Ten Great Hardboild P.I. Fiction Series
Discover the top ten hardboiled P.I. fiction series that define the genre. From gritty detectives to noir mysteries, explore the best books for crime fiction fans.
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Flood
by Andrew Vachss
Burke's newest client is a woman named Flood, who has the face of an angel, the body of a high-priced stripper, and the skills of a professional executioner. She wants Burke to find a monster for her—so she can kill him with her bare hands. In this cauterizing thriller, Andrew Vachss's renegade investigator teams up with a lethally gifted avenger to follow a child's murderer through the catacombs of New York, where every alley is blind and the penthouses are as dangerous as the basements. Fearfully knowing, crackling with narrative tension, and written in prose as forceful as a hollow-point slug, Flood is Burke at his deadliest—and Vachss at the peak of his form.
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Day of Wrath
by Jonathan Valin
Harry Stoner, a hard-boiled but sensitive detective, searches for Robbie Segal, a perfectly ordinary, teenaged girl who has disappeared
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Berlin Noir
by Philip Kerr
Now in one volume—the first three novels in Philip Kerr’s New York Times bestselling historical mystery series starring hard-boiled detective Bernie Gunther... “A Chandleresque knight errant caught in insane historical surroundings. Bernie walks down streets so mean that nobody can stay alive and remain truly clean.”—John Powers, Fresh Air (NPR) Ex-policeman Bernie Gunther thought he'd seen everything on the streets of 1930s Berlin. But then he went freelance, and each case he tackled sucked him further into the grisly excesses of Nazi subculture. And even after the war, amidst the decayed, imperial splendour of Vienna, Bernie uncovered a legacy that made the wartime atrocities look lily-white in comparison... This collection includes: MARCH VIOLETS THE PALE CRIMINAL A GERMAN REQUIEM
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Down by the River where the Dead Men Go
by George P. Pelecanos
Sleeping off a night of drinking in a public park, Nick Stefanos is awakened by a dull plopping sound and a quiet splash that turns out to be the murder of Calvin Jetter, and the beginning of a grim investigation.
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The Last Good Kiss
by James Crumley
C.W. Sughrue, a Montana private eye, is hired to track down a failing author and winds up searching for Betty Sue Flowers, a woman missing for ten years in Haight-Ashbury.
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The Lonely Silver Rain
by John Dann MacDonald
Someone is trying to kill Travis McGee, someone linked to southern Florida's drug traffickers--either Miami's old-time underworld or the new generation of Latino drug barons--and in order to save his own life, McGee must detonate a drug war.
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The Long Goodbye
by Raymond Chandler
ONE OF TIME MAGAZINE'S 100 BEST MYSTERY AND THRILLER BOOKS OF ALL TIME • The renowned novel from crime fiction master Raymond Chandler, with the "quintessential urban private eye" (Los Angeles Times), Philip Marlowe • Featuring the iconic character that inspired the film Marlowe, starring Liam Neeson. In noir master Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye, Philip Marlowe befriends a down on his luck war veteran with the scars to prove it. Then he finds out that Terry Lennox has a very wealthy nymphomaniac wife, whom he divorced and remarried and who ends up dead. And now Lennox is on the lam and the cops and a crazy gangster are after Marlowe.
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Alice in La-la Land
by Robert Campbell
Whistler was not usually a bodyguard, but Nell Twelvetrees had a body worth protecting. And her husband, a famous talk-show host, hid a psychopathic sadism beneath his smiling face. "Mr. Campbell confirms that he is a master of the hard-boiled Chandleresque manner".--New York Times.
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The Zebra-Striped Hearse
by Ross Macdonald
One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years Strictly speaking, Lew Archer is only supposed to dig up the dirt on a rich man's suspicious soon-to-be son-in-law. But in no time at all Archer is following a trail of corpses from the citrus belt to Mazatlan. And then there is the zebra-striped hearse and its crew of beautiful, sunburned surfers, whose path seems to keep crossing the son-in-law's—and Archer's—in a powerful, fast-paced novel of murder on the California coast.