Pronzini Bill Скачать все книги 39 Количество книг

An empty train yard at midnight. A small cabin bathed in the light of a full moon. A seedy Skid Row hotel in San Francisco. These are the places where fear lives. Collected for the first time are 26 terrifying stories that span nearly three decades in the career of this master writer of suspense and horror.

A simple case of blackmail gets lethally complicated when “Nameless,” Bill Pronzini’s seasoned private-eye, exposes a nasty scam that involves junior accounts executive Jay Cohalan, his unhappy wife, and a mistress with a serious drug problem. It’s the kind of case “Nameless” likes, because bleeders — the blackmailers, extortionists, small-time grifters, and other opportunists who prey on the weak and gullible — sit near the top of his most-worthless-human-beings list. So he contemplates with pleasure the prospect of putting another one or two of these parasites out of commission, and then returning the $75,000 in cash to its rightful owner.

“Nameless” discovers, though, that he is not going to be able so easily to close his Cohalan file — not when he finds his client face down in the middle of a four-poster bed with a bloody, powder-scorched hole behind the right ear. And only by a hair’s breadth does “Nameless” himself escape a similar fate. Aggrieved, cut to the psychological quick by his close brush with death, “Nameless” embarks on a relentless hunt for his unknown assailant in San Francisco’s shadowy underworld. There he encounters bleeders of every ilk — like the loan shark Nick Kinsella, drug dealer Jackie Spoons, punch-drunk boxer Zeke Mayjack, and crankhead Charlie Bright — before he tracks down his quarry.

At a deserted backcountry road stop “Nameless,” packing his long-unused .38, attends to the last of a bad business and, in a climax as powerful as it is unexpected, finally confronts his own demons. He maybe even conquers them.

Beyond the wrought-iron gates and behind the stuccoed facades of the Spanish-style houses in the affluent California community of Greenwood, a murderous maze of deceit, adultery, fraud, and betrayal awaits the private eye hailed by the as “the thinking man’s detective” in this ingeniously contrived mystery novel by two-time Shamus award-winner Bill Pronzini.

Not that larceny among the rich comes as a surprise to “Nameless.” Indeed, even before he visits the handsomely appointed offices of the blond, tanned insurance agent Rich Twining and the estate where the recently widowed Sheila Hunter lives uneasily with her wary ten-year-old daughter, the private investigator’s darker suspicions have been aroused. For why would anyone, no matter how moneyed and beautiful and bereaved, refuse to claim fifty thousand dollars due to her in life insurance?

The question is simple enough. The answer, though, lies several murders, many miles, ten years, a deviously contrived name game, and one baffling word clue — away.

John Faith is a stranger in the isolated town of Pomo in the wilds of Northern California. Who is he? Why show up now, during the off-season, when there is nothing to do but get into trouble? He is big, ugly, and “strange,” so it is no wonder that he arouses suspicions or inspires threats. His swift departure is fondly desired by almost all who cross his path. When a beautiful, lonely woman is brutally murdered after spending time with him, Faith is the prime and logical suspect. Discovering the identity of the killer becomes as important to Faith as it is to everyone else... except the murderer.

Shaken after a hair’s-breadth escape from death, Nameless has made changes in his professional life, but he’s not put himself out to pasture. Again he enters San Francisco’s shadowy underworld, this time in a search for the identity of a gentle, mentally disturbed homeless man who has been found dead in an alley doorway. Clues are few, but eventually they bring the Nameless Detective to the small California town that drove the nameless victim tragically to murder and madness.

Emotionally exhausted from the events surrounding his partner’s suicide, “Nameless” welcomes the chance for a quiet vacation that comes when San Francisco Assistant District Attorney Patrick Dixon proposes that the burnt-out detective drive Dixon’s wife and son to their summer cottage on a remote High Sierra lake. In exchange, “Nameless” will have a week’s free use of a neighboring cabin.

The same week, unknown to both the assistant DA. and “Nameless,” also among the vacationers at Deep Mountain Lake is a recently paroled explosives expert, Donald Michael Latimer. The timing is not coincidental, for Latimer has meticulously devised a warped plan for revenge against the men who sent him to prison. His viciously ingenious boobytraps have already claimed the lives of two of his intended victims, and at Deep Mountain Lake he has lined up his next three targets: Pat Dixon, Dixon’s twelve-year-old son, and “Nameless” himself.

A harrowing tale that builds with relentless suspense to an edge-of-the-chair climax, marks another triumph both for the sleuth cited by the as “the thinking man’s detective” and for his creator, Bill Pronzini, whom the praised as “an exceptionally skilled writer working at the top of his ability.”

Jordan Wise is a mild-mannered accountant with a large San Francisco engineering firm in the late 1970s. By his own admission, the first thirty-four years of his life were dull, empty. But that all changes when he meets and falls in love with Annalise Bonner, an ambitious young woman who craves excitement, a life on the edge.

With her as the catalyst, Wise concocts and executes a meticulous plan to steal more than half a million dollars from his firm. They escape to the Virgin Islands, but their plans to live a life of quiet luxury are beset by unexpected pitfalls -- and Wise is forced to carry out two more ingenious schemes as a result. All three of his crimes are perfect -- or are they?

THE CRIMES OF JORDAN WISE is a classic tale of love, greed, betrayal, and violence told with Bill Pronzini's characteristic twists and turns and his special brand of suspense. It is also a powerful psychological examination of a man, a woman, and the wages of sin.

Abducted by a shadowy figure he never sees, chloroformed and taken to a remote mountain cabin, the Nameless Detective is told by that figure before he is deserted, that the mission is one of revenge. Nameless has destroyed his mysterious abductor’s life and now his life in turn will be destroyed.

Chained with a limited supply of food and water and just enough room in the shackles to allow him to feed himself, Nameless knows that the abductor must be a component of one of his old cases… someone who he has tracked and caught for the police, someone who has served prison time and, released, wants Nameless to suffer in turn. But the detective cannot deduce who that abductor may be and, as his ordeal begins, he understands that his efforts must be more directed toward survival and escape; if he does not find a way free of the shackles he will die. Freeing himself of the shackles will involve more than an act of physical escape; Nameless must come to understand the entirety of his own life and the nature of a profession which has caused him and those he loves risk at the highest level.

Through the Walpurgisnacht of that confinement and escape, Nameless does indeed come to understand himself and in a shocking, complex, surprising but inevitable ending, Nameless comes to understand as well the nature of entrapment and purgation, and how a rite of passage must crucially take place internally as well as externally. The denouement of the novel is resonant and shattering: it is unforgettable.

This is a fast paced mystery/thriller. Men who participated in a never solved robbery of an armored truck are being picked off one-by-one 11 years after the crime.

What would you do if you began to suspect that someone in your close circle of friends was not who he seemed to be, and that for a reason known only to him he had embarked on an insidious plan to destroy you and those you love most? This is the terrifying question facing two friends and potential lovers, college professor Dix Mallory and real estate salesperson Cecca Bellini, in the quiet Northern California town of Los Alegres. The reign of terror against them starts with a series of anonymous telephone calls, shortly after Dix's wife, Katy, is killed in a freak accident. Or did it start before the tragedy, with a secret affair between Katy and the unknown tormentor? Was her death in fact cold-blooded murder? Shock follows shock as the tormentor escalates his campaign in both subtle and overt ways. But it is not until a sudden act of violence, as brutal as it is unexpected, that Dix and Cecca realize just how montrous and far-reaching his scheme really is. And how many other lives besides their own are in jeopardy? With an Extreme Burning is a harrowing novel of ordinary people trapped in a web of extraordinary menace. In their struggles to extricate themselves, they must not only take desperate measures but come to terms with their own weaknesses and self-doubts. What happens to each of them as a result has implications that will stay with the reader long after the final page is turned.