Spook

Roll out the red carpet. Uncap a bottle of decent beer. Nameless is back, and Bill Pronzini's much-praised Bleeders did not conclude a series that Booklist calls "a stunning and unique achievement in crime fiction" and "one of the greatest-ever detective series." Instead, in Spook, the pivotal new twenty-eighth novel in the remarkably successful award-winning Nameless series, Pronzini, working at the top of his form, takes his seasoned private-eye hero to a new phase of a still-evolving thirty-year career. Shaken after a hair's-breadth escape from death, Nameless has made changes in his professional life, but he's not put himself out to pasture. Again he enters San Francisco's shadowy underworld, this time in a search for the identity of a gentle, mentally disturbed homeless man who has been found dead in an alley doorway. Clues are few, but eventually they bring the Nameless Detective to the small California town that drove the nameless victim tragically to murder and madness.