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.