Murder Room
15 total works
It began with the murder of a beautiful woman, the adulterous wife of a mild-mannered professor. Then a corrupt cop was gunned down in a phone booth.
After that, the killer who called himself Raptor moved through a list of players, playboys and mobsters from Palm Springs to Minnesota. With each hit came a phone call to San Francisco organised crime investigator Dante Stagnoro, and a disguised, taunting voice daring Stagnoro to stop him. Raptor is a killer like no other Stagnoro has ever pursued.
And the final truth of his death trip - a truth about man, nature and God - will not be revealed until the last victim is claimed.
Joe Gores collects here fourteen stories spanning the five decades of his varied writing career. In the title story, two bright young scientists set out to prove there is no good-dispensing God by demonstrating that there is no evil-dispensing Satan - with unforeseen results.
Sneaking onto an anti-terrorism course for law enforcement officers produced 'Watch For It', featuring an urban terrorist who is clever, manipulative and without pity. A childhood spent around the Mississippi marshes informs 'Quit Screaming', putting a Miami mobster into a midnight swamp where he buried a man he murdered.
'Sleep the Big Sleep' sees a nerdy dreamer finally get his chance, inspired by a photo taken of the author for the cover of a crime magazine. And 'Goodbye, Pops', which won an Edgar Award, is based on a story written by the author while at college, on the death of his beloved grandfather.
A respectable citizen trips on a store escalator. On cue, Cadillacs start disappearing from lots all over San Francisco, as a team of scam artists use pure criminal genius to do one California bank out of $1.3 million of Detroit's finest.
The bank hires Daniel Kearny Associates to get the cars back, and soon Kearny's team discover what they're up against: Gypsies. Dangerous charmers, they are one nation united in street crime. The escalator fall has mortally wounded their beloved King, and they're planning to attend his funeral Cadillac-style. And the action won't let up until both repo-men and Gypsies reach the dying Gypsy King - and the biggest scam of all.
After eight hard years in San Quentin prison, Runyan is out and ready to lead a quiet life - an honest life. But certain people have been planning for the day of his release - people who desperately want the two million dollars in diamonds Runyan was carrying just before he went to jail ... Like the insurance investigator who arranged his parole. A beautiful woman who wants him alive. The unknown killer who definitely wants him dead.
Runyan goes to recover the diamonds from where he has stashed them, so he can buy his way out ... but the diamonds are gone. Now he must pull another robbery - something he swore never to repeat - and use the proceeds to stay alive.
The bank gives Chandra the dancer final notice; Daniel Kearny Associates take her red Caddy, then the trouble starts. In the car the DKA men find $500 in new bills. Suddenly the bank wants to give the Caddy back, and Dan Kearny smells a crime. Putting a tail on Chandra leads the DKA team to a mobster, a former porn star and the wrong side of a blackmail payoff.
At the end of the trail waits an underworld shark with a deadly grin - the kind of man who plays murderous games, and plays to win ...
Ballard has seventy-two hours to find out who attacked his partner, Bart Heslip, who's lying in the hospital in a coma. Now Ballard is racing around the frayed edges of Oakland and San Francisco tracing down deadbeats. A stripper, an embezzler and an ex-con all have repo'd cars in common. Do they also share a murder? The clock's ticking away like Bart's heartbeat, but Ballard is up against a dead skip, a blank wall.
Then Ballard's boss, Dan Kearny, jumps into the hunt, loving every minute of it - and hurtling them both toward the barrel of a gun ...
Once Eddie Dain had a life: a beautiful wife, a happy young son and a thriving business catching soft-core bad guys by computer. Then he hung onto an odd-looking case and made a mysterious enemy - one whose calling cards were two men with shotguns.
Now Eddie is reborn - as a dead man. Known by the single name of Dain, he pumps his body and his psyche as he follows a trail of sweaty white-collar crime to the steamy Louisiana bayous. Here, in this torrid landscape, is a woman on the run who can lead him to what he wants more than anything: the man who took everything from him ...
It's 1953, and Pierce Duncan leaves college an innocent. Seeking the freedom of the road, Dunc sets off to see America. His road trip brings strange, fateful encounters: with a savage Georgia chain gang; with a killer on a lonely Texas road; and with the darker side of the Las Vegas fight game. Finally, Dunc reaches San Francisco, a city seething with the unexpected.
In the backstreets and along the freight lines, Dunc meets beautiful women, dangerous men . . . and murder. In California, home of the lost and the outcast, he joins up with the hard-nosed head of a private investigation agency, and his life changes for ever.
A violence-marked love letter to a time in America now lost, Cases is as vivid as a lightning storm over a deserted highway, as unforgettable as a first kiss, as haunting as a dead woman's eyes.
Hollis Fletcher has no idea why someone has tried to kill him. Fletcher is a professional hunter with years of tracking experience, and he's going to find the man who left him for dead in the frozen Minnesota woods, and take vengeance. Soon he discovers he is after big game: someone in the entourage of Fletcher's boyhood friend, Gary Westergard - candidate for the presidency - pulled the trigger, and his own daughter is a key figure in the campaign. Hollis Fletcher is a threat to someone, someone who has taken steps to remove the problem. In failing, they've only made it worse.
The hunt has begun. Fletcher is skilled, patient and deadly - and his target never escapes ...
On a Hollywood studio lot, a dancing bear - a Gypsy in a fur suit - does a little sly pickpocketing. In San Francisco, Daniel Kearny Associates are waging a campaign to repossess twenty-seven classic cars from people who are creatively determined to keep them. And in a fortress in the Big Sur wilderness, a rich man vows to steal a collectors' item. Soon the bear, DKA and the millionaire entangle in a twisted plot of betrayal and murder.
When the dancing bear is killed, the police start searching for his beautiful wife, Yana. But Yana is eluding everyone - DKA included - and working a grift of her own.
Meanwhile a helicopter is headed for Big Sur, carrying the greatest scam of all.
Honolulu: Port of Call is a unique collection of short stories of the Hawaiian islands brought together by Joe Gores: thirteen tales by legendary writers including Jack London, Herman Melville, W. Somerset Maugham, Robert Louis Stevenson, Joseph Conrad and Joe Gores himself.
Yet these are tales chosen to entertain, rather than literary gems. They paint a picture of a Hawaii before the high-rise buildings went up; an era of missionaries and merchants, sailors and whalers, of the drama of East meeting West before, finally, urbanisation and the tourist buck killed off the Polynesian way of life almost completely.
Gores brings us a flavour of that lost way of life; a breath of the romance that still draws Western visitors to the islands in search of the exotic and, perhaps, of an innocence long lost.