Frank Carlson Library

A bank robber in Florida commandeers a car belonging to a woman U.S. marshall, climbs with her into the trunk, while an accomplice drives. So begins a novel about two people who really wish the ride had gone forever. As it is, she escapes to lead a manhunt for him.

""Loren Estleman is my hero."--Harlan Coben. Desperate Detroit and Stories of Other Dire Places represents forty years of suspense writing in the short form. Previously published in a host of magazines and anthologies, with a new Preface and introductions to the stories written especially for this collection, these eighteen tales feature gangsters, private eyes, psychotic killers, hitmen, feuding families, prostitutes, prizefighters, bodyguards, corrupt...

It's 1963 and Detroit is on top of the world. The city's leaders are among the most visionary in America: Henry Ford II; labor leader Walter Reuther; Motown founder Berry Gordy; the Reverend C.L. Franklin and his daughter, Aretha; Governor George Romney; super car salesman Lee Iacocca; Martin Luther King. It was a time full of promise. But in Once in a Great City, David Maraniss shows that the shadows of collapse were evident even then.

On his first night with Detroit PD, Officer Walter O'Brien is called to a murder scene. A terrified twenty-year-old has bludgeoned her kidnapper with skill that shocks even O'Brien's veteran partner. The young woman is also a brilliant escape artist. Her bold flight from police custody makes the case impossible to solve, and, for Walter, even more impossible to forget. By the time Walter's promoted to detective, his fascination with the missing, gray-eyed...

Pagan Babies is classic crime fiction from the master of suspense, New York Times bestselling author Elmore Leonard. Father Terry Dunn thought he'd seen everything on the mean streets of Detroit, but that was before he went on a little retreat to Rwanda to evade a tax-fraud indictment. Now the whiskey-drinking, Nine Inch Nails T-shirt-wearing padre is back trying to hustle up a score to help the little orphans of Rwanda. But the fund-raising gets...

"Peri Reed's job eats her mind, but for a special task agent in hiding, forgetting the past can be a blessing. Betrayed by the man she thought she loved and the agency who turned her into the very thing she fought against, Peri abandoned the wealth and privilege of Opti for anonymity riddled with memory gaps and self-doubt. But when a highly addictive drug promises to end her dependency on those who'd use her as a tool for their own success, she must...

Mildred Peacock is fed up with poverty-and with the jealous rampages of her husband, Crook. When Crook runs over her foot with his '59 Mercury, she finally kicks him out to raise her five kids on her own. Resourceful and sly, sassy and sexy, she's willing to do just about anything to pay the bills. But she loses job after job, and one man after another, until alcohol and pills are her only comfort. But as long as her children need her, she has no...

The odd thing about Walter Schoen, German born but now running a butcher shop in Detroit, he's a dead ringer for Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS and the Gestapo. They even share the same birthday. Honey Deal, Walter's American wife, doesn't know that Walter is a member of a spy ring that sends U.S. war production data to Germany and gives shelter to escaped German prisoners of war. But she's tired of telling him jokes he doesn't understand-it's...

A gripping new novel in the three-time Shamus Award-winning Amos Walker series. The New York Times calls Amos Walker a "streetwise indestructible tiger with an ethical code that keeps him with the good guys." In a sharp new thriller, Detroit's most savvy private eye is up to his neck in international drug-smuggling, hit squads, double-identities, music-industry gangsters, and a client who's nothing but trouble. Gilia Cristobal is a singer with a...

"Crime writer Julia Gooden has just completed the most important story of her life--a book about her beloved brother's childhood abduction and how she found his killer after thirty years. But that hasn't taken her focus off her day job--especially with what looks to be a serial killer terrorizing the city. Female runners are being snatched off jogging trails, then slaughtered in abandoned churches. As Julia begins investigating, with help from Detective...