Showing results by author "Loren Estleman" in All Categories

The winner of five Spurs, two Stirrups, and three Western Heritage Awards for his work, best-selling author Loren D. Estleman is among the greatest chroniclers of the American West. The eighth novel in Estleman’s popular and acclaimed Page Murdock series, this action-packed tale finds Murdock and his trusted five-shot Deane Adams revolver enforcing order in a world of chaos.

For years, Donna ignored the guns in her husband's safe, his long hours, and all the cash he couldn't possibly have made as an "efficiency expert." But finally she was forced to admit that Peter Macklin is a killer for hire. Donna wants a divorce, and she wants to take her husband for all he's worth. But she won't get a penny if he's dead.

Each member of the five-man posse brought a special talent to the expedition, but not one of them was prepared for what greeted them at the top of a grassy slope in an aspen clearing one summer afternoon.

The Reverend Thomas Aquinas Sunsmith is halfway through his sermon when killers open fire. He is preaching against the evils of gambling, which a cartel of mobsters is trying to legalize in Detroit. The hail of gunfire misses the reverend, but a choir member is cut down—the first victim in the battle for the soul of the Motor City. The Detroit mob has erupted into civil war, and professional killer Peter Macklin is caught in the middle. A former mob employee, he has since tried to stay away from the savagery of organized crime, but now they're offering him a job too tempting to refuse.

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.

Barry Stackpole was tough once. Amos Walker met him in a Cambodian shell crater when Walker was serving his country and Stackpole was on the payroll of the Detroit News, and they formed the kind of bond that war often creates. At war’s end, they returned to the Motor City, where Stackpole took to reporting crimes and Walker to solving them. A violent run-in with a big time mobster left Stackpole a leg and two fingers short, and he became an alcoholic. He has made several attempts to get his life straight since, but never quite managed.

America's richest legends come from the frontier - from the land where the events of a single moment might erase the lines between law and lawlessness, between safety and mortal danger, between heroes and villains. The carefully selected stories in this collection are vibrant proof that the great American West is a fertile ground to storytellers. Here is the most varied collection of short stories by 17 highly acclaimed Western writers.

Amos Walker has made a lot of friends - and a few enemies - in his years as a detective in Detroit, but he has never had to deal with quite the trouble he finds when he agrees to grant the deathbed wish of Beryl Garnet. Beryl was a madam with a long, successful career. She's got no regrets about that, but she does about her son. She hasn't seen him in a long time and would like him to know his mother never forgot him. So she asks Walker to make sure that her son gets her ashes when she's gone.

Los Angeles, 1921: Ex-Pinkerton agent Charlie Siringo is living in quiet retirement when Wyatt Earp knocks on his door and asks him to track down Earp’s missing horse. What begins as horse thievery turns into a deeper mystery as Siringo and another ex-Pinkerton, the young Dashiell Hammett, follow clues that take them from the streets of Los Angeles to Jack London’s farm. There they discover a conspiracy masterminded by the notorious and powerful Joseph P. Kennedy.

Spring has come to Detroit's Sugartown enclave, and Amos Walker would like to feel kindly toward the human race. Unfortunately, his first case of the new season immediately leads him into trouble among the Polish settlers of neighboring Hamtramck, when old Martha Evancek hires him to look for her missing grandson. But even before Walker gets a chance to investigate, he's presented with a second case: an eminent Russian novelist who fears that someone is out to kill him.

On screen, Sandy Broderick is everything a newscaster is supposed to be. He has a deep voice, a 10,000-watt smile, and the God-given ability to banter with weathermen until his ears fall off. But when the cameras turn off, he has a private problem: His 20-year old son, Bud, has disappeared. Amos Walker is going to find him. The boy and his junkie girlfriend are both gone, and Broderick is terrified - not for his son, but for his career. The station is about to do an exposé on drugs in Detroit, and the newscaster doesn’t want his boy’s addict girlfriend to get in the way of his Pulitzer.

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!"

Enter Valentino, a mild-mannered UCLA film archivist, who buys a decrepit movie palace and uncovers a skeleton in the secret Prohibition basement. He then makes a second discovery: long-lost, priceless, reels of film: Erich von Stroheim's infamous Greed. The LAPD wants to take the reels as evidence, jeopardizing the precious old film.

Eugene Morner liked the feel of the Colt .45 against his thigh. But it was probably boredom that made him put a bullet into a man named Curly one starless night. He felt a slow euphoria creep over him as he watched the man whimper into slow death.

Amos Walker doesn't mean to walk into trouble. But sometimes it finds him, regardless. The missing woman has left a handwritten note that said, "Don't look for me." Any P.I. would take that as a challenge, especially when he found out that she'd left the same message once before, when having an illicit affair. But this time it's different. The trail leads Walker to an herbal remedies store, where the beautiful young clerk knows nothing about the dead body in the basement…or about any illegal activity that might be connected to the corpse.

What could be more innocent than watching old movies? For Neil Catalin, a wealthy man with a happy home, old-fashioned pictures were a hobby that became an obsession. But he wasn’t watching The Wizard of Oz. Crime movies were his passion, the sort where life is cheap and death is free, and Catalin sank himself into them as an escape from the stresses of suburbia. Now he has disappeared, and his wife believes the clue may be in his collection of gruesome classics.

Loren D. Estleman, one of America’s most critically acclaimed authors, is a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award nominee who has won three Shamuses, four Golden Spurs, and three Western Heritage Awards. One of Estleman’s most unique works, Billy Gashade follows the adventures of a 16-year-old vagabond who wanders the Old West, crossing paths with such legends as “Billy the Kid,” Jesse James, Chief Crazy Horse, and “Wild Bill” Hickok.

Feast on this delectable collection of "whodunits" from some of the mystery world's most diabolical chefs.

At a gala party held in memory of screen legend Greta Garbo, Hollywood film detective Valentino is having fun until the host, a hotshot developer named Rankin, tells Valentino about a certain letter from Garbo to his late wife. She and Garbo had been…close. Such a letter is of great interest to a film archivist like Valentino, but the plot thickens when Rankin tells Val that his assistant, Akers, is using this letter to blackmail him.

This suspenseful courtroom drama is based on the actual historical trial of Jack McCall, who shot James Butler Hickok from that most dishonorable position - behind.