For the Nameless Detective, investigations involving matters of the heart are to be avoided at all costs. 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 unwillingly relents, but he soon discovers there is much more at stake than a simple affair.

Nedra is a modern-day Circe who attracts men who become dangerously obsessed

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A California woman learns she is an adopted child and hires the Nameless Detective to find her real parents. As he probes, Nameless makes a frightening discovery: the woman is the product of a rape and her father is still raping and murdering.

Nameless handles two investigations that challenge his agency's resources, including a woman who yearns to learn more about her late husband's potential secret love life and the case of an agoraphobic who has gone missing.

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,...

"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...

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 Pronzini, working at the top of his form, takes his seasoned private-eye hero to a new phase of a still-evolving...

David Virden's case is simple enough: Namless must find his ex-wife and deliver some papers to her. But she refuses the papers, sends a message to Virden to never contact her again, and slams the door. His colleague, Tamara, tells Nameless that Virden threatens to sue, stops payment on his checks, and claims that the woman they located isn't his wife. Then he disappears and his fiancée hires Nameless to find out why. Clearly, someone is trying

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The police said it was an accident. The dead woman's sister said it was murder … and that she knew who did it. Nameless isn't certain, but the more he learns about Nancy Mathias' life, the more inclined he is to accept the possibility that her sister is right. Combine that with the situation Jake Runyan, one of the agency's partners, is facing as he searches for a young man who is either a murderer or a victim, and life at their San Francisco detective...

Ravaged by time and abandoned by the people who once flocked there in search of golden nuggets, Ragged-Ass Gulch is a ghost town. What's left is a small, proud, and close pack of people who aren't looking for change. But change seems to be afoot as several mysterious fires plague the town. That's where the Nameless Detective comes in.

Nameless had told Mitchell Krochek that he'd do whatever he could to find his missing wife, Janice. She'd run away before-propelled by a gambling fever that grew ever higher-and Mitch had always taken her back. This time, when Nameless, his partner Tamara, and the agency's chief operative Jake Runyon finally found her in a sleazy San Francisco hotel, she demanded a divorce. A few days later, a beaten and bloody Janice stumbled into the agency begging...