Items related to Spook (Nameless Detective)

Pronzini, Bill Spook (Nameless Detective) ISBN 13: 9781628153323

Spook (Nameless Detective) - Softcover

 
9781628153323: Spook (Nameless Detective)
View all copies of this ISBN edition:
 
 
With a new case, a new partner, and a new P.I., Nameless is back—and Bill Pronzini's much-praised Bleeders did not bring to a close the series that Booklist calls "a stunning and unique achievement in crime fiction" and "one of the greatest-ever detective series." Instead, in Spook, a pivotal novel in the remarkably successful Nameless Detective series, Pronzini, working at the top of his form, takes his seasoned private-eye hero into a new phase of a still-evolving thirty-year career.

Shaken after a hair's-breadth escape from death, Nameless has made some changes in his professional life: He's taken on his smart, young assistant Tamara as a partner, and he's hired Jake Runyon, a reticent ex-cop with a hammerhead jaw and troubled past, to work with him in the field. 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.

Beyond the dead man's street name—Spook (for his habit of talking at length with two ghosts he called Dot and Luke)—clues are few. Eventually, though, they take the investigation to Aspen Creek, the small, isolated town high in the California Sierras where the nameless victim has left behind him a tragic history of murder and madness. More dangerously, and unpredictably, in Nameless's low-end office on O'Farrell Street, seventeen years of repressed rage are about to erupt again into violent revenge—from a hot-eyed wild man brandishing a Micro Uzi SMG.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

Review:
Deaths among the homeless don't usually provoke background probes. But when a transient known as Spook (because "he had ghosts living inside his head") is shot outside the offices of a San Francisco film-industry supplier, employees there want to know why. "He didn't have a mean bone in his body," one staffer assures Bill Pronzini's Nameless Detective in Spook. So was this just the random slaying of a street crazy, or had someone from Spook's unknown past--maybe Dot or Luke, the apparitions he was always jabbering to--finally come gunning for him?

In Nameless' 28th novel-length outing, but his first since the pivotal Bleeders (in which he almost hung up his gumshoes for good), Pronzini's classically wrought sleuth is preparing for semiretirement, turning over responsibilities to his young PI partner, Tamara Corbin. He's also breaking in a new investigator, reserved ex-cop and widower Jake Runyon, to whom he hands off the identity search--little knowing how quickly that case will turn ugly, linking the "gentle, friendly" Spook to the murder of another homeless man and a long-ago triple homicide in the California Sierras. Meanwhile, Nameless finishes up a high-profile dig into questionable practices among city employees. This secondary plot lacks the intrigue of Runyon's task; however, both investigations generate action, including a hostage situation and a not-so-merry chase during a Christmas benefit. More than two decades after this series' initial installment, The Snatch, Nameless's assignments have become less conventional, and he's been mellowed by age, marriage, and too much death. Yet, even at age 61, he's more vital than many newer, less deservedly cynical competitors. --J. Kingston Pierce

About the Author:
Bill Pronzini is simply one of the masters. He seems to have taken a crack at just about every genre: mysteries, noirish thrillers, historicals, locked-room mysteries, adventure novels, spy capers, men's action, westerns, and, of course, his masterful, long-running Nameless private detective series, now entering its fourth decade, with no signs of creative flagging. He's also ghosted several Brett Halliday short stories as Michael Shayne for Mike Shayne's Mystery Magazine, and has managed to collaborate with such fellow writers as John Lutz, Barry Wahlberg, Collin Wilcox and Marcia Muller. Still, if he never ventured into fiction writing, his non-fiction work, as both writer and editor, would still earn him a place in the P.I. genre's Hall of Fame. Besides his two tributes to some of the very worst in crime fiction (what he calls "alternative classics"), Gun in Cheek and Son of Gun in Cheek, and one on western fiction (entitled Six Gun in Cheek, naturally), he's the co-author (with Marcia Muller) of 1001 Midnights. The Mystery Writers of America have nominated him for Edgar Awards several times and his work has been translated into numerous languages and he's published in almost thirty countries. He was the very first president of the Private Eye Writers of America, and he's received three Shamus Awards from them, as well as its Lifetime Achievement Award in 1987. His passion for the old crime pulps is largely responsible for keeping them in the public's eye. He's amassed a huge collection of books and magazines and has always been an omnivorous reader; all of which made him a natural when it came to editing various anthologies. He admits "it was a pleasure tracking down good stories to fit a particular anthology theme." But after editing 80 or so of them over a period of twenty-some years, he decided it was "more than enough."

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.

  • PublisherSpeaking Volumes, LLC
  • Publication date2015
  • ISBN 10 1628153326
  • ISBN 13 9781628153323
  • BindingPaperback
  • Number of pages240
  • Rating

Other Popular Editions of the Same Title

9780786710867: Spook: A Nameless Detective Novel

Featured Edition

ISBN 10:  ISBN 13:  9780786710867
Publisher: Carroll & Graf Pub, 2002
Hardcover

  • 9780786253074: Spook: A "Nameless Detective" Novel

    Thornd..., 2003
    Hardcover

  • 9780754072492: Spook (A Nameless Detective novel)

    Imprin..., 2004
    Softcover

  • 9780754072485: Spook (A Nameless Detective Novel)

    Chiver..., 2003
    Hardcover

Top Search Results from the AbeBooks Marketplace

Stock Image

Pronzini, Bill
Published by Speaking Volumes, LLC (2015)
ISBN 10: 1628153326 ISBN 13: 9781628153323
New Softcover Quantity: 1
Seller:
GF Books, Inc.
(Hawthorne, CA, U.S.A.)

Book Description Condition: New. Book is in NEW condition. Seller Inventory # 1628153326-2-1

More information about this seller | Contact seller

Buy New
US$ 34.94
Convert currency

Add to Basket

Shipping: FREE
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds
Stock Image

Pronzini, Bill
Published by Speaking Volumes, LLC (2015)
ISBN 10: 1628153326 ISBN 13: 9781628153323
New Softcover Quantity: 1
Seller:
Book Deals
(Tucson, AZ, U.S.A.)

Book Description Condition: New. New! This book is in the same immaculate condition as when it was published. Seller Inventory # 353-1628153326-new

More information about this seller | Contact seller

Buy New
US$ 34.95
Convert currency

Add to Basket

Shipping: FREE
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds
Stock Image

Bill Pronzini
Published by Speaking Volumes, LLC (2015)
ISBN 10: 1628153326 ISBN 13: 9781628153323
New Paperback / softback Quantity: > 20
Seller:
THE SAINT BOOKSTORE
(Southport, United Kingdom)

Book Description Paperback / softback. Condition: New. New copy - Usually dispatched within 4 working days. Seller Inventory # B9781628153323

More information about this seller | Contact seller

Buy New
US$ 23.67
Convert currency

Add to Basket

Shipping: US$ 11.29
From United Kingdom to U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds
Stock Image

Bill Pronzini
Published by Speaking Volumes, LLC (2015)
ISBN 10: 1628153326 ISBN 13: 9781628153323
New Paperback / softback Quantity: > 20
Print on Demand
Seller:
THE SAINT BOOKSTORE
(Southport, United Kingdom)

Book Description Paperback / softback. Condition: New. This item is printed on demand. New copy - Usually dispatched within 5-9 working days. Seller Inventory # C9781628153323

More information about this seller | Contact seller

Buy New
US$ 24.00
Convert currency

Add to Basket

Shipping: US$ 11.29
From United Kingdom to U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds
Seller Image

Pronzini, Bill
Published by SPEAKING VOLUMES LLC (2015)
ISBN 10: 1628153326 ISBN 13: 9781628153323
New Softcover Quantity: > 20
Seller:
moluna
(Greven, Germany)

Book Description Condition: New. Seller Inventory # 904600294

More information about this seller | Contact seller

Buy New
US$ 22.61
Convert currency

Add to Basket

Shipping: US$ 52.97
From Germany to U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds