Showing results by author "Ace Atkins" in All Categories

Gabby Leggett left her Boston family with big dreams of making it big as a model/actress in Hollywood. Two years later, she disappears from her apartment. Her family, former boyfriend, friends - and the police - have no idea where she is and no leads. Leggett's mother hires Spenser to find her, with help of his former apprentice, Zebulon Sixkill, now an LA private eye. Spenser barely has time to unpack before the trail leads to a powerful movie studio boss, the Armenian mob, and a shadowy empowerment group some say might be a dangerous cult.

Who are cash-strapped George and Jay to say no to a stranger’s offer of $10,000? The gig: fly to Havana and retrieve the old gent’s “family valuables,” hidden in Cuba since the Revolution. All expenses paid. At their disposal is a safe place to stay, a driver, a crudely drawn map, and a translator and guide. And what a guide. She’s a knockout named Carmen, lush and movie-star gorgeous. But their lady in Havana arrives with a warning: Trust no one. To say the least. Because nothing on this scavenger hunt is what it seems.

A modern, Southern reinvention of The Maltese Falcon, Crossroad Blues won noir fans with its nod to the masters and thrilled readers with a wild ride along Highway 61. It’s here that we first meet Nick Travers, an ex-New Orleans Saint turned Tulane University blues historian. Nick searches for the lost recordings of 1930s bluesman Robert Johnson—and a missing colleague—and finds trouble at every turn.

In the 1950s, Ruby Walker boarded the Illinois Central from Mississippi to the Promised Land—Chicago. She became one of the greatest blues singers the city has ever known, only to lose everything when she was convicted of murdering her lover and producer, Billy Lyons, in 1959. She's been locked in a prison cell ever since. Now, a flickering hope emerges for Walker in the form of letters from a Tulane University blues historian named Nick Travers. She agrees to an interview only in exchange for him checking out what she calls the truth behind Lyons's last hours.

When crime-fighting attorney Albert Patterson is gunned down in a Phenix City, Alabama, alley in the spring of 1954, the entire town seems to pause for just a moment—and when it starts up again, there is something different about it. A small group of men meet and decide they have had enough, but what that means and where it will take them is something they could not have foreseen.

1955: Tampa, Florida, is a city pulsing with Sicilian and Cuban gangsters, cigar factories, sweet rum, and violence. The death of retired kingpin Charlie Wall—the White Shadow—has shocked the city, sending cops, reporters, and associates scrambling to find those responsible. As the trail winds through neighborhoods rich and poor, enmeshing the innocent and corrupt alike all the way down to the streets and casinos of Havana, an extraordinary story of revenge, honor, and greed emerges.

In July 1933, a gangster staged the kidnapping-for-ransom of an Oklahoma oilman. He would live to regret it. What started clean soon turns messy as two of “Machine Gun” Kelly’s partners cut themselves into the action, a determined former Texas Ranger makes tracking Kelly his mission, and his wife, ever alert to her own self-interest, starts playing both sides. Set in the first days of the modern FBI, Infamous is a blend of historical novel and crime story featuring an unexpected hero, some of the most colorful supporting characters in recent crime fiction, and femme fatale Kathryn Kelly.

San Francisco, September 1921: Silent-screen comedy star Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle is throwing a wild party in his suite at the St. Francis Hotel-girls, jazz, bootleg hooch...and a dead actress named Virginia Rappe. The D.A. says it was Arbuckle who killed her—crushed her under his weight—and brings him up on manslaughter charges. William Randolph Hearst's newspapers stir up the public and demand a guilty verdict.

With a precise eye for detail, Atkins takes Nick Travers on a journey into the hidden pockets of New Orleans, the battered roadhouses and truck stops of Mississippi, and the streets of Memphis that only an insider could know. The plan is simple. All Nick Travers, a former professional football player turned professor, has to do is drive up Highway 61 from New Orleans to Memphis and track down the lost brother of one of his best friends. But as Travers knows, these simple jobs seldom turn out smoothly.

When music mogul Teddy Paris, a former teammate from the New Orleans Saints, visits Nick Travers and asks him to help find $700,000 taken from a rap prodigy, Nick can't turn down his friend. The missing money will pay a bounty on Paris's head that was set by a crosstown rival, a street-hard thug named Cash. Nick soon finds himself lost in the world of Gucci-lined Bentleys and endless bottles of Cristal champagne. He sets out with fifteen-year-old rap star ALIAS, seeking a team of grifters that conned the kid.