Showing results by publisher "Phoenix Books" in Private Investigators

Marlowe is back...and he's married to a rich, beautiful society lady who wants him to settle down in the posh desert community of Poodle Springs. Marlowe may have married rich, but old habits die hard: he's hired to recover a gambling debt and soon finds himself in a case involving bigamy, pornography and murder. The first four chapters of this final Marlowe mystery were written by noir master Raymond Chandler at the end of his life. Robert B. Parker was chosen by Chandler's estate to complete his last work.

Spenser is investigating the Port City Theater Company, where the director claims he's being stalked. When an actor is shot dead during a performance, all clues lead to the local Chinese Mafia, whose roots run deep in this drab waterfront city. With Hawk and ex mobster Vinnie assisting, Spenser eventually triumphs in one of his most compelling adventures.

The Sternwood family, immortalized in Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep, is in trouble again. Lovely Vivian's psychotic sister, Carmen, has disappeared from the sanitarium, and Vivian herself has once again fallen into the clutches of the shady underworld character Eddie Mars. Enter Philip Marlowe, the original tough-but-tender private eye. He saved the Sternwoods once before. The question is: Can he do it again?

Spenser is forced by loyalty into an alien world where violence is a way of lie and outsiders enter at a lethal risk. When Spenser's cohort Hawk is hired by the tenants of a gang-plagued Boston housing project known as "Double Deuce," he enlists his friend's aid. A friend's girl and her infant daughter have been gunned down. Though the act at first appears to be an accidental drive-by shooting, it soon becomes clear that it was premeditated murder.

Hired by an aggrieved Boston aristocrat who believes his wife's brutal slaying to be something other than random violence, Spenser immediately senses that his client's picture-perfect portrayal of his family life is false. For starters, the victim's reputation is too saintly, her house is as lived-in as stage set, and her troubled children don't appear to be products of a happy home.

Brad Sterling - former Harvard football player, ne¿er-do-well, and Susan Silverman's long out-of touch ex-husband, is by all appearances a successful businessman. But when, in the course of running a vast fundraiser called Galapalooza, he is charged with sexual harassment, he turns to Susan for help.

When the bride of a Boston police detective vanishes, he hires Spenser to find her. His path leads from a New England college campus to glamorous L.A. sports clubs. When the trail turns to a world of prostitution, drug abuse, and self-destruction, Spenser must enter ghetto tenements to continue his search. Ultimately, Spenser must hire a Chicago hitman to help him free the girl from a sociopathic ex lover.

There is no detective in fiction as shrewd as Sherlock Holmes. An accomplished violinist, adept at a dozen obscure sciences, and possessed of an acerbic wit, Holmes's adventures with Dr. Watson have delighted readers for more than a century. This collection features some of the most celebrated stories in the Sherlock Holmes canon: "A Scandal in Bohemia", "The Red-Headed League", "The Man with the Twisted Lip", "The Adventure of the Crooked Man”, "The Adventure of the Cardboard Box", "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches", and "The Adventure of the Six Napoleons”.

Boston hoodlum Julius Ventura wants to find his daughter's missing husband. At least that's how he puts it to Spenser and Hawk, even though it's clear that Julius isn't telling the whole truth—or maybe not any part of the truth. Something about the case appeals to Spenser's passion for justice, though, and he launches an odyssey that leads him and Hawk into the netherworld of organized crime.

When Athena disappeared from St. Polycarp's College at Oxford, her friends assumed she had run away - to hide from her overbearing, wealthy Greek family, or even to marry some unacceptable young man. To their shock, they find out at their 10-year reunion that her body has been discovered in an excavation. Private investigator Regan Reilly, Athena's former college roommate, is determined to track down her friend's killer.

A young man resurfaces from Spenser's past to seek out the likeable P.I.'s guidance and help to solve the mysterious and sudden disappearance of the boy's mother. The most personal and revealing Spenser thriller of all, the hardboiled yet caring detective faces danger and a reckoning with his own past. Pastime is Robert B. Parker's electrifying masterpiece of crime fiction, both personal and revealing.

The Paradise Men's Softball League has wrapped up another game, and Chief of Police Jesse Stone is lingering in the parking lot with his teammates, drinking beer, swapping stories of double plays and beautiful women in the late-summer twilight. But then someone makes a horrifying discovery at a nearby lake: At the water's edge, facedown, is something that used to be a girl.

Regan Reilly, is a young PI who has come from L.A. to ski and celebrate with her parents and their rich Aspen friends. It ends up being a busman's holiday for Regan, who gets swept up in art theft intrigue after some multimillion-dollar paintings are stolen from her parent's friends. The thieves continue to elude capture, but Regan is on their trail. She's up agaist time, though, as the clock ticks down to Aspen's biggest party of the season—at which the town's most valuable painting of all will be unveiled.

They all loved her. That was their mistake. Two husbands, her college fiancé, an influential boss—every man who gets close to Jordan Price is made to pay in blood. And the list is growing. The more investigator Rick Carson delves into the string of deaths from which Jordan has profited handsomely, the more convinced he becomes that he is dealing with an unstoppable killer.

Boston P.I. Sunny Randall goes on the road to protect a best-selling author - and uncovers a world of dark secrets - in the new novel by the grand master. Sunny Randall, the beautiful blond P.I. with a yen for dogs, painting, and her ex-husband, Richie, has won over even the most hard-core of Robert B. Parker's many fans.

Three years ago, Lew Fonseca quit his job as a process server with the State's Attorney's office in Cook County, Illinois, and headed for Key West. Sidetracked by fate when his car broke down in Sarasota, Florida, he decided to stick around, making ends meet by doing some investigative work for local attorneys. Asked to locate the missing wife of a well-known local entrepreneur, Lew learns that finding Melanie Sebastian is anything but simple.

After a holiday trip to the Big Apple, Midnight Louie, a hard-boiled, hairy-chested, 19-pound black tomcat detective, returns home to death on the Nile. Two battling Egyptian barges outside the Oasis hotel cause a dead body to rise to the surface. The soggy victim is well known to Temple Barr—Louie's redheaded, high-heeled human companion—and her two best beaux both have reasons to want him dead.

Jake Sands has had a truly action-packed life as a recoverer of stolen objects and people. His work has made him a very rich man, but he paid a steep price: the murder of his wife and child. Jake now spends his days working out and his nights haunted by memories.