Unsuccessfully contacting an unpleasant client's ex-wife, the Nameless Detective must subsequently track down the client when he disappears, while his partner, Jake Runyon, conducts a personal investigation to determine if his girlfriend's son is being beaten by his father.

Shaken after a hair's-breadth escape from death, Nameless has made changes in his professional life, 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. Clues are few, but Pronzini, working at the top of his form, takes his seasoned private-eye hero to a new phase of a still-evolving...

Reluctantly agreeing to investigate the theft of a valuable rare book collection, Nameless finds the heist tied to a stalking case involving a pair of brothers who are being hounded by a twisted adversary who has decimated their father's grave.

Investigating the death of a woman that has been ruled accidental by the police but that her sister insists was a murder by a known perpetrator, a reluctant Nameless begins to suspect that the victim's sister is telling the truth when he learns unsettling facts about her life.

Bill, the "Nameless Detective," and his wife Kerry were in the Sierra foothills, just outside of Six Pines, falling in love with a cabin. It was all perfect, until Kerry went missing. They'd seen Balfour at breakfast at the diner and Kerry remembered his name...PR people are like that. Which was unfortunate, because when she ran into him along the trail on that sunny afternoon and called him by name, he panicked. And, that's when Bill's nightmare...

Two novellas and two short stories featuring Mystery Writers of America Grandmaster Bill Pronzini's iconic Nameless Detective! Zigzag is an original novella, in which a safe and simple accident investigation becomes the unraveling of a twisted murder scheme. Grapplin, which first appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, deals with the kind of missing person case that can end in only one of two ways, closure or heartbreak. In the second short,...

"When Nameless is hired by Cory Beckett, a beautiful young woman who claims to be a model, to find her missing brother, Kenneth, it seems to be a routine matter. Kenneth has fled San Francisco in a drug-induced panic to avoid trial on a charge of stealing a valuable necklace from the alcoholic wife of the man for whom he works, wealthy yachtsman Andrew Vorhees. When agency operative Jake Runyon locates and questions the frightened young man, Cory...