San Diego police detective Finbar Finnegan is forty-something, an aspiring but frustrated actor and - after that third divorce - a committed bachelor. Just when he thinks he's seen it all, he faces a killer more deadly than any psychopath: a 55...
For some, it's the pleasure capitol of the world. For others, it's a city of last chances, a paradise on the edge of the desert. For soon-to-be-ex-cop Lynn Cutter, sweating out a disability pension, it could become a point of no return.
As...
Seventeen months ago the California desert revealed the remains of Jack Watson. The rich man's son was found incinerated in a Rolls-Royce, a bullet in his head. Now, a year and a half later, Los Angeles Police Department homicide detective Sidney...
A cheap hooker named Missy Moonbeam takes a fatal dive from the roof of a sleazy hotel. But what's a Caltech phone number doing in her trick book? And how does that connect to a dead private eye and a useless credit card? And what does all that...
The Winter Murder Case (1939) is a Philo Vance novella that S. S. Van Dine intended to expand into his twelfth full length book, a project cut short by his death. The Winter Murder Case seems especially similar to the B mystery movies of the...
"Van Dine's last two full-length novels show his storytelling talent operating at full force. The Kidnap Murder Case (1936) adds more physical action than the usual Van Dine cerebral plotting allows, perhaps as an attempt to keep up with...
"There were two reasons why the terrible and, in many ways, incredible Garden murder case—which took place in the early spring following the spectacular Casino murder case —was so designated. In the first place, the scene of this tragedy was...
Philo Vance receives an anonymous letter warning of deadly danger to the wealthy Llewellyn family heir, Lynn. Eccentric widow Priscilla Llewellyn presides over a society family filled with greed, ego and unhappy marriage. Her secretary Doris...
"Of all the cases I have thus far recorded none was as exciting, as weird, as apparently unrelated to all rational thinking, as the dragon murder. Here was a crime that seemed to transcend all the ordinary scientific knowledge of man and to carry...