Jim Meskimen

American Sailor Kurt Reid is a hothead and a hard case-a man who hits first and asks questions later. As scrappy and rough around the edges as Jimmy Cagney, it's no wonder that when the ship's captain turns up dead, it's Reid who takes the rap. Falsely accused and under the gun, Reid jumps ship and vanishes into Shanghai -only to get caught in a web of intrigue, betrayal, and murder. In a world where nothing is what it seems and everything is for...

"A handsome young New York professor visiting Phoenix to research his new book is brutally murdered. Historian-turned-sheriff's deputy David Mapstone should not be investigating Jax Delgado's death. But Jax has been dating David's sister-in-law Robin, and now she's someone's target, too. Robin's sister Lindsey, strangely distant while working with an anti-cyber terror unit in DC, makes one demand of husband David: protect Robin. This won't be an easy...

Toby tries to clear a dentist accused of a medieval murder Though an otherwise unremarkable woman, Mildred Minck has the distinction of being the first citizen of Los Angeles to be murdered by crossbow. The police find her dentist husband, Sheldon, standing over the body with the weapon, swearing that only Joan Crawford can identify the real killer. An insanity defense seems a natural fit, but Sheldon wants his neighbor, private investigator Toby...

The Big Seven sends Detective Sunderson to confront his new neighbors, a gun-nut family who live outside the law in rural Michigan. Detective Sunderson has fled troubles on the home front and bought himself a hunting cabin in a remote area of Michigan's Upper Peninsula. No sooner has he settled in than he realizes his new neighbors are creating even more havoc than the Great Leader did. A family of outlaws, armed to the teeth, the Ameses have local...

It's not easy living in someone else's world. But that's the story of Mike de Wolf's life. . . literally. He awakens to find himself a fictional villain in someone else's book, landing in the West Indies three centuries ago, pursued by pirates and a wild woman on horseback. What's a guy to do? The answer's written in the sky-in this wildly original, wickedly amusing novel.

What does a woman do when she discovers her husband is an incurable cheater? If she's Cat DeLuca, she launches the Pants On Fire Detective Agency to do what two years of unholy matrimony taught her: she catches cheaters. After client Cleo Jones shoots her cheating husband's bum full of buckshot, he disappears, taking her money, her dog, and her sister with him. Cat promises to return the dog and money if her client stops shooting at Walter. She finds...

California, 1957. Lee Mellon believes he is the descendant of the only Confederate general to have come from Big Sur and is himself a seeker of truth in his own modern-day war against the status quo. For the first time in audio, A Confederate General in Big Sur was the late Richard Brautigan's first published novel, written when he was twenty-eight.

Sometimes fools must step in where Fred Astaire fears to tap. Luna Martin, the moll of a well-known Los Angeles gangster nicknamed "Fingers" (because he likes to cut them off), has demanded dance lessons from Hollywood's finest hoofer-and whatever Luna wants, Luna gets. To sidestep the flirtations of the lead-footed lady, Astaire hires private investigator Toby Peters to pose as a dance instructor and take over the lessons. But when someone cuts...

The final Toby Peters Hollywood whodunit from the Edgar Award-winning author is a marvelous magic trick of a mystery featuring Harry Blackstone. When an anonymous rival demands that master illusionist Harry Blackstone reveal his secrets on stage or die, the magician hires Toby Peters and his brother, ex-cop Phil Pevsner, to run security for his show at the famous Pantages Theater in Hollywood. Of course, Peters doesn't expect the job to include replacing...

As a hard-boiled Hollywood PI enlists Al Capone's help to save the Marx Brothers, Kaminsky "makes the totally wacky possible" (The Washington Post). It's 1941 and the Marx Brothers' first movie for MGM, Go West, has the country in stitches. But now Chico Marx is worried he's going to need stitches when he receives a severed ear in the mail-a simple message from a Chicago bookie who wants $120,000, or else. Chico is baffled because, although...