Introducing Junior Bender, the favorite burglar turned private investigator of Hollywood crooks

Junior Bender is a Los Angeles burglar with a magic touch. Since he first started breaking into houses at age fourteen, he’s never once been caught. But now, after twenty-two years building an exemplary career, Junior has been blackmailed by Trey Annunziato, one of the most powerful crime bosses in LA, into acting as a private investigator on the set of Trey’s porn venture, which someone keeps sabotaging. The star Trey has lined up to do all that’s unwholesome on camera is Thistle Downing, America’s beloved child star, who now lives alone in a drug-induced stupor, destitute and uninsurable. Her starring role will be the scandalous fall-from-grace gossip of rubberneckers across the country. No wonder Trey needs help keeping the production on track.

Junior knows what he should do–but doing the right thing will land him on the wrong side of LA’s scariest mob boss. With the help of his precocious twelve-year-old daughter, Rina, and his criminal sidekick, ex-getaway driver Louie the Lost, Junior will have to pull off a miracle to get out of this mess.

Robert B. Parker and Robert Crais fans will enjoy Edgar Award nominee Timothy Hallinan’s novels featuring overeducated private eye Simeon Grist. In this third book in the cult series, Grist takes a case that leads him to the phantom neighborhoods of Los Angeles’ lost children.

Missing thirteen-year-old Aimee Sorrell ran all the way from Kansas to be a star. But Aimee’s trail soon leads Simeon to the city morgue, the first stop on a perilous journey to find out what happens to America’s lost children when they go looking for love in all the wrong places.

It’s three days until Christmas and Junior Bender, Hollywood’s fast-talking fixer for the felonious, is up to his ears in shopping mall Santas, Russian mobsters, desperate holiday shoppers, and (’tis the season) murder.

The halls are decked, the deck is stacked, and here comes that jolly old elf. Junior Bender, divorced father of one and burglar extraordinaire, finds himself stuck inside the Edgerton Mall, and not just as a last-minute shopper (though he is that too). Edgerton isn’t exactly the epicenter of holiday cheer, despite its two Santas, canned Christmas music, chintzy bows, and festive lights. The mall is a fossil of an industry in decline; many of its stores are closed, and to make matters worse, there is a rampant shoplifting problem.

The murderous Russian mobster who owns the place has decided it takes a thief to catch a thief and hires Junior—under threat—to solve the shoplifting problem for him. But Junior’s surveillance operation doesn’t go well: as Christmas Eve approaches, two people are dead and it’s obvious that shoplifting is the least of the mall’s problems. To prevent further deaths, possibly including his own, Junior must confront his dread of Christmas—both present and past.

It’s everyday business when Wattles, the San Fernando Valley’s top “executive crook,” sets up a hit. He establishes a chain of criminals to pass along the instructions and the money, thereby ensuring that the hitter doesn’t know who hired him. Then one day Wattles finds his office safe open and a single item missing: the piece of paper listing the crooks in the chain. When people associated with the chain begin to pop up dead, the only person Wattles can turn to for help is Junior Bender, professional burglar and begrudging private eye for crooks.

But Junior already knows exactly who took Wattles’ list; the signature is obvious. It was Herbie Mott, Junior’s burglar mentor and second father–but when Junior seeks him out to discuss the matter, he finds him very unpleasantly murdered. Junior follows the links in the chain back toward the killer, and as he does, he learns disturbing things about Herbie’s hidden past. Just how much of the life he’s lived for the past twenty years has been of his own making, and how much of it was actually Herbie’s game?

Edgar and Macavity Award nominee Timothy Hallinan’s novels featuring erudite Los Angeles private eye Simeon Grist have become cult favorites—and this fourth installment is one wild ride.

Simeon Grist is about to face off against his most terrifying adversary—a madman who’s setting fire to the homeless. As Simeon is drawn into the case, very much against his will, he realizes that the “Incinerator” has a huge advantage. Somewhere, years ago, the two of them met, and the Incinerator has been nursing hatred and resentment for years. Now, as helpless people burst into flame on Skid Row, Simeon has to scour the wastelands of Los Angeles, and his own past, looking for the face of a killer.

Los Angeles burglar Junior Bender is in the middle of burgling a house and has just gotten his hands on one of the world’s rarest stamps when the job goes terrifically wrong. After barely escaping, Junior realizes the danger is far from over. He’s gotten himself on the wrong side of a man whose name is synonymous with violence, and to save his own skin he’s set off a chain reaction of blackmail, strong-arming, and escalating crime. To pay off his underworld debts, Junior is forced to break into the house of the most powerful man in Hollywood, the shadowy, widely feared studio mogul known as King Maybe. It’s an impossible break-in, and to get out of the house alive Junior will need to use everything he’s learned, plus a few skills he knows he doesn’t possess.

Junior Bender is back to untangle one of the weirdest mysteries in Tinseltown.

LA burglar Junior Bender has, unfortunately, developed a reputation as a competent private investigator for crooks. The unfortunate part about this is that, regardless of whether he solves the crime or not, someone dangerous is going to be unhappy with him–either his suspect or his employer.

Now Junior is being bullied into proving aging music-industry mogul Vinnie DiGaudio is innocent of the murder of a nasty tabloid journalist he’d threatened to kill a couple times. It doesn’t help that the dead journalist’s widow is one pretty lady, and she’s trying to get Junior to mix business with pleasure. Just as the investigation is spiraling out of control, Junior’s hard-drinking landlady begs him to solve the disappearance of her daughter, who has gotten involved with a very questionable character. And, worst news of all, both Junior’s ex-wife and his thirteen-year-old daughter, Rina, seem to have new boyfriends. What a mess.

Timothy Hallinan’s private eye Simeon Grist has gone out of print and he’s pissed about it.

Simeon thought he was living a good life–solving mysteries, falling in and out of love, risking life and limb to do the right thing. Then the last Simeon Grist mystery was pulped to make newsprint, and he woke up in a room where nothing ever changed except his sense of who he was: his entire existence was a work of fiction that the real world was in the process of forgetting. And when one of his few remaining readers is murdered, Simeon discovers that he can–at great risk–step out of the pages of his books and into the world of the living. The only problem: even if he succeeds in solving the murder, winning the love of a real-life woman, and finding the man who wrote him, he could still die trying.

Junior Bender, Los Angeles burglar and off-the-books detective to the felonious, is reminded that rock and roll will never die (no matter how fervently he wishes some of it would) when Hollywood’s most dangerous geriatric mobster, Irwin Dressler, retains Junior’s investigative services to solve a rather unharmonious problem.

Four of Dressler’s old gangster colleagues have put together a national tour of once-popular rock bands they own a piece of: three nights of concerts by guys (and a few gals) who were big shots back in the 1960s and 1970s, and who are now hoping for one more gasp of glory with this nostalgia exhibition. The Rock of Ages tour has proved itself to be anything but a love fest: plenty of the bandmates have been feuding for forty years, and–perhaps unsurprisingly–drugs and bad behavior have created health, wellness, and legal problems for the musicians and managers. Plus there have been two near-fatal accidents that might have been attempted murders.

But they’re not what Irwin Dressler is concerned about. It’s that someone–one of his own colleagues–is using the tour as a front to steal Dressler’s money. And that simply cannot be allowed.

Now the tour has pulled into LA, and Junior has one weekend to figure out who’s to blame–a weekend that begins with his tires being slashed, threatening notes left on his car, and a theatrical backdrop falling on a drummer during the truly terrible first set of the first concert. To make things worse, Junior is saddled for the weekend with his teenage daughter, Rina, who lately has been much, much too interested in how her father earns his living. Can Junior recover Dressler’s money, prevent a murder, talk his daughter out of pursuing a life of crime, and somehow survive all that bad music?

The Simeon Grist private-eye novels by 2011 Edgar and Macavity Award nominee Timothy Hallinan have become cult favorites, and here is the one that started it all.

For a fee so big he can’t turn it down, Simeon Grist is hired to watchdog the kind of guy he’d usually prefer to throw through the nearest window. Toby Vane is the golden boy of prime-time television, whose gee-whiz smile and chiseled features mask a dark secret that would take the shine off for his millions of adoring female fans: every now and then he beats up a woman, and almost any woman will do. When some of the women around Toby begin to turn up dead, Simeon has to figure out whether he’s protecting a murderer—or whether one of Toby’s multitude of enemies wants to put him away forever. And when Simeon meets the beautiful Nana, the whole situation becomes very personal, very fast.

Edgar and Macavity Award nominee Timothy Hallinan’s Simeon Grist private-eye novels have become cult favorites. This sixth series installment takes place in the West Hollywood of 1995, where the community is shaken by the brutal killing of an older man who was widely loved for his generosity and kindness. In a time when the police were largely indifferent to crimes against gay people, Simeon is hired to catch the murderer—and finds himself up against the most dangerous adversary of his career, a man who kills his victims not once but twice: once physically and once in spirit.

With an unforgettable climax and a twist you won’t see coming, The Bone Polisher is a top-notch crime novel from a highly acclaimed author.

The highly anticipated, laugh-out-loud third installment in the fan-favorite Junior Bender mysteries

There are not many people brave enough to say no to Irwin Dressler, Hollywood’s scariest mob boss turned movie king. Even though Dressler is ninety-three years old, LA burglar Junior Bender is quaking in his boots when Dressler’s henchmen haul him in for a meeting. Dressler wants Junior to solve a crime he believes was committed more than seventy years ago, when an old friend of his, once-famous starlet Dolores La Marr, had her career destroyed after compromising photos were taken of her at a Las Vegas party. Dressler wants justice for Dolores and the shining career she never had.

Junior can’t help but think the whole thing is a little crazy. After all, it’s been seventy years. Even if someone did set Dolores up for a fall from grace, they’re probably long dead now. But he can’t say no to Irwin Dressler–no one can, really–so he starts digging. What he finds is that some vendettas never die; they only get more dangerous.

Edgar Award finalist Timothy Hallinan continues his six-book Simeon Grist series with this white-knuckle mystery—a must-listen for fans of Robert B. Parker’s Spenser novels.

Simeon Grist knows LA inside and out—the sex for sale, the chic seductions, every rip-off from City Hall to Venice. So when he’s hired by a Hollywood recording company to shadow one Sally Oldfield, suspected of embezzlement, Grist discovers she’s entangled in the Church of the Eternal Moment—a million-dollar religious scam built around a twelve-year-old channeler and the voice of a man who has been dead for a millennium. When Sally turns up dead, Simeon knows he’s become the next target of a very flesh-and-blood entity waiting in the back alleys of sin and salvation to give him a brutal look at the four last things: death, judgment, heaven, and hell—revelations he could definitely live without.

Edgar and Macavity Award–nominated author Timothy Hallinan throws his erudite Los Angeles private eye into the middle of a global human-trafficking operation in this fifth book in the series. Simeon Grist does a favor for the family of his sometimes-girlfriend, Eleanor Chan, and goes looking for two children who vanished in Chinatown. He quickly learns that he’s gone straight through the looking glass and into a world where grieving parents are afraid to contact the police, where fear is the teacher and power is the law, and where helpless people are shipped from China to America and forced into lives of toil and submission.