Private

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James Patterson and Mark Pearson

For Hannah Shapiro, a beautiful young American student, this particular nightmare began eight years ago in Los Angeles, when Jack Morgan, owner of Private - the world's most exclusive detective agency - saved her from a horrific death. She has fled her country, but can't flee her past. The terror has followed her to London, and now it is down to former Royal Military Police Sergeant Dan Carter, head of Private London, to save her all over again. In central London, young women are being abducted off the street. When the bodies are found, some days later, they have been mutilated in a particularly mysterious way. Dan Carter's ex-wife, DI Kirsty Webb, is involved in the investigation and it looks likely that the two cases are gruesomely linked. Dan Carter draws on the whole resources of Private International in a desperate race against the odds. But the clock is ticking... Private may be the largest and most technologically advanced detection agency in the world, but the only thing they don't have is the one thing they need - time.

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John Shannon

In this novel, Jack Liffey once again searches the volatile and dangerous ethnic communities buried in the urban sprawl of Los Angeles. Jack is seeking another of the city's mysteriously lost souls. Originally published: New York: Carroll & Graf, 2002.

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Kinky Friedman

"Alone in his New York loft, the private detective Kinky Friedman, reflects on friendship and why all his friends are out of town. With time on his hands and feeling a little melancholy his mind turns to Stephanie DuPont - very hot but pretty much resistant to all his advances. The phone rings and Kinky's old contact Hoover from Honolulu is on the blower to report that Kinky's great friend Mike McGovern has disappeared while in the process of researching and writing his cookbook Eat, Drink and Be Kinky. He was last seen heading for the beach. Our hero flies to Hawaii, and in a series of farcical wild goose chases, that includes identifying a faceless corpse in the morgue and trying to ensnare what turn out to be hoax kidnappers, Kinky ends up visiting the local museum on the island and in a room full of ancient relics he stumbles upon a full size, sculpted wooden head that is a dead ringer for McGovern." -- Back cover.

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Michael Kurland

> In 1891, Sherlock Holmes, in a struggle with his archenemy, the Napoleon of crime, Professor James Moriarty, plunged with him over Reichenbach Falls to his inevitable death. All of England - indeed, the entire world - mourned the irreplaceable loss of the greatest detective. And that's where things stood until 1894, when Holmes suddenly reappeared in London, revealing himself to his friend Dr. John Watson, and resumed his activities as a consulting detective. Holmes remained very quiet and mysterious on those nearly three years he was missing, never revealing precisely where he'd been or what he'd done in the "hidden years." >Now, in this anthology of original stories, the truth about those thirty-five months is unveiled and Holmes's adventures described. While some of these stories place Holmes in such familiar locations as New York and San Francisco, others find him high in the Himalayas or above the Arctic Circle. With stories from such writers as Rhys Bowen, Peter Beagle, Carolyn Wheat, Michael Collins, and many others, *Sherlock Holmes: The Hidden Years* is a must-have book for every fan who has ever wondered about the untold adventures of Sherlock Holmes.