Either way, it was maddeningly mysterious. Captain Harold Jeffries, swaddled in his robe, had settled down for a coqy evening with Crime and Punishment when his wife left the house for bridge party. An hour later he was dead. What could have induced him to dress and go out into the stormy night - much less to walk on the beach, which he hated and never went near? Conan Flagg, proprietor of the Holliday Beach Bookshop and Rental Library, is persuaded by Jeffries' widow to investigate privately; and astonishingly, all the clues lead to Flagg's own Dickensian establishment. With passing assistance from Meg, the bookstore cat, Flagg baits a trap to catch a rat - and find himself dangerously involved in a crime with implications far beyond this lazy seaside village.

"I'LL BE ON YOUR PATIO AT FOUR O'CLOCK. IF YOU AREN'T THERE, I'LL UNDERSTAND...." This is the gist of the mysterious plea for help that Conan Flagg finds lying on the counter of his Holliday Beach Book Shop. The writer is beautiful Isadora Canfield, a concert pianist and daughter of the late Oregon Senator John Canfield, in whose will she would become a millionairess. Isadora wants Conan to find out who is keeping her under twenty-four-hour surveillance, but she becomes strangely quiet when asked for details of her father's death and of how she had spent the weeks following. In fact she is disinclined to talk about the family at all—not her blind stepmother or her irrepressible stepbrother or her sadly altered stepsister, Jenny, who had once been a promising artist. Conan soon realizes that he and his gifted client are sitting on dynamite. He thinks he knows who has the matches, but he can't be sure. And proving it, is dangerous work, even for a pro like Flagg.

Conan Flagg, book shop proprietor and sometime private detective, is summoned to his friend's ranch in eastern Oregon where he is confronted by blackmail, cattle rustling, and murder

A CONAN FLAGG MYSTERY

In 1940 Leland Langtry ran off with his redheaded secretary and $10,000 in company funds... Or so everyone believed… Forty years later, Langtry’s remains are found in a boarded-up silver mine tunnel. And as the knife still jammed between his ribs had belonged to his partner in Lang-Star Mining, Tom Starbuck—also long since dead—a jury decided that Tom had killed Langtry. But Tom’s widow, Delia, resists that verdict and persuades that very private investigator Conan Flagg to find the real murderer—an impossible job made tougher by the curious reticence of nearly everyone in town whenever Leland Langtry is mentioned….

Conan Flagg, a wealthy Oregon private detective, is convinced that a friend's death in a suspicious automobile accident was really a murder connected with a multi-million dollar real estate deal

The celebrated author, Ravin Gould, his equally celebrated actress wife, the media, the locals, and as many tourists as can cram themselves into Conan Flagg's bookstore are all on hand for that electric moment when Cady MacGill, the sheriff's son-in-law, threatens to cut off a vital portion of Gould's anatomy with a chain saw. Less than twenty-four hours later, Ravin Gould is dead, and Cady MacGill has been charged with his murder. But bookstore owner and private investigator Conan Flagg doesn't read the situation that way. Not with an election for sheriff coming up. Not when a covey of hotshot New York publishing executives wings into town, lured to the quiet Oregon beach resort by word of the tell-all autobiographical novel that Gould had just finished writing. A novel worth millions, which has vanished without a trace . . .

When conservative millionaire A. C. King hosts his annual house party at his spacious mountain lodge, he has no idea it will be the last family reunion. Yet the mellow autumn air is tension-filled with the presence of A. C.'s beautiful second wife, the constrained animosities of his two older sons, and the tippling of his flower-child daughter-in-law. But it is the unwelcome arrival of youngest son Lucas, with a ravishing black fiancée in tow, that is the true kiss of death. Even Conan Flagg, an old family friend and private investigator, doesn't foresee the sudden tragedy that leaves the party diminished and vulnerable to a cunning killer, As a blizzard seals their isolation, Conan attempts to identify the murderer among them before he or she strikes again....