Neal Carey is not your usual private eye. A graduate student at Columbia University, he grew up on the streets of New York, usually on the wrong side of the law. Then he met Joe Graham, a one-armed P.I. who introduced him to the Bank, an exclusive New England institution with a sideline in keeping its wealthy clients happy and out of trouble. They pay Neal's college tuition, and Neal gets an education that can't be found in any textbook—from learning how to trail a suspect to mastering the proper way to search a room. Now it's payback time. The Bank wants Neal to put his skills to work in finding Allie Chase, the rebellious teenage daughter of a prominent senator. The problem: Allie has gone underground in London, and to get her back, Neal has to follow her into the punk scene, a violent netherworld where drugs run rampant and rage is the name of the game. Up against punk junkies, antique book thieves, and murderous betrayal, Neal has his work cut out for him to save Allie—and get back above ground for good.

Robert Pendleton is a chemical genius with a fertilizer worth a fortune to whoever controls the formula. Not surprisingly, the Bank, his notoriously exclusive backer, wants to keep an eye on its investment. But so does the CIA. And the Chinese government. And a few shadier organizations. So when Pendleton disappears from a conference in San Francisco, along with all of his research, Neal Carey enters the picture. Neal knows the Bank is calling in its chips in return for paying his grad school bills. He thinks this assignment will be a no-brainer—until he meets the beguiling Li Lan and touches off a deadly game of hide-and-seek that will lead him from San Francisco's Chinatown to the lawless back streets of Hong Kong, and finally into the dark heart of China. In a world where no one is what they seem, Neal must unravel the mystery of a beautiful woman and reach the fabled Buddha's Mirror, a mist-shrouded lake where all secrets are revealed.

From domestic war to ballroom brawls. grad student-turned-P.I..I. Neal Carey's got more than studying on his plate. Graduate student Neal Carey's three-year confinement in Chinese monastery is finally over-but his troubles are just beginning. The elusive financial benefactors who have bought his freedom expect a return on their investment. They want him to find Cody McCall, a two-year-old boy recently abducted by his father in a bitter Hollywood custody battle-a task that will propel Neal from the glittering Hollywood hills to the remote wilds of Nevada. To find Cody, Neal has to turn outlaw in a land of two-bit casinos and roadside cathouses, and infiltrate a vicious white supremacist group spouting hatred and dealing in terror. But the deeper undercover he goes, the deadlier the game becomes. Now Neal must force a showdown with the group's crazed leader and find Cody before the missing toddler ends up lost in a world of unspeakable evil.

Neal Carey has to keep the mob, the FBI, and a major television personality from killing his newest client—but he's tempted to do the job himself. Sometime student and ever-reluctant detective Neal Carey would rather be finishing a dull doctoral thesis than staring down the nose of a loaded gun—but his new assignment doesn't sound dangerous. All he's got to do is pull off the ultimate turn Polly Paget—a gum-chewing, foul-mouthed, big-haried broad—into a perfect lady in time to testify in a rape case against Jack Landis, head of the Family Cable Network and America's most beloved family man. But Polly isn't cooperating, and everyone—including a former FBI agent, and an obsessive-compulsive hitman, the Mafia, a porn prince, and a slew of tabloid reporters—is on her trail turning Neal's "simple" assignment into a deadly game of duck-duck-goose. In a hellish and hilarious escapade that takes him from the deserts of Nevada to the bright lights of Las Vegas, and finally to a hair-raising climax in a shoddily built amusment park, Neal tries to escape the mob's big guns while taking a slippery walk up the world's biggest water slide.

Neal Carey is asked to pick up an aging comic named Nathan Silverstein in Las Vegas and take him home toPalm Springs after Nathan witnesses arson by two criminals who are now hot on his trail, in a trip that becomes an action-packed chase across miles of desert. Reprint.