Starzek's usual cigarette route along the Lake Huron shore, and finally gets a solid lead on the paper hangers. But before Walker can break the case, someone tries to shoot him—and he's accused of murder. Walker will need all of his intestinal fortitude, injured leg notwithstanding, to stay alive long enough to figure out who's doing what to whom, in time to save his friend, in Nicotine Kiss.

Five-time Spur Award-winning author Estleman delivers a fascinating depictionof the life of Isaac Parker, the West's legendary Hanging Judge.