Endgame

April 24, 2017
The vitality and suspense that marked this long-running series are long gone, as shown by MWA Grand Master Pronzini’s 41st Nameless Detective novel (after 2015’s Vixen). James Cahill, a regional sales director, retains the San Francisco PI to find his agoraphobic wife, Alice, who has disappeared from their Bay Area home. Her sister believes that Cahill murdered Alice, and he’s eager for Nameless to exonerate him. While there’s no obvious motive for foul play, Nameless is intrigued to learn that Alice, a romance novelist, was recently accused of plagiarism. Meanwhile, operative Jake Runyon, Nameless’s partner, looks into the seemingly accidental death of a man found in a locked cabin by his wife, who just wants to identify the woman she suspects her husband was with at the time. The dramatic developments in the characters’ personal lives aren’t likely to move readers not already invested in the series. While Pronzini does include an impossible crime, he has crafted much more imaginative resolutions in previous installments. Agent: Dominick Abel, Dominick Abel Literary Agency.

May 15, 2017
An autumnal pair of cases for the Nameless Detective Agency explores the strains in two very different marriages.Wives leave their husbands all the time, but James Cahill assures Nameless (Zigzag, 2016, etc.) that his wife never would have left him. Ever since she killed someone in a car accident four years ago, Alice Cahill has become severely agoraphobic and couldn't even have ventured out to her front porch without suffering a panic attack. The members of Alice's laughably small circle--her sister, Kendra Nesbitt; her brother-in-law and physician, Paul Nesbitt; and jewelry designer Fran Woodward, her best friend from college--don't know a thing. The only leads are a threatened lawsuit by Grace Dellbrook, who insists that Alice's romance novel The Convenient Bride plagiarized parts of Grace's earlier What the Bride Found Out, and a neighbor's account of seeing a light-colored sedan pull into the Cahill garage on the day Alice went missing. While Nameless beats the bushes, his operative Jake Runyon is ripping the lid off a different set of marital and extramarital secrets. Patricia Dennison is convinced that her husband, Philip, who accidentally died during a stay in a remote cabin he borrowed from a college friend, wasn't spending his week away alone, and she wants Jake to find the other woman so she can say a few choice things to her. Jake finds out a lot more than that, making unwelcome discoveries about Philip Dennison, his women, and Joshua Fleming, Jake's own long-estranged son. Middling, professional-grade work for this long-running series, whose most notable feature is a broad hint in its closing pages that it may well be its nameless hero's last case.

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June 1, 2017
The Nameless Detective is still semiretired, but when his other operatives are engaged, he puts on his game face to help. James Cahill's agoraphobic wife, Alice, is missing; prior to vanishing, she hadn't left the house in years, ever since a car accident in which her friend died with Alice at the wheel. The police believe Alice was murdered and suspect James of being the killer, prompting him to hire Nameless to find out what really happened. Meanwhile, the agency's top operative, Jake Runyon, is driving to a small town in Northern California to claim the body of a man who was found dead in a remote cabin. The local cops believe it was an accident, but the victim's wife is convinced her husband was having an affair. She wants Runyon to evaluate the local police work and then find the other woman. The Nameless series has been one of the genre's standouts for decadesmainstream hard-boiled fare, rich in characterand even as Pronzini himself hints at the endgame, his mastery remains undiminished.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)