Secret Service agent John Quincannon has found little joy in his life since the day his stray bullet killed an innocent young woman and her unborn child. Still in mourning a year later, Quincannon seeks his solace at the bottom of a jug of sour mash. But he'll have to buck up-and sober up-for his next mission: The Service needs him to bring down a major counterfeiting ring responsible for the death of one of his colleagues. And staying sober won't be easy when there's a young lady in town who's a dead ringer for his late victim... A new novel of frontier justice from the award-winning author acclaimed for his "stylish writing" (Publishers Weekly) and "unerring eye" (Kirkus Reviews).

The bestselling author of The McCone Files teams up with the creator of the "Nameless Detective" for a collaborative mystery that bridges the San Franciscos of 1894 and 1986. Muller and Pronzini masterfully parallel the investigations of turn-of-the-century detective Quincannon and Chicana amateur sleuth Elena Oliverez.

John Frederick Quincannon, a former United States Secret Service agent, and Sabina Carpenter, one of the first female Pinkerton operatives, joined forces to form the firm of Carpenter and Quincannon, Professional Detective Services. Their various cases take them all over the American West in the 1890s. Now they're back in four new adventures. In "The Bughouse Caper," Quincannon matches wits with Sherlock Holmes to solve a series of burglaries and a baffling locked-room murder. "The Cloud Cracker" finds Quincannon called to a small California town to expose an itinerant rainmaker as a charlatan and confidence man, only to run into an unexpected murder. In "Medium Rare" Quincannon and Sabina attend a seance, but more is involved than exposing psychic phenomena as fakery, since they are witnesses to a murder that seems to have been supernatural. "Quincannon in Paradise" is set in the Hawaiian Islands, with the detective on the trail of a pair of swindlers. Bill Pronzini and his wife, Marcia Muller, make their home in Petaluma, California.