Loren D. Estleman

A New York Times Notable Book: A cop is shot and a Detroit PI is determined to find the culprit in this mystery by a multiple Shamus Award winner.
 A routine case puts Amos Walker on the highway to Ann Arbor, but the trip turns deadly just a few miles outside of Detroit. Tailing a trucker suspected of faking hijackings, Walker does his best to keep a safe distance, but is recognized anyway. The trucker runs him off the road, and...

Hardboiled noir starring Detroit PI Amos Walker: "For readers who can't get enough of Elmore Leonard and Ross Thomas, try Estleman. He's that good" (People).
After a tour in Vietnam and several years working the streets of Detroit as a private investigator, Amos Walker has seen a lot. But he's never encountered anything quite like his newest assignment. Ann Maringer, an aging stripper hard at work at one of the city's many...

A PI scours Detroit for a newscaster’s missing son: “[Estleman] remains among the top echelon of American private-eye specialists” (The New York Times).
 On screen, Sandy Broderick is everything a newscaster is supposed to be. He has a deep voice, a ten-thousand-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:...

First a rich young wife is missing, then bodies start showing up. Amos Walker's up to his neck in dames, drugs ... and murder, again Amos Walker doesn't mean to walk into trouble. But sometimes it finds him, regardless.

"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...

"Film detective Valentino is summoned to the estate of Ignacio Bozel to collect a prized donation to the university's movie library: Bleak Street, a film from the classic noir period, thought lost for more than sixty years. Bleak Street was never released. Its star, Van Oliver, a gifted and charismatic actor with alleged ties to the mob, disappeared while the project was in post-production, presumably murdered by gangland rivals: another one of Hollywood's...

Amos Walker is hired by Francis X. Lawes, a private-sector mover and shaker in Detroit politics, to prove that his wife, Paula, who disappeared under sinister circumstances more than six years ago, is dead. Francis wants to remarry without having to wait for the seven-year declaration-of-death rule to kick in. Walker's investigation is complicated by two facts: the police still consider Lawes the prime suspect, and the first-responding officer in...

"Valentino, a mild-mannered 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...

"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...

Detroit private investigator Amos Walker is hired to recover HDTV converter boxes stolen from a retailer whose shop also does vintage resale business. Before long, the case turns old school: both a suspect and the man who lost the boxes are murdered, and Walker ends up working with both the local police and the feds.