Now a Silver ENnie award winner and Golden Geek award nominee.

For nine long days, the mayor and district attorney of Reno, Nevada, have been missing. Vanished without a trace. Their vehicles were found parked side-by-side at Reno-Tahoe International Airport. Did they fly somewhere together? They aren’t on any flight manifest. Did the two of them take off with a big pile of the city’s money? If so, the city accountants can’t find it. Were they murdered? There’s no sign of foul play. Their disappearances have finally made national news. Enter Mortimer Angel, who’d just quit a thankless job as an IRS agent. Mort is Reno’s newest gumshoe, a private-eye-in-training at his nephew’s detective agency. Just four hours into his new career, Mort finds the mayor―make that, the mayor’s head―in the trunk of Mort’s ex-wife’s Mercedes. The news-hungry media speculates: Did Mort kill the mayor? Did Mort’s ex? As events begin to spin out of control, Mort realizes things have been out of control since the night before he started his new career, the night he found the unknown naked blonde in his bed.

USA Today best-selling author A hooker who's not a hooker—a hand without a body—what's next for Mort? Ex-IRS agent turned gumshoe-in-training, Mortimer Angel, is approached by a beautiful hooker, Holiday, in a casino bar in Reno. Mort first met Holiday two months ago, but now learns that she's not really a hooker. She's a college engineering student, searching for her younger sister, Allie, who disappeared three months ago. Having seen Mort in the news, Holiday knows he's a PI who finds missing persons. While in the bar with Mort, Holiday gets an unexpected phone call from Allie who says she's in Gerlach, a small town in Nevada. The call is cut off. Holiday hires Mort on the spot, dragging him off to Gerlach. On the way out of town, Mort picks up a FedEx disturbing package. When Mort finds a connection between Allie and US Senator Harry "Liar" Reinhart, a presidential candidate who vanished without a trace three days ago, things quickly turn deadly—very deadly. The perfect mix of John Sanford and Carl Hiaasen While all of the novels in the Mortimer Angel Gumshoe Series stand on their own and can be read in any order, the publication sequence is: Gumshoe Gumshoe for Two Gumshoe on the Loose Gumshoe Rock Gumshoe in the Dark (coming June 2021)

On a lonely Nevada highway at dusk in a thunderstorm, private eye Mortimer Angel comes across a scantily-clad girl, cold and alone. She orders him out of his truck at gunpoint, but nothing is as it seems, and Mort is soon dragged into the deadliest situation of his career. The perfect mix of John Sanford, Randy Wayne White, and Carl Hiaasen

In a near-future America on the verge of civil war, a gay detective investigates ritual killings, conspiracies, and what might be black magic. In the summer of 2045, Atlanta is a city on the verge of panic. A killer is stalking her people, leaving behind eerily beautiful crime scenes painted with occult symbols. Is he an insane artist, carving his work out of flesh and blood? A satanic sorcerer, hoping to bring about the end of days? Or a political operative, trying to terrify the electorate into voting for his party? A handful of people have the pieces to the puzzle, but they are scattered through the city’s subcultures: A wisecracking gay detective hunting for his kidnapped partner. A black cop, trying to use high-tech forensics to solve crimes that seem to be right out of the Middle Ages. A Wiccan journalist who employs search engines and scrying spells with equal skill. A televangelist with an eye on the White House, and the Christian rock star who wants to take him down. A transgender Cherokee shaman trying to right a wrong from the 1800s. And Benji, the fourteen-year-old boy at the center of it all. Who thinks that his biggest problem is what will happen when his strict Baptist parents find out that his new girlfriend is a witch. Together, they might be able to stop what’s coming. If they can stay alive long enough to find each other. - Winner of two Spectrum Awards for LGBT-themed science fiction. - - A double finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards in the Mystery and Speculative Fiction categories - "There's a great SF premise here...the writing is tight, the drama tense." -- Locus "Hartman's character's are smart. His world-building is broad, convincing, and exciting: his choice of detail is exquisite. Compelling and engrossing, this book grabbed me and didn't let me go until long after the end." -- Nina Kiriki Hoffman, winner of the Nebula and Bram Stoker Awards. "Like his hero, loved his plot, and envied his style." --Mike Resnick, five-time winner of the Hugo Award.

Cthulhu Confidential is a roleplaying game designed for one player and one game master. Its powered by the GUMSHOE One-2-One game system which retunes, rebuilds and reimagines the acclaimed GUMSHOE investigative rules set, as seen in such hit roleplaying games as Trail of Cthulhu and Nights Black Agents, for one player and one GM. Together, you create a story that evokes the classic solo protagonist mystery format. Cthulhu Confidential drops your hero into the noir nightscape of hardboiled-era Los Angeles, New York or Washington, DC. Meet powerbrokers and politicians, rub shoulders with Hollywood studio bosses and fiery evangelists. Face narrow-eyed G-Men, bent cops and dangerous crime lords. But beneath it all, under the scrim of all this human endeavor, lives corruption so old and inhuman youll need all your courage and resourcefulness to face it. Choose one of three heroes with their own settings and adventures: Langston Wright is an African-American war veteran and scholar in WW2-era DC with a keen intellect. Dex Raymond is a hard-boiled private detective in 1930s Los Angeles with a nose for trouble. And Vivian Sinclair is The New York Heralds most determined scoop-hound. Each is a lone investigator, equipped with smarts, fists, and just maybe a code of honor, uncovering their towns secret truths. But what happens when you scratch the veneer of human malfeasance to reveal an eternal evilthe malign, cosmic indifference of HP Lovecrafts Cthulhu Mythos? Made in the U.S.

DIVSees hard-boiled crime fiction in relation to a changing literary marketplace and as an arena for conflicts about citizenship, class culture, and democracy during the New Deal./div

Popular fiction, with its capacity for diversion, can mask important cultural observations within a framework that is often overlooked in the academic world. Works thought to be merely "escapist" can often be more seriously mined for revelations regarding the worlds they portray, especially those of the disenfranchised. As detective fiction has slowly earned critical respect, more authors from minority groups have chosen it as their medium. Chicana/o authors, previously reluctant to write in an underestimated genre that might further marginalize them, have only entered the world of detective fiction in the past two decades. In this book, the first comprehensive study of Chicano/a detective fiction, Ralph E. Rodriguez examines the recent contributions to the genre by writers such as Rudolfo Anaya, Lucha Corpi, Rolando Hinojosa, Michael Nava, and Manuel Ramos. Their works reveal the struggles of Chicanas/os with feminism, homosexuality, familia, masculinity, mysticism, the nationalist subject, and U.S.-Mexico border relations. He maintains that their novels register crucial new discourses of identity, politics, and cultural citizenship that cannot be understood apart from the historical instability following the demise of the nationalist politics of the Chicana/o movement of the 1960s and 1970s. In contrast to that time, when Chicanas/os sought a unified Chicano identity in order to effect social change, the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s have seen a disengagement from these nationalist politics and a new trend toward a heterogeneous sense of self. The detective novel and its traditional focus on questions of knowledge and identity turned out to be the perfect medium in which to examine this new self.

Bacardi and Coke. Neat. Not the usual drink of choice for a mountain dwarf. Then again, Detective Sirgrus Blackmane is no ordinary dwarf—at least not since the Great War. Being a gumshoe during Prohibition might appear glamorous, with secret speakeasies, all-night cocktail parties, and scantily clad women displaying their knees, but crime and conspiracy lurk beneath the city’s shining illusion. When the human half of the Mason and Blackmane Detective Agency is found dead at the scene of a rum-running bust, Sirgrus vows to find the killer. But this quest for justice leads him straight into a tangled web of underhanded deals with demihuman mobsters who are fighting for control of the rum supply. And when two more corpses turn up, Sirgrus must work double-time if he wants to find the killer—and avoid turning up dead at the next crime scene.

USA Today best-selling author Mortimer Angel, ex-IRS agent, PI-in-training has a reputation—he specializes in body parts IRS agent-turned-PI Mortimer Angel is relaxing in a hole-in-the-wall bar in a Reno casino when an attractive young girl hires him to find out who left her a cryptic message demanding a million dollars. At the girl's house, Mort finds the body of missing rapper Jonnie Xenon—Jo-X to his legions of fans—hanging from the rafters with two bullet holes in him. Mort is shocked when he learns the identity of the girl's father—and even more shocked when he is hired to investigate the murder. Mort, being Mort, accumulates a few felonies as he follows the clues to Las Vegas. And along the way, he picks up an alluring young assistant who changes his life—in every conceivable way. The perfect mix of John Sanford and Carl Hiaasen While all of the novels in the Mortimer Angel Gumshoe Series stand on their own and can be read in any order, the publication sequence is: Gumshoe Gumshoe for Two Gumshoe on the Loose Gumshoe Rock Gumshoe in the Dark (coming June 2021)