The most recommended private investigator books

I not only loved this book (and all of Ross Macdonald’s writing) but he wrote his only screenplay for me as a producer in Hollywood, based on this book, The Instant Enemy. Working with him closely on this book taught me a great deal about writing complicated character-driven thrillers. He was a master at that, and it was an extraordinary education for me.

Peter Lovesey’s detective discovers the power of art in this recent mystery set in Bath, England.

This book in the series is unusual, since most of the story is told through the eyes of a cheap private detective, who views Diamond as a grumpy old man. A body found in an antique sarcophagus and the disappearance of the antique dealer is at the start of the mystery, but the piece of art which was purchased in an antiques roadshow drives the plot.

Greed and ambition, stirred by the provenance of the art, results in several murder attempts which confound Diamond’s and the private detective’s investigation.

Early Autumn made me cry from two directions. As a tween, reading about Spenser’s rescue of Paul, a shut-down, emotionally neglected boy that Spenser first assesses as “an unlovely little bastard”, I cried in sympathy and relief for Paul.

Over a summer, Spenser taught him skills, built up his strength and gave him the confidence to find his own dreams, before leaving him at the doorway to the life he now knew he wanted. As an adult, I cried with joy for Spenser, who connected with a stranger, taught what he had to teach, and changed a life.

Really helping someone in a lasting way is rarely so easy as it was in this book, but it’s a worthwhile dream and this Cinderella story gets me every time.

It's 1932. For the best history thriller I have ever read, Max Allan Collins spins together characters like Al Capone, Frank Nitti, George Raft, and even Ronald "Dutch" Reagan.

True Detective is the story of a young cop, Nathan Heller, who vows never to be corrupted, even though he's already done something and will do more on the wrong side of the law. Maybe.

While it's a fantastic story, and the characters and dialogue are unbeatable, the best part for me is that while this didn't happen precisely as Collins wrote it, the story was pretty damn close to reality.

The first of Sue Grafton’s groundbreaking alphabet series, this humorous, engaging series is told by private investigator, Kinsey Milhone. In book one, we find the tough, smart Kinsey setting up her detective agency office while taking the case of Nikki Fife, out on parole for killing her husband. Nikki hires Kinsey to discover who really killed him.   

I love Kinsey Milhone, every book reveals her smarts as well as her humor and humanity. Sue Grafton is mystery writer whose books I grabbed up as soon as they were published. I have read every one of her alphabet series. I would tell a friend that A Is For Alibi is funny and has a terrific, main character. I grew up on Dorothy Sayers, Agatha Christie, and others, but Grafton’s work presented me with a whole new kind of mystery. My mysteries are written in this tradition and readers often compare them… show more.

In 2009, after years of writing Easy Rawlins novels set in a past Los Angeles, Walter Mosley began a new series set in contemporary New York. African-American Leonid McGill is a hard PI, with a complex seamy past who aspires to become a better person, despite the pressures of being a husband and family man caught in a near-loveless marriage. The New York in which McGill lives and struggles is the upscale but still gritty descendant of earlier versions of the city in the Mike Hammer novels of Mickey Spillane and the Matthew Scudder novels of Buffalo-born Lawrence Block. It is a land of wealth and culture but danger and deceit.

This is one of a series of Spenser novels. It is set in modern-day Boston, and this novel follows the protagonist, Spenser, as he tries to find out who shot his associate Hawk. Parker takes the reader into a murky netherworld where all is grey, even justice.

The novel's pacing is slick, the characterization believable, and the dialog takes one back to Raymond Chandler. I read it in two sittings. 

I love a good mystery that also makes me laugh. Kinky Friedman does that on almost every page. He is most known for his singing and songwriting, (and his run for Texas Governor), but I’ve found all his books to be page-turners and laugh-out-loud funny. In Spanking Watson, Kinky calls upon his real-life friends to help him solve a mystery that he instigated. Kind of a test to evaluate his future assistant, or Watson to his Sherlock. 

This novel introduced Matthew Scudder, an ex-New York City cop turned unlicensed private investigator. In this case, a young woman has been brutally murdered and the police believe they have solved the crime. But the victim’s father hires Scudder to look deeper into the case which will produce more than its share of surprises. The beauty of this series, though, lies in the development of the Matthew Scudder character, who remains one of the most fascinating and compelling figures in all of crime fiction. The first chapter, which introduces Scudder, is one of the best opening chapters of any crime novel.

From the days of my youth, I’ve always had an interest in stories relating to the pursuit of murderers by a Sherlock Holmes type of character. Anthony Horowitz excels in this novel with his character, Daniel Hawthorne, an ex-detective who is determined to solve the mystery Horowitz so artfully lays out. While attending a literary festival at an island once held by the Nazis, two murders take place which throw shadows over those attending as they each are faced with Hawthorne, now on loan by the police, to aid in finding the killer. As a former federal investigator, I found myself relating to the characters, their personalities, and how they parlayed back and forth with Hawthorne. As such,  I heartedly recommend it.