William Arden Livres

A pawnbroker dies, and Fortune investigates his brother, a French soldier It’s summer in New York, and the city is boiling. Unable to stand the heat, Dan Fortune’s girlfriend Marty asks him to pawn her diamond ring in order to buy them a few weeks by the seashore. Fortune does as told, but picks up some business while at the pawnshop. There he meets Claude Marais, brother of the pawnbroker and veteran of the humiliating French defeats in Vietnam and Algiers. Fearing that someone is trying to kill her husband, Claude’s wife hires Fortune to guard him against a mysterious German with a years-old wartime grudge. Because money is tight, Fortune violates his own policy of avoiding suspicious cases, and agrees to spend a night standing guard outside Claude’s hotel room. In the morning Claude is fine, but the pawnbroker hangs from a rope in his shop’s back room. To avenge the pawnbroker, Fortune’s vacation will have to be postponed.

The three investigators try to solve a mystery involving a gold Indian amulet and a weird laughing shadow that appeared to them in the night.

Searching for a legendary pirate treasure, the three investigators find a band of modern day pirates.

Dan Fortune, the iconic private detective who operates out of New York's bohemian Chelsea district, has just taken on a baffling case. It should've been an ordinary business transaction, but Leslie Carter - Fortune's friend and a retired belly dancer - asks for help. It's time for her new husband to pay the lease on a parking garage they own, but her husband can't find anyone to take the money. A mammoth corporation owns the property now, and no one there will see him or talk with him about it. It's 1975, and the country is sliding toward recession. Already on a financial cliff, the Carters will lose everything if they can't hold onto the lease. When Fortune goes out to handle the matter, he finds himself the victim of a strange runaround, too. But his ends in murder. From Manhattan's executive towers to the raucous saloons and bordellos of Hoboken, Fortune is caught up in the lives of men so powerful they can order murder with a nod, and of twisted criminals who openly attack him to stop his probing. There are women, too, some greedy, some gentle, who conceal private nightmares behind smooth smiles. Someone is hiding the secret that has driven an unlikely killer to murder, and no matter what, Fortune intends to uncover him - or her.

"Who shoots a bag lady?" the policeman asked. No one had the answer - yet. In this riveting novel set in 1988 New York, private investigator Dan Fortune faces a tough question: Who'd want to murder Rosa Gruenfeld, nearly ninety years old and a lifelong fiery Communist living in a derelict hotel in the bohemian Chelsea district? In the hospital, confused and hallucinating, she's visited by son Nicholas, who walked away from her years before, fed up with her Marxist doctrine and her shopping bags of pamphlets and handouts. But Granddaughter Lennie has her own causes, and one of them is Rosa. A rock singer, Lennie hires Dan to uncover the would-be killer. Dan promptly finds himself targeted, too, and the only way he's going to stop whoever it is, is to find out who in Rosa's past hated her so much he or she still wanted her dead. From her three husbands to her children and her brother, to the police and to the FBI, Dan is propelled on a trail of history and politics, bitterness and hope. As Kirkus Reviews said, "When it's all over, the pieces of the puzzle fit with sweet inevitability. Dan survives a variety of attacks to fight the good fight another day. The reader can hope it's in a story as suspenseful, character-rich, and absorbing as this."