This series is a small treasure. --BOOKLIST

A killer terrorizes Chicago's diverse Uptown neighborhood. Private investigator Paul Whelan's specialty is tracking down missing persons, but when his good friend is found slain in an alley, Whelan is steered down a path of violence as he searches for answers.

His investigation is interrupted by the arrival of an attractive young woman, Jean Agee, who is on her own search for her missing brother. But as clues lead Whelan to believe the two cases may be connected, the body count rises quickly, and he finds himself racing to catch a killer before he strikes again.

In the summer of 1967, a Florida bookie is found dead in a Chicago motel, a businessman is missing along with a satchel of money, and Private Eye Harry Strummer is in the middle of it.

A shaggy, satisfying valentine to Chicago's seedy uptown. --KIRKUS

The body of a small-time drug dealer washes up in Belmont Harbor among the yachts of Chicago's wealthy. Convinced that this murder connects to her husband's suicide two years prior, wealthy widow Janice Fairs hires private eye Paul Whelan to investigate.

Whelan's investigation takes him into the rarefied air of the wealthy, where he begins to discover unlikely connections between the two men in the harbor. But Whelan isn't the only one snooping, and he discovers himself an unwitting player in a game of cat-and-mouse, with deadly consequences.

An underappreciated, carefully crafted series. --BOOKLIST

Margaret O'Mara's brother disappeared thirty years earlier, so when his last known associate is found murdered, O'Mara hires Chicago PI Paul Whelan to investigate.

Whelan makes the rounds through seedy bars and dilapidated apartment buildings, discovering connections to a long-gone Chicago amusement park where another murder took place forty years prior.

Soon, Whelan finds himself navigating his way through dark pasts, deep secrets, and a mystery that may cost him his life.

This series is a small treasure. --BOOKLIST

Chicago private eye Paul Whelan is hired by an elderly jazz musician to find a missing street hustler named Sam Burwell. As Whelan delves into Burwell's past, the world of street vendors and corner musicians, he uncovers old enmities and love affairs, but his search for Burwell comes up empty. That is, until Burwell is found murdered.

Soon Whelan is swept up into a whirlwind of old feuds, dark pasts, unlikely romances...and a killer hiding in plain sight.

This series is a small treasure. --BOOKLIST

Chicago Private Investigator Paul Whelan takes the case when an elderly woman asks him to look into the disappearance of Tony Blanchard, a young man she'd taken in after his parents died. Instead, Whelan discovers a string of murders, all tied to a car-theft ring.

All the evidence suggests that Tony is dead as well, but Whelan keeps digging until he finds himself surrounded by a dangerous maze of silent witnesses, crooked cops, and people willing to kill to keep the truth from surfacing. When a friend from Whelan's past emerges--a friend Whelan thought long dead--his investigation takes a dangerous turn; one that brings him no closer to Tony, and a lot closer to his own demise.

The Conjuror's Boy is the saga of Thomas Faye, a fatherless boy who enters a junk shop on a gray Chicago day in 1962 and is forever changed by the two men he meets there. Arthur Farrell, the proprietor, is a sometime-magician, raconteur, wanderer, a wounded veteran of the carnage at the Somme, who can heal - and perhaps far more - with the mere touch of his hand. His belligerent friend Meyer, a seemingly indestructible survivor of the fall of the Warsaw Ghetto, lives on the street, a magnet for trouble and violence. Under the influence of these two mysterious men Thomas comes to see the world in ways he could never have imagined. As his own travels take him to Vietnam and the far corners of America, he adopts one persona after another: drifter, soldier, carny worker, detective, lover. Through it all, three people hover at the edge of his existence: Farrell, Meyer, and a troubled girl. As he notes the troubling changes in his own abilities, he begins to understand why fate sent him into the conjuror's shop that day in 1962. Michael Raleigh is the author of seven previous novels, including IN THE CASTLE OF THE FLYNNS. He has received the Eugene Izzi award for crime fiction and four Illinois Arts Council awards for fiction. He teaches writing at DePaul University and lives in Chicago with his wife Katherine and his three children.

For the boy, it was the first real chance for a future. For the man, it was one last chance to triumph over his past. Opportunities like these happen only once in a Blue Moon.

An absolute charmer.--Library Journal Starred Review

Simply put, this is a ripsnorting good historical yarn full of circus lore, so smartly told by an expert storyteller that it's the kind of book truly deserving that overused term 'page-turner.'--Chicago Sun-Times

With no safety net, Raleigh takes a spectacular highwire route...making it all look easy in this captivating tale of a decent man in a very hard world. Beguiling, wise and wonderful.--Kirkus Reviews Starred Review

A heartwarming, often humorous story filled with interesting circus lore as well as deeper themes about the value of human connection, especially as life winds down.--Booklist

Rollicking, warmhearted...As dramatic and engaging as a high-wire act, the novel combines honest story-telling with down-home wit. There's plenty of smartly written, feel-good fun under this big top.--Publishers Weekly

Once Billy Fox starts looking for trouble, he discovers that--in Chicago--trouble's under every footstep.

Home from the war, Billy Fox leaves Michigan for Chicago, hoping to find his ex-girlfriend, Rita--now another man's wife. Chicago isn't a town that takes kindly to strangers, and Billy finds himself barely scraping by, working odd jobs and living in squalor among convicts and other men that the city hasn't spit out just yet.

A chance encounter lands him a job with Harry Strummer, the streetwise owner of the Peerless Detective Agency. At Harry's oddball agency, Billy hones his skills, learning how to stake out a mark, find a bug, and spot a tail. Odd life lessons and unexpected romance come his way. But as he searches for Rita, an even bigger mystery comes along, one that puts Harry, and Billy with him, in the crosshairs.

This punchy, spellbinding noir spins a web that will catch readers and hold them captive to the final page, when we learn that Billy's Chicago is a town where nothing is ever truly left up to chance.

It is the summer of 1946, the sinister, Gatsby-like millionaire Cary Morrison is found dead in his Chicago mansion, apparently the victim of a burglary gone hopelessly wrong. Soon after, the burglars themselves are found dead, one by one. Ray Foley, just returned from wartime service in Europe, finds himself embroiled. One of the dead burglars was Ray's boyhood friend Eddy Walsh, and Ray decides to involve himself in the search for the killer. At the heart of the mystery is a missing statue, a hollow Greek statuette said to contain Morrison's records of all his illegal financial transactions with mobsters and public officials. Ray's investigation attracts the wrong kind of attention, as a number of interested-and dangerous-people assume he has the statue or knows of its whereabouts.

Ray's search brings him in contact with street toughs, bookies, gangsters, a slick private investigator named Max Silver, a tough young nurse named Hannah Marcel, a crusty street cop named Carmody, and the eccentric Sal Greene, a major figure in the local mob, and the killer, in the hot Chicago summer.