Hardcase

by Bill Pronzini

Overview

A happy newlywed at last, the "Nameless Detective" returns from his honeymoon with the idea that he'll finally take it easy. And when the young, beautiful, and wealthy Melanie Ann Aldrich walks into his office, everything seems perfect. After rummaging through some old papers belonging to her dead parents, she's discovered that she's adopted. Now she wants to know who her real parents are and why no one ever told her the truth. Nameless could do this in his sleep, this case is so easy.

But is it? Nameless delves easily enough into the past but no one there is talking... at first. As he starts to sort out the truth behind Melanie's mysterious history, he wonders how much his client will really want to know. Her real mother was an emotionally disturbed young woman, now deceased. Her real father was a teenage delinquent named Stephen Chehalis, who was chased out of town by his own father shortly after Melanie was born. But that's only the beginning.

Now Melanie wants to meet her father and asks Nameless to arrange it. Easy enough, but after the arrangement is made, Nameless uncovers some disturbing information about the man--information Chehalis would kill to keep secret. Suddenly a routine case turns into a hardcase, and Nameless must risk his own life to protect a daughter from a vicious father with a deadly secret.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940151650465
Publisher:	Speaking Volumes
Publication date:	05/25/2015
Series:	Nameless Detective Mystery Series , #22
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Bill Pronzini is simply one of the masters. He seems to have taken a crack at just about every genre: mysteries, noirish thrillers, historicals, locked-room mysteries, adventure novels, spy capers, men's action, westerns, and, of course, his masterful, long-running Nameless private detective series, now entering its fourth decade, with no signs of creative flagging.

He's also ghosted several Brett Halliday short stories as Michael Shayne for Mike Shayne's Mystery Magazine, and has managed to collaborate with such fellow writers as John Lutz, Barry Wahlberg, Collin Wilcox and Marcia Muller.

Still, if he never ventured into fiction writing, his non-fiction work, as both writer and editor, would still earn him a place in the P.I. genre's Hall of Fame. Besides his two tributes to some of the very worst in crime fiction (what he calls "alternative classics"), Gun in Cheek and Son of Gun in Cheek, and one on western fiction (entitled Six Gun in Cheek, naturally), he's the co-author (with Marcia Muller) of 1001 Midnights.

The Mystery Writers of America have nominated him for Edgar Awards several times and his work has been translated into numerous languages and he's published in almost thirty countries. He was the very first president of the Private Eye Writers of America, and he's received three Shamus Awards from them, as well as its Lifetime Achievement Award in 1987. His passion for the old crime pulps is largely responsible for keeping them in the public's eye. He's amassed a huge collection of books and magazines and has always been an omnivorous reader; all of which made him a natural when it came to editing various anthologies. He admits "it was a pleasure tracking down good stories to fit a particular anthology theme." But after editing 80 or so of them over a period of twenty-some years, he decided it was "more than enough."

"Pronzini makes people and events so real that you're living those explosive days of terror."
—Robert Ludlum

"Once in a crocodile's age you come across a writer whose work you instinctively like... I've found one—Bill Pronzini. Buy him, read him, and relax."
—Los Angeles Times

"A skilled writer working at the top of his ability."
—Denver Post

"Pronzini delivers breathtaking suspense"
—San Francisco Examiner