Jackpot

Bill Pronzini

May 2012 · Nameless Detective" mysteries Book 17 · Speaking Volumes

About this ebook

Bill Pronzini's "Nameless Detective"-the San Francisco-based, Italian-American, slightly overweight, thoroughly charming favorite of mystery aficionados, whose name is never revealed-returns with one of his cleverest, most intense cases.

Why would a successful, good-looking young man, who had just won two hundred thousand dollars at a Lake Tahoe casino, kill himself? That's the question Nameless asks himself when he finds a friend's brother dead--an apparent suicide, was more than luck involved in his windfall? Or was his good fortune reason enough for murder?

The investigation takes Nameless inside the seamy and dangerous world of high-stakes gambling and mob-run casinos-and into the middle of a complex scam that has left at least one man in his grave, with others, including Nameless, odds-on favorites to follow.

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.