Johnny Heller

A dozen murders and counting—and any one of them could lead a Chicago attorney to a hotheaded female tycoon.

It's 11:59 p.m. on New Year's Eve and criminal lawyer John J. Malone is nursing his blues in a Chicago dive bar. He's been two-timed by his inamorata and abandoned by his favorite gumshoe partners, crime reporter Jake Justus and socialite Helene Brand, for their Bermuda honeymoon. But Malone's not lonely for long.

A Chicago attorney scours the Big Apple for a missing bride and a wedding-night murderer in a mystery that's "Miss Rice at her best" (The New Yorker).

On a break from the Windy City, aspiring crime novelist Jake Justus and his wife, Helene, are acquainting themselves with Manhattan's finest cocktail lounges when they befriend Dennis Morrison, a blind-drunk groom. The handsome former male escort thought he'd found his

From the "grand dame of mystery mixed with screwball comedy": The children of a widowed mystery writer play amateur sleuths and matchmakers (Ed Gorman, Ellery Queen Award–winning author).

When your mom's a mystery writer, a talent for detection is only natural. So when the three children of prolific whodunit author Marion Carstairs become material witnesses in a neighborhood murder, they launch their own investigation.

Wrongly convicted of murder, a death-row chorus girl lives for revenge, in this novel from "the grand dame of mystery mixed with screwball comedy" (Ed Gorman).

Anna Marie St. Clair was a normal Wisconsin-farm-girl-turned-mistress when she was framed for the murder of her racketeer boyfriend, one of Chicago's sleaziest politicians. Sentenced to death, and only hours from getting fried, a lucky hitch sets Anna Marie free, but

A Chicago lawyer must save his big-city friends from small-town corruption in this "triumphantly rowdy" mystery (Time) that's also "exciting [and] hard as nails" (The New Yorker).

When club owner Jake Justus and his wife, Helene, flee a sweltering Chicago summer for rural Jackson County, Wisconsin, they expect sweet-as-apple-pie locals and calm lakes for fishing. Instead, they become the bait: When the town's two-term

From Hollywood's Black Dahlia to the Arkansas Bluebeard: an anthology of true crime profiles by "the grand dame of mystery" (Ed Gorman).

Whether venturing into a blood-spattered farm in Texas, down a lonely mountain road in Alabama, or into the deceptively sunny Ohio suburbs, acclaimed mystery writer Craig Rice lends her hard-boiled style and a wicked irony to this gallery of real-life murders. Among them . . .

The Big Midget is the hit of the show in Jake Justus's night club, until someone puts an abrupt end to the Midget. Why were eleven unmatched silk stockings used as a noose? Who conked Jake when he got on the killer's trail? John J. Malone finds all the answers with the energetic and hilarious assistance of Jake Justus and the beautiful Helene.