DIVAn old flame’s fiancé is missing, and only Drum can save him from the Soviets/div DIVChester Drum will never love another woman the way he loves Marianne. After years of on-and-off romance, he tells her that his work as a private detective is too dangerous for him to ever marry, so she ends the affair and moves to West Berlin, to report on the Cold War from its front lines. There she falls in love with Quentin Hammond, ace foreign correspondent, and Drum is happy for her until her new man disappears behind the Iron Curtain. She telegraphs for help, and Drum is on the next plane./divDIV /divDIVHammond was close to winning the scoop of the century, by cooperating with an exiled East German dissident to tunnel beneath the Berlin Wall and free thousands of people from the other side. Before they could complete their audacious scheme, though, the Stasi kidnapped them. Only Drum has the skills to go behind the wall and return with the man who’s stolen the woman he loves./div

DIVA kidnapped intellectual and a dead partner take Drum to South America/div DIVWhen Andy Dineen tires of the FBI, he jumps ship for Langley and joins the CIA to fight the Cold War in Berlin. After years in the spy game, he grows sick of the paperwork, and is considering his options when an old friend, private detective Chester Drum, offers him a job. Drum is surprised when his old academy classmate takes him up on it, and shocked when it gets Dineen killed./divDIV /divDIVDineen’s first and last case is a stint as a bodyguard for a South American intellectual who’s writing an exposé of his nation’s savage dictator. When the strongman’s thugs kidnap the author and bludgeon Dineen, Drum rushes to the hospital just in time to watch his friend die. Avenging Dineen will mean a trip to South America, and infiltrating a palace whose secret police are not half as dangerous as the despot’s daughter./div

DIVWith a body in his office and a pocketful of secrets, Drum heads to Moscow/div DIVEugenie is seventeen, with long legs, blond hair, and an appetite for misery. Daughter of a corrupt millionaire, she has bounced around Europe’s finest boarding schools, and Chester Drum knows she’s trouble the moment he sees her tearing her blouse to implicate Ilya Alluliev, a Russian diplomat, in rape. The man came to give her a message, an envelope that quickly finds its way to Drum’s safe. Inside is an unsigned note claiming that a Russian Nobel Prize–winning poet is in grave danger. As soon as he reads it, Drum joins the poet on the Kremlin’s hit list./divDIV /divDIVThe next day, Drum goes to his office and finds Alluliev on the floor, shot dead. The police cannot help him; Drum will find answers only behind the Iron Curtain. At the height of the Cold War, Drum will risk his life for the sake of a fire-eyed teen with a heart made of ice./div

DIVTo find his ex-wife’s killer, Drum takes on the Communist Party/divDIV Deirdre Hartsell loved life too much to shoot herself in her pretty head. She’d been a high-society party girl since her days at college, and her two greatest passions were keeping up appearances and having a roaring good time. Women like that don’t kill themselves, and Deirdre’s father wants to prove that his girl didn’t die by her own hand. To get the truth, he hires Washington DC’s sharpest private detective, Chester Drum. After all, Drum knew Deirdre better than anyone—he was married to her./divDIV /divDIVBut in a town built on lies, Deirdre lived with more than her fair share of secrets, and the first thing Drum learns is that his late ex-wife was a prominent member of the Communist Party, supporting the local cell with endless donations from her fat checkbook. Did leftist sympathies get Deirdre killed? The truth lies in Venezuela—and Chester Drum has gone farther than that for answers before./div

DIVA drive-by killing puts Drum on the scent of a Washington sex scandal/div DIVWhen Chester Drum first took a crack at detective work, PI Gil Sprayregan offered to split a case with him, giving the rookie half the fee and more credit than he deserved. Years later, Drum is established and Gil is at the tail end of a long, slow fall,/divDIVdrinking heavily and considering blackmail to make ends meet. When he gets in over his head, Sprayregan’s wife begs Drum to help. But her husband has already taken the first step on the road to oblivion./divDIV /divDIVDrum takes a dinghy out to Sprayregan’s Chesapeake hideout. When they return, a car full of gangsters kills Sprayregan and puts Drum in the hospital. Drum doesn’t mourn the man who gave him his first break, but to the new widow, he owes a debt. No matter how well connected they are, he will break the men who gunned down Gil Sprayregan./div

DIVTo recover his license, Drum must unlock the mystery of a professor’s suicide/div DIVDuncan Hadley Lord seems too happy to kill himself. But then, he has no reason to sleep around, either. For three months the history professor has carried on an affair with a call girl, and for the last few weeks Chester Drum and his partner, rookie PI Jerry Trowbridge, have watched him do it. When Lord steps onto a fourth-story window ledge on Homecoming night, Drum gets through the police cordon just in time to watch the professor fall to earth./divDIV /divDIVAn embittered local sheriff, convinced that Drum and his partner were blackmailing the professor, has their license revoked. To salvage his business, Drum must find the real reason for Lord’s suicide. He has tangled with politicians, thieves, and spies, but no detective can truly know treachery until he steps into the hallowed halls of a college campus./div

DIVCrossing the Atlantic on NATO’s behalf, Drum tangles with mobsters, blackmail, and murder/divDIV As the H.M.S. Queen Victoria pulls out of New York Harbor, danger encircles Chester Drum. He’s sailing for Europe on the largest luxury liner ever built, but it’s not big enough to hold the secrets on board—or the men who keep them. And by the time the liner reaches Southampton, she will be missing a few passengers. Drum can only hope he isn’t among those who don’t make it to shore./divDIV /divDIVHired by a NATO functionary as a bodyguard, the private investigator quickly learns his real assignment: protecting his client from a Chicago mobster with dreams of blackmail. Keeping the mafia at bay is tricky enough, but when a State Department colleague ends up in the line of fire, Drum sets his mind on getting even. After all, there is no better spot for vengeance than the icy waters of the open sea. /div

A PI heads from DC to Saudi Arabia to save the life of a client targeted by a hit man. Nothing will stop the beautiful Fawzia Totah and her lover, US Army colonel Lyman Tyler, from boarding a plane for the Middle East to make their pilgrimage to Mecca. So Fawzia hires Washington PI Chester Drum to serve as bodyguard until she’s safely out of the country. But Lyman’s wealthy mother, Davisa, doesn’t want Fawzia to go anywhere safely. The violently bigoted, socially connected woman comes from old Virginia money, and she’s not about to let this former dancer from Jordan risk her precious Southern reputation. Not only is her son prepared to convert to Islam for the woman he loves, he’s also already married. When Davisa hires a hit man to track down Fawzia and take her out, Drum has no choice but to follow. However, Davisa’s motives aren’t as simple as they first seem—and the road to Mecca has a sudden turn no one will see coming. This is a twisting, fast-paced mystery in the vintage series that “combined elements of the hard-boiled detective story and the international espionage thriller” by a recipient of the Private Eye Writers of America’s lifetime achievement award (The New York Times). Mecca for Murder is the 2nd book in the Chester Drum Mysteries, but you may enjoy reading the series in any order.

Private Eyes is the complete map to what Raymond Bhandler called "the mean streets," the exciting world of the fictional private eye. It is intended to entertain current PI fans and to make new ones.

DIVDrum confronts a senator to save the life of a drunken old friend/div DIVWhen Chester Drum knew him, Jack Morley was a Washington player, just a few promotions away from becoming Secretary of State. A bad divorce and a nervous breakdown later, Morley has hit rock bottom, and works in Paris for the Army ghoul squad, confirming the deaths of World War II soldiers long ago reported missing in action. Morley is content to spend the rest of his life wallowing in the bottom of a Pernod bottle, until word gets out that he is blackmailing a US senator—an accusation that could cost him his life./divDIV /divDIVThough disgusted by his old friend’s drunkenness, Drum agrees to make Morley’s case to the senator. Blackmailer or no, Morley has stumbled onto a conspiracy that dates back to the end of the war. If Drum can’t get to the bottom of it, Morley won’t be the only one to die./div