Spook

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.