Two novellas and two short stories featuring Mystery Writers of America Grandmaster Bill Pronzini’s iconic Nameless Detective! Zigzag is an original novella, in which a safe and simple accident investigation becomes the unraveling of a twisted murder scheme. Grapplin, which first appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, deals with the kind of missing person case that can end in only one of two ways, closure or heartbreak. In the second short, Nightscape, readers discover how, indeed, one thing just leads to another (First published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine as The Winning Ticket). The final work, Revenant, is another original novella and entangles Nameless in a weird crime with fearful occult overtones

His name was Roy Sands, and he had everything to look forward to. He was getting out of the service and coming home to marry his beautiful Fiancee. He had his debts paid, money in the bank, and a happy new life ahead of him. Then he disappeared

A unique conception in suspense novels, TWOSPOT combines the talents of two popular San Francisco-based detectives, Bill Pronzini’s “Nameless” private eye and Collin Wilcox’s Lieutenant Frank Hastings, on a case of murder and bizarre conspiracy surrounding an old California winemaking family. When “Nameless” is hired by Alex Cappellani, whose family owns the Cappellani Winery in the Napa Valley, it seems at first to be a routine matter. Alex is concerned that his mother, Rosa, may be romantically involved with an enologist she has hired named Jason Booker; he wants the detective to investigate Booker’s background for proof that the man is a fortune hunter. But soon a series of surprising twists take the case in an entirely different direction. For no apparent reason Alex is attacked and almost killed at the winery; “Nameless” himself is assaulted. And then, in San Francisco, there is sudden and violent death. Lieutenant Hastings is called in and confronted with a long list of suspects that includes Alex’s autocratic brother, Leo; Paul Rosten, the winemaker who has been with the family for decades; Shelly Jackson, Logan Dockstetter and Philip Brand, all of whom work at the winery’s business office in San Francisco; and Alex himself. A slip of paper signed with the cryptic name “Twospot,” and the shadowy presence of a hoodlum, further complicate matters — and eventually lead to another attempted murder and a chilling gun battle on San Francisco’s Telegraph Hill. As “Nameless” and Hastings delve deeper into the web of violence and mystery, working together and separately in the Napa Valley and in San Francisco, the truth begins slowly to unfold. And if is a truth of shocking magnitude which foreshadows a climax as frightening as it is harrowing. Told in alternate sections through the eyes of the two protagonists, TWOSPOT is a compelling novel filled with the same tension, atmosphere, and power which have earned each of the authors a high ranking among contemporary suspense novelists

It’s a lazy mid-August Sunday afternoon. The “Nameless Detective” and his old friend Lieutenant Eberhardt are relaxing on the patio, drinking beer and shooting the breeze, when the doorbell rings. As Eberhardt answers the door, Nameless hears two sharp echoing reports — gunshots; they could only be gunshots. Rushing into the house, Nameless glimpses the bloody body of his friend sprawled on the floor — just before he feels a bullet strike his own chest. While Eberhardt lies in a coma, Nameless is released from the hospital and hits the San Francisco streets, determined to track down the gunman. Facing the toughest case of his career, Nameless doggedly pursues the secret behind his friend’s shooting — only to find himself plunged into an action-packed intrigue involving murder, bribery, violence, and the forces of organized crime in San Francisco’s Chinatown. The inimitable Nameless Detective, an overweight private eye of Italian descent with a penchant for pulp magazines, is in top form in this gripping, fast-paced tale. The ninth in the “Nameless Detective” series and one of Pronzini’s most suspenseful mysteries to date, Dragofire is sure to please his ever-growing number of fans

In Double, the “Nameless Detective” and Sharon McCone — reunited at a private eye convention in sunny San Diego — team up to tangle with kinky lifestyles, double dealing and multiple murder. When Elaine Picard, head of security at the posh Casa del Rey hotel and an old friend of Sharon’s, falls to her death from a hotel tower, “Nameless” is a distant witness. And when McCone’s zealous pursuit of clues lands her in jail, it’s “Nameless” who posts bail. While Sharon continues to risk her life trying to unravel the mystery of Elaine’s death, “Nameless” puts his own on the line investigating the odd disappearance of a little boy and his mother who’ve vanished from the Casa del Rey without a trace. The two detectives are swiftly drawn into a treacherous maze of past duplicity and present danger. The action races from the Casa del Rey to an ominous menagerie in the hills outside of town, a pornographic curio shop, a political campaign headquarters, a villa on the Mexican seacoast, and an isolated desert mansion with a strange history that belies its even more bizarre current goings on. Double is a crackling and complex thriller from two premier mystery writers

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

For the “Nameless Detective,” investigations involving matters of the heart are to be avoided. But when an old poker buddy asks him to help frazzled and distraught Kay Runyon, whose husband, Victor, is having a clandestine affair with a mystery woman named Nedra, Nameless relents. After all, it seems like a simple matter: Find out just who Nedra is so Kay can confront her in a last-ditch effort to save her marriage. But Nameless soon discovers that there is much more at stake than a simple affair. Nedra is a modern-day Circe who attracts men who become obsessed with her, in some cases dangerously so. Victor Runyon is the latest in a long line; others whose paths Nameless crosses include a violent ex-convict, Nedra’s jealous ex-husband, and a powerful San Francisco politician. Victor’s obsession with Nedra takes a bizarre twist when she suddenly vanishes without a trace. Did she disappear willingly or was she the victim of one of her lovers’ private demons? Nameless must find out before it’s too late to save Victor and Kay from tragic ends. And he do so while trying to cope with a very personal and private demon of his own. Demons is a powerful tale of psychological suspense that builds inexorably to a chilling and shocking climax

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, Boobytrap marks another triumph both for the sleuth cited by the Chicago Sun-Times as “the thinking man’s detective” and for his creator, Bill Pronzini, whom the Denver Post praised as “an exceptionally skilled writer working at the top of his ability.”

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 Chicago Sun-Times 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 — crazybone — away

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

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

When Nameless is hired by Cory Beckett, a beautiful young woman who claims to be a model, to find her missing brother, Kenneth, it seems to be a routine matter. Kenneth has fled San Francisco in a drug-induced panic to avoid trial on a charge of stealing a valuable necklace from the alcoholic wife of the man for whom he works, wealthy yachtsman Andrew Vorhees. When agency operative Jake Runyon locates and questions the frightened young man, Cory Beckett's motives come into question and the case takes on darkly sinister complexities. Cory lied to Nameless about her livelihood, her relationship with Vorhees, her brother's alleged drug use, and the nature of his alleged crime. Not only is she Andrew Vorhees’ mistress, Cory has a secret second lover, factory owner Frank Chaleen, with whom she conspired to frame Kenneth. This bizarre sibling betrayal is part of a diabolical plan that reveals her to be a deadly, designing woman who will stop at nothing to achieve her warped desires