Detective John Francis Cuddy is hired to find the missing son of a noted Massachusetts judge

A friend's murder takes Cuddy back to the dark days of Vietnam As military policemen, John Francis Cuddy and Al Sachs bonded while patrolling the wild streets of American-occupied Saigon. Over a decade later, Cuddy is a private detective making a living in Boston's back alleys. Awoken by a ringing phone at seven a.m., Cuddy is shocked to hear Sachs asking to meet for a drink that night. His old friend's voice reminds him of the time a Cagney movie inspired Sachs to say that, if ever captured by enemy agents, he would break his pinkie finger to signal to Cuddy that his death was not an accident. Sachs never shows for the drink, and the next morning he is found naked in a park, his body mangled and his pinkie broken. To avenge his friend, Cuddy confronts a dark military cover-up, and travels back to the war zone he thought he left behind years ago.

Cuddy attempts to exonerate a boy who confessed to murder under hypnosis William Daniels nearly didn't make it to college. A black student raised in one of Boston's roughest suburbs, he once barely skirted time in juvenile hall for gang activities. Pressure from his mother convinced William to straighten out, and he went on to study at a prestigious university. Years after his first brush with the law, William is in trouble again, and it will take more than a mother's love to keep him free. While hypnotized by his psychiatrist, William admits to shooting his girlfriend, producing the murder weapon and telling the doctor where to find the body. When he comes out of his state, William is in handcuffs and thinks he killed the girl. But private eye John Francis Cuddy doesn't trust the psychiatrist, and risks everything to save this bright young man whose mind has been turned against him.

John Francis Cuddy returns as a hired bodyguard protecting a mother and child in a nasty divorce case that involves him with a cocaine distribution ring and a double murder

Boston P.I. John Francis Cuddy is dragged into small town treachery and danger when he reluctantly accepts a case from reporter Jane Rust, who senses a conspiracy in the town of Nasharbor and is killed for her perception

Hired to protect Maisy Andrus, a crusader for euthanasia rights, from a potential assassin, Jeremiah Healy enters Andrus' world of righteous activism in order to investigate his list of suspects. Reprint.

Asked to find the killer of a young model who was also a Boston mobster's granddaughter, John Cuddy investigates the owners of a modeling agency and the deceased's cynical boyfriend, and unearths some sinister clues. Reprint.

When three members of the Foursome—a pair of wealthy, libertine couples—are found murdered by a peaceful Maine lake, Detective John Cuddy is hired to scour Maine's North Woods and Boston's meanest streets to find the killer. Reprint.

The return of John Francis Cuddy finds the Boston private eye traveling from his hometown to the boardwalks of New Jersey as he investigates a particularly brutal murder. Reprint.

Twenty-four hours after making a promise to a doomed ten-year-old boy, John Cuddy begins a race against the clock to fulfill his promise and encounters sinister religious zealots, a lovely barmaid, and a World War II vet. Reprint.

Hired by Olga Evorova to perform a discreet background check on the man she wants to marry, Cuddy believes it will be a simple assignment, until everyone he questions lies to him and a pair of thugs warn him to back off The eleventh title in one of today's best American mystery series (Kevin Moore, Chicago Sun-Times ). Detective John Cuddy is happy to handed a case as routine as a background check on a client's boyfriend. But after he's warned off by the mob, Cuddy's investigation grows more bizarre and dangerous

With the help of his irrepressible hero, John Francis Cuddy, Jeremiah Healy never fails to deliver scintillating, perfectly pitched mystery masterpieces in what The New York Times Book Review calls "a superior series." Now the Shamus Award-winning author "looks ready to join the honors class of private-eye writers that includes Robert B. Parker" (USA Today), as he introduces us to The Only Good Lawyer. An attorney friend of Boston P.l. John Cuddy has called in a favor, looking into the case of Alan Spaeth. Spaeth is one sorry piece of work—a down-and-out divorce squeeze, a racist, a misogynist, and from all appearances, a cold-blooded killer. Frankly wishing the whole mess would disappear, Cuddy can't let it. It pains him, but he's convinced of Spaeth's innocence, and he isn't the kind of P.l. who can watch even a guy like Spaeth fry for someone else's crime. As much as Cuddy is repulsed by the accused, he's intrigued by the victim, Woodrow Wilson Gant, the African-American lawyer who had been representing Spaeth's wife in a very nasty divorce. But before Cuddy's investigation is done, there will be plenty of nastiness to go around. On the surface, Gant led a charmed and successful life as a rising star in the glittering firmament of Massachusetts law. But three quick bullets at a deserted roadside knocked Gant out of the Boston skyline for good, and now Cuddy's discovered the attorney was also a man of strange desires and deep secrets?secrets that could prove lethal to the touch.... Ricocheting from Gant's law offices, Cuddy picks up the trail of a woman who fled the scene of the murder. Rousted by a couple of loan sharks and conned by Gant's avaricious brother, Cuddy stumbles on a more personal question. The mere mention of Gant's name puts a cold, hard kink in his relationship with Assistant D.A. Nancy Meagher, and Cuddy's Iosing sleep wondering why. Greed. Revenge. Jealousy. There is any number of motives for murder, and Cuddy can take his pick as he investigates the high-profile homicide of Woodrow Wilson Gant, exploring the raw passion—and touching every nerve—of the edge.

Still reeling from an unfathomable tragedy, Boston P.I. John Francis Cuddy agrees to help a former Vietnam-era comrade who is searching for his granddaughter's killer. The thirteen-year-old was found dead in Colonel Nicolas Helides' heavily guarded mansion on the Intracoastal Waterway. Used by her own father to revive his rock band, called Spiral, Veronica Helides had been molded into a sexually provacative rock starlet. By the time someone drowned her, murder was merely the last crime committed against her. Now Cuddy is picking apart a cast of players in the life of Colonel Heilides and the girl everyone called "Very." From Helides' depressive son to former groupies, from a mysterious spiritual adviser to the woman who married the colonel for his money, Cuddy is seeing the worst of human nature at a time when his own heart is broken in two. As if that were not enough, the killing of Veronica Helides may not have been the isolated act it first appeared.

Cuddy is not only a skillful P.I., but a concerned human being who has experienced loss in his own life. He still communes with his dead wife Beth at a Boston graveyard, and though he lives in a world that can turn violent, he is not a violent man. Cuddy – Plus One puts in book form thirteen previously uncollected cases about Cuddy – including four nominees for the Shamus Award for Best Private-Eye Short story, and two stories that appeared in the annual Best American Mystery Stories. As a special bonus, the book adds a "plus one," the first short story featuring Mairead O’Clare, a female attorney just past the bar who, disenchanted with large law-firm practice in Boston, throws in with an older male attorney representing mostly criminal defendants.