Hot Money, by Dick Francis. Wealthy gold trader Malcolm Pembroke has five ex-wives and
nine chidren between them, all fighting among themselves. But when violent death strikes the
least likable of his former spouses, Malcolm himself feels threatened, and he calls on his most
capable son, Ian, the family jockey, to protect him from his nearest and dearest. While he's at it,
Ian is also commissioned to delve for the final, critical clue in the darkly buried Pembroke past,
simmering with the greed, hate, and vengefulness that could motivate blood to strike against
blood.
Steam Pig, By James McClure I read this book from cover to cover in about a day. It's not long
(ca. 250 pages) and the characters and plot are easy to follow, once you get used to the pseudoBritish prose and pacing. The plot is pretty conventional, and the mystery is pretty much by the
numbers, with few real surprises. The protagonists are a pair of detectives, a homicide
investigator named Kramer and his black partner, who's named Zondi. In this first book they're
assigned to investigate (or rather Kramer's assigned; the senior cops have nothing to do with
Zondi because he's black) to investigate a strange cicumstance involving a mixup at the local
funeral home and morgue. The funeral home's attendants had the corpses of 2 women to deal
with. One, a young music teacher who had heart trouble and died of natural causes, was to be
cremated without further ado; the other, a homeless alcoholic, had died on the streets, and rules
require that there be an autopsy. The attendants at the funeral home screwed up and switched the
bodies, cremating the homeless woman who drank herself to death, while the young music
teacher got the autopsy--and it turns out that the cause of death on the death certificate is
incorrect. She was murdered in a particularly horrific fashion, probably by a black assassin,
given that the technique used to kill her is typically only used by Africans. So Krame and Zondi
have to investigate, and find out how the demure little music teacher could have gotten herself
mixed up with the local African organized crime thugs.. (Davis Nicholas – Amazon)
Chasing the Devil’s Tail, by David Fulmer . Storyville, 1907: In this raucous red-light
district, where two thousand scarlet women ply their trade, where cocaine is sold over the
counter and rye whiskey flows freely, there's a killer loose. Someone is murdering prostitutes
and marking each killing with a black rose.
As Creole detective Valentin St. Cyr begins to unravel the murder, he encounters a cast of
characters drawn from history: Tom Anderson, the political boss who runs Storyville like a
private kingdom; Lulu White, the notorious madam; E. J. Bellocq, the photographer of whores; a
young piano player who would later be known as Jelly Roll Morton; and finally, Buddy Bolden,
the man who all but invented jazz and is now losing his mind.
An original tale of murder, music, and madness, Chasing the Devil's Tail is a chilling portrait of
genius and self-destruction, set at the very moment when jazz was born.
Trent’s Last Case, by EC. Bentley. "One of the few genuine classics of detective fiction." — The New York
Times. Written in reaction to what Bentley perceived as the sterility and artificiality of the detective
fiction of his day — particularly stories that featured infallible detectives of the Holmesian stripe —
Trent's Last Case (1913) features Philip Trent, an all-too-human detective who not only falls in love with
the chief suspect but reaches a brilliant conclusion that is totally wrong.
The case begins when millionaire American financier Sigsbee Manderson is murdered while on holiday in
England. A London newspaper sends Trent to investigate, and he is soon matching wits with Scotland
Yard's Inspector Murth as they probe ever deeper in search of a solution to a mystery filled with odd,
mysterious twists and turns. Called by Agatha Christie "one of the best detective stories ever written,"
Trent's Last Case delights with its flesh-and-blood characters, its naturalness and easy humor, and its
style, which, as Dorothy Sayers has noted, "ranges from a vividly coloured rhetoric to a delicate and
ironical literary fancy." New Introduction by Douglas G. Greene.