Jonathan Valin

Stoner is a private eye in the classic tradition: a loner with a history of failed relationships with women and all-too-successful relationships with bottles of scotch. He's unable to look away from the world's corruption-and unable to avoid trying to do something about it. His latest hopeless cause is Cindy Ann, a teenage hooker. She's not very pretty or bright or engaging ... she doesn't have much to offer at all. So when she disappears, it's all...

Detective Harry Stoner has seen better days. It's the middle of January and business is slower than a crawl. Curled up in his office with a paperback mystery, a little classical music on the radio, and a bottle of Scotch, Harry's ready to cut his losses and hibernate until spring. The only problem is that Harry's been living off Visa credit and Christmas cash, and the money faucet is beginning to run dry. Enter Leon Tubin, an odd little man with...

The professor was an eccentric old bird, and his daughter was a delicate flower. So how could Harry Stoner suspect the snake pit of hatred and greed he was walking into that winter day when he agreed to find a missing document for Professor Daryl Lovingwell? Following Sarah Lovingwell to a subversive group landed Stoner face-to-face with a towering ex-marine making a new career of murder. Before Stoner could catch his balance, one of the two Lovingwell’s...

Clients never tell the whole story. Harry Stoner had taken a snowy drive to Cincinnati psychiatrist Phil Pearson's mansion to hear the tale of daughter Kirsten-emotionally disturbed and missing. But the doctor left out the parts about his first wife's suicide and his second wife's bedroom eyes that were already chasing the winter cold from Stoner's blood. That's why Stoner suspected the search for Kirsten could take a kinky turn. He'd seen teens driven...

Sheltered but precocious Robbie Segal has run away from home, a small brick house on an unexceptional street. Her desperate mother has asked Harry Stoner to find her. What begins as an ordinary missing-persons case, a case that should be settled without any violence at all, suddenly changes in an impossibly terrifying way. Now Harry is on the trail of a shockingly brutal act of murder, because it might lead him to a runaway girl, because it had become...

Mason Greenleaf-good teacher, good friend, fond lover-vanishes from his Mount Adams home one hot summer afternoon, leaving a haunting mystery behind him. For his fellow teachers, former students, and friends, his disappearance is inexplicable and tragic. For his lover, Cindy Dorn, it is a cruel blow that shakes the very foundations of her world. She calls Harry Stoner for help. Soon after, Greenleaf turns up dead in a sleazy hotel. The police call...