Dell Shannon: 86 books

When Nonie Johnson kidnaps her daughter from the adoptive parents, Jesse Falkenstein is brought in. Something seemed wrong from the start - Nonie just wasn't the maternal type, and then she suddenly vanished from sight. The search for Nonie Johnson yielded nothing but a series of wild goose...

Mystery writer Brendan Monroe is tormented by the fear that his flamboyant fictional detective P. I. Roy Barron has come to life. Is the author losing his mind? Or is someone making it seem that way? When Barron is found dead, Sergeant Dan Valentine of the Santa Monica police focuses his investigation...

As always, Jesse Falkenstein and Sergeant Clock have a score of cases on their hands, but Jesse is mainly interested in the murder of Margaret Brandon, a trance medium. He was her lawyer and liked her, and someone had gone to great efforts to make her death seem accidental. But with so many...

Lawyer Jesse Falkenstein thought his secretary Miss Williams was a remarkably efficient typist, but he felt she had drawbacks as a legal secretary. She had an earnest face, unfashionable tight curls and she irritated him very much. Jesse wished he could fire her. But she'd been his secretary...

Ivor Maddox and his men of the Hollywood police department face, as ever, a formidable load of tricky and puzzling cases. An unknown woman walks into a lawyer's office and shoots him dead: who is she and what is her motive? A housewife in a reputable neighbourhood is found slaughtered. And,...

'The best American police procedural of the year' Anthony Boucher Sergeant Ivor Maddox and the Wilcox Street precinct do not have time to rest on their laurels. Currently there is a curious wave of shoplifting among teenagers, an elderly pensioner has been shot dead from the window of a passing...

Raymond Austin, a neat, discreet banker, was Jesse Falkenstein's client. Jesse should only have been concerned with Austin's wife, Tamar, because she was being sued for divorce. But then Tamar is found dead, so Jesse has to find out a lot more about her and her friends: Lee Davenport, the golden...

'A Luis Mendoza story means superlative suspense' Los Angeles Times A beautiful Hollywood blonde inexplicably vanishes from the restaurant she is dining in with her fiancé and is found with her neck broken and miles away from the scene of her disappearance. Who lured her away? How?...

'My favourite American crime-writer' New York Herald Tribune The Wilcox Street precinct is as busy as ever. Sergeant Maddox and his team face three tricky murder cases, with motives that turn out to be as strange and bizarre as the crimes themselves. But it is not only murder that is...

Jesse Falkenstein was just putting away his notes at the end of the day when he was visited by Mrs Lester, an acquaintance of his sister, who came to him claiming her husband, Glen, had been seen frequently dining with another woman. Jesse was loath to get involved, even though Mrs Lester was...

Old Vandeveer is an odd client for the famous Jesse Falkenstein; dressed head to toe in shabby clothes it seems like he can hardly afford Jesse's standard fee to draw up a will. But when he and his wife are murdered a few weeks later, Falkenstein is launched on an intricate search for a fortune the...

With a brief note to her employer, Dorrie Mayo left her job - and another note taped to a neighbour's door claimed she was taking her baby to live with her in-laws on the other side of the U.S. A natural enough thing for a young widow with a fifteen-month-old daughter to do. Only why didn't...

The Manning Company is a big business, but although it was headed by Claire Manning, the founder's widow, before her death, her son John had been running the firm for many years and was the undisputed successor. So why did Claire leave almost everything to her third cousin, whom no one associated...

Glamorous TV star Jan Warden is found gruesomely murdered in her bed. In her climb to fame, she has made plenty of enemies and the police are not short of suspects. It has fallen to Ivor and Sue Maddox and their LAPD colleagues to solve the murder, which they must do under intense media pressure. Crime...