A globetrotting detective always one step away from cracking the case, and one smaller step from having his skull cracked open, in this dazzling mystery from the author of TO CATCH A THEIF. Al Colby, an American expatriate working as a private investigator in Mexico City, is contacted by an old acquaintance in Los Angeles who hands him a cold case involving a missing person. Robert Parker’s mysterious disappearance is tying up a family fortune and is enraging his abandoned wife who can’t tap the family coffers without proof of death. The case sounded routine enough, right up his alley, but the trail for the missing Mr. Parker leads Colby down a rabbit hole winding through a number of South American countries, each one a dead end. Running out of funds and clean shirts, Colby is ready to throw in the towel, but the stakes are too high and his client fuels the search with additional cash. The deeper Colby digs the more entangled he becomes in a decades old mystery of misplaced loyalties, family secrets and riches in nitrate ore. In between tequila shots and beautiful women, Al Colby has a case that drags him in deeper with each step. But can he piece it all together before the quicksand swallows him whole?

ON THE TRAIL OF THE LOST TREASURE OF THE INCAS – WITH EVERY FORTUNE HUNTER IN SOUTH AMERICA CLOSING IN! Al Colby should never have agreed to smuggle the package from Chile to Peru. Now one man’s dead, two beautiful women have betrayed him, and a couple of gunmen are hot on his trail. All because of an ancient Quechua manuscript pointing to the hiding place of a priceless hoard, lost for centuries. Now the race is on – by train, by plane, by motorboat and by mule – first to find the treasure and then to escape with it alive…

The action in The Red Tassel, David Dodge’s third and final Al Colby adventure, takes place high in the Bolivian Andes. Colby is hired by the beautiful, red-headed Pancha Porter, who is making her first visit to Bolivia, to investigate a series of mysterious thefts and accidents at her lead and silver mine in San Martín Coquellache. The mine was left to her by her father and is managed by an American named Simon Braillard. Braillard suspects that the “accidents” are actually sabotage and that the village witch doctor, Yatiri, is behind them. Upon their arrival at the mine, Al and Pancha meet Braillard, his beautiful wife Lili and skinny son Carl, along with the mine’s chief employees. The thefts continue, including a daring nighttime raid on the mine’s llama herd. Just as Colby is beginning to unravel the relationships between Yatiri and the mine workers (everyone in the village is related and Braillard’s chief assistants are direct descendants of the witch doctor), Braillard winds up with a knife in his back and a red borla—a woven ear tassel for a llama, used as a mark of ownership—in his hand. Now he has to uncover the rest of Yatiri’s secrets before he and Pancha meet the same fate.