Narrator

Joe Barrett

Joe Barrett
  • 30th Anniversary Edition with a new introduction by the author

    Shamus Award winner and Edgar Award nominee Don Winslow combines breathless suspense, zany wit, and whiplash action in his latest novel featuring grad student/private eye Neal Carey. Now Neal is assigned to escort monkeyish octogenarian Natty Silver home from Las Vegas to Palm Springs. Natty, once a burlesque top banana, has a nonstop barrage of corny jokes, an eye for an aging cocktail waitress, and a chronic disappearing act.

    When Neal catches up with him, he can see why Natty doesn’t want to go home. Sole witness to a crime, he’s now the quarry of hard-faced suits, a fascist con artist, and a career-track assassin. And bodyguard Neal, scorching through the trackless desert at eighty miles per hour, brooding on his inner child by freezing starlight, and looking down the barrel of one gun too many, is soon dodging vultures and on the brink of a surprise watery grave.

  • 30th Anniversary Edition with a new introduction by the author

    Neal Carey has to keep the mob, the FBI, and a major television personality from killing his newest client, but he’s tempted to do the job himself.

    Sometime student and ever-reluctant detective Neal Carey would rather be finishing a dull doctoral thesis than staring down the nose of a loaded gun, but his new assignment doesn’t sound dangerous. All he has to do is pull off the ultimate makeover: turn Polly Paget, a gum-chewing, foul-mouthed, big-haired broad, into a perfect lady in time to testify in a rape case against Jack Landis, head of the Family Cable Network and America’s most beloved family man. But Polly isn’t cooperating, and everyone (including a former FBI agent, an obsessive-compulsive hit man, the Mafia, a porn prince, and a slew of tabloid reporters) is on her trail, turning Neal’s “simple” assignment into a deadly game of duck-duck-goose.

    In a hellish and hilarious escapade that takes him from the deserts of Nevada to the bright lights of Las Vegas and finally to a hair-raising climax in a shoddily built amusement park, Neal tries to escape the mob’s big guns while taking a slippery walk up the world’s biggest water slide.

  • 30th Anniversary Edition with a new introduction by the author

    From domestic war to barroom brawls, grad-student-turned-PI Neal Carey’s got more than studying on his plate.

    Neal Carey’s three-year confinement in a Chinese monastery is finally over, but his troubles are just beginning. The elusive financial benefactors who have bought his freedom expect a return on their investment. They want him to find Cody McCall, a two-year-old boy recently abducted by his father in a bitter Hollywood custody battle, a task that will propel Neal from the glittering Hollywood hills to the remote wilds of Nevada.

    To find Cody, Neal has to turn outlaw in a land of two-bit casinos and roadside cathouses to infiltrate a vicious white supremacist group spouting hatred and dealing in terror. But the deeper undercover he goes, the deadlier the game becomes. Now Neal must force a showdown with the group’s crazed leader and find Cody before the missing toddler ends up lost in a world of unspeakable evil.

  • 30th Anniversary Edition with a new introduction by the author

    Robert Pendleton is a chemical genius with a fertilizer worth a fortune to whoever controls the formula. Not surprisingly, the Bank, his notoriously exclusive backer, wants to keep an eye on its investment. But so does the CIA. And the Chinese government. And a few shadier organizations. So when Pendleton disappears from a conference in San Francisco, along with all of his research, Neal Carey enters the picture.

    Neal knows the Bank is calling in its chips in return for paying his grad school bills. He thinks this assignment will be a no-brainer until he meets the beguiling Li Lan and touches off a deadly game of hide-and-seek that will lead him from San Francisco’s Chinatown to the lawless back streets of Hong Kong, and finally into the dark heart of China. In a world where no one is what they seem, Neal must unravel the mystery of a beautiful woman and reach the fabled Buddha’s Mirror, a mist-shrouded lake where all secrets are revealed.

  • 30th Anniversary Edition with a new introduction by the author

    “One of America’s greatest storytellers.”―Stephen King

    Neal Carey is not your usual private eye. A graduate student at Columbia University, he grew up on the streets of New York, usually on the wrong side of the law. Then he met a PI who introduced him to the Bank, an exclusive institution with a sideline in keeping its wealthy clients happy and out of trouble. They pay Neal’s college tuition, and Neal gets an education that can’t be found in any textbook, from learning how to trail a suspect to mastering the proper way to search a room.

    Now it’s payback time. The Bank wants Neal to put his skills to work in finding Allie Chase, the rebellious teenage daughter of a prominent senator. The problem is that she’s gone underground in the London punk scene. To get her back, Neal has to follow her into a violent netherworld where drugs run rampant and rage is the name of the game.

  • “Freeman’s Bourne novels might get more publicity, but his Stride novels are where his skills as a storyteller are really showcased. First-rate.” — Booklist

    A woman has been kidnapped.
    Now Jonathan Stride must decide if her husband wants her back … dead or alive.

    After nearly dying of a gunshot wound, Jonathan Stride has been on leave from the Duluth Police for more than a year. When his partner, Maggie Bei, gets called about a suspicious abduction involving a local lawyer, she tells Stride it’s time for him to come back.

    Attorney Gavin Webster says he paid $100,000 in ransom money to the men who kidnapped his wife. Now they’ve disappeared with the cash, and she’s still missing. Gavin claims to be desperate to find her—but Stride discovers that the lawyer had plenty of motive to be the mastermind behind the crime.

    Even as Stride digs for the truth about Gavin Webster and his wife, he must also deal with a crisis in his own marriage.

    His wife, Serena, is struggling after the death of her mother, the abusive woman she hadn’t seen in twenty-five years. When she loses control at a crime scene and draws her gun on a fellow cop, Serena finds herself kicked off the Webster case. Alone at her desk, she begins hunting through old police files and starts to ask questions about a mother’s death that was written off as suicide. That death haunts Serena like an echo of her own childhood—but her obsession with it takes a terrible toll.

    As Serena shuts him out of her despair, and his own investigation grows increasingly tangled, Stride wonders whether going back to his detective work was the right decision. But all he can do is keep moving forward. Because Stride fears the Webster kidnapping may be only one part of a horrific murder conspiracy.

    And it’s not over yet.

  • Featuring a new Jack Reacher story by Andrew Child!

    A dangerous drifter, a hired gun, a grisly corpse—you never know who you’ll run into at the Hotel California.

    Eight deliciously talented mystery authors have lent their skills of crafting murder and suspense to this collection of gripping short stories. Each of these eight provocative tales is designed to entertain and mystify—and maybe even chill you to your core. Get lost in the wild imaginations of such New York Times bestselling writers as Andrew Child, Heather Graham, Reed Farrel Coleman, and John Gilstrap, plus authors Rick Bleiweiss, Jennifer Graeser Dornbush, Amanda Flower, and Don Bruns. From the titular tale “Hotel California” to a new, original Jack Reacher adventure, these stories have a little something for every mystery lover.

    Go ahead. Check in, enjoy some room service, and stay until the very last tantalizing page. Just don’t forget to search the closet or behind the curtains.

  • “You’re safe, Stride. I found the body at the Deeps. I buried him.”

    Jonathan Stride’s best friend, Steve Garske, makes a shocking deathbed confession: he protected Stride by covering up a murder. Hours later, the police dig up Steve’s yard and find a body with a bullet hole in its skull.

    Stride is pretty sure he knows who it is. Seven years ago, an out-of-town reporter disappeared while investigating anonymous allegations of rape against a prominent politician. Back then, the police believed that the reporter drowned at a dangerous swimming hole called the Deeps… but the discovery of the body changes everything. Now Stride’s partner, Maggie Bei, is forced to ask Stride an uncomfortable question: Did you kill him?

    Stride is obviously hiding things. He was the last person to see the reporter alive. And he admits lying to Maggie about that meeting, but won’t tell her why. With suspicion in the murder pointing at him, Stride finds himself off the case and on leave from the Duluth Police.

    His only ally in clearing his name is his wife, Serena, who retraces the reporter’s investigation into the explosive allegations. The clues all point to a hot Duluth summer years earlier that everyone in town would prefer to forget.

    Someone was willing to kill rather than let those long-ago secrets come out, and the suspect with the strongest motive … is Stride.