Nathan Heller Series by Max Allan Collins
Requirements: Mobi Reader, 11.3MB
Overview: As a Chicago cop in the glory days of Al Capone, and later as a big-shot private eye, NATE HELLER seems to have wandered into every major crime story in the last century, in what’s turned out to be one of the most intriguing and satisfying P.I. series of the eighties and nineties.
01. True Detective
In the mob-choked Chicago of 1932, private detective Nathan Heller may be willing to risk his life to earn a Depression dollar, but he never sacrifices his slicing wit. That’s why mystery fans and critics alike rank the historical thriller True Detective at the top of their lists —and why the book swept up a Shamus Award for best novel from the Private Eye Writers of America. Now, author Max Allan Collins (Road to Perdition) reissues the contemporary classic that introduces the inscrutable, wise-cracking Nathan Heller in all his guts and glory. Mayor Cermak aims to scrub up Chicago’s rancid reputation for the World’s Fair, and that daunting task comes down to the youngest plainclothes cop in town, Nathan Heller of the pickpocket detail. When the Mayor’s “Hoodlum Squad” brings Heller along on a raid with no instructions but to keep his mouth shut and his gun handy, he finds himself an unwitting, unwilling part of an assassination attempt on Al Capone’s successor, Frank Nitti. Soon, he’s smack in the middle of a power struggle between the mob and the mayor, and it’s up to the young detective to upend a potentially nation-shaking political assassination in Miami Beach.
02. True Crime
Private Eye Nate Heller trying discover who the gunshot victim was, found next to the Biograph Theatre, the man the FBI confidently identified as John Dillinger. His search for the answer leads him into a confrontation with J. Edgar Hoover.
03. The Million-Dollar Wound
Chicago P.I. Nate Heller returns home from duty in Guadalcanal a decorated, damaged, and dangerous hero—and drops directly from one war into another: the gangland coup to topple Frank Nitti as he tries to strong-arm the Hollywood unions.
04. Neon Mirage
When Nate Heller clears Bugsy Siegel of murder, the Chicago P.I. and brash, handsome gangster become unlikely friends…and rivals in love. Bugsy invents modern Vegas, but receives bullets as his reward and Heller becomes his avenger.
05. Stolen Away
When an incarcerated Al Capone claims he can help find the Lindbergh baby, detective Nate Heller is sent to the scene as a Chicago liaison, never dreaming that the fate of accused kidnapper Bruno Hauptmann would one day be in his hands.
06. Carnal Hours
Forties private eye Nathan Heller has a knack for involving himself with famous people and notorious murder cases. This time out, Canadian millionaire Sir Harry Oakes summons Heller to the Bahamas to "tail" his allegedly philandering son-in-law. When police arrest the son-in-law for the subsequent murder of Oakes, his daughter hires Heller to prove her husband innocent. True crime readers will love this version of police corruption and stupidity, name-dropping (Erle Stanley Gardner lends a hand), and doctoring of evidence. Hard-boiled but debonair.
07. Blood and Thunder
Some think Louisiana governor Huey Long is akin to Hitler and Mussolini, but others believe he’s just a good ol’ boy trying to help the common man. The president and sole operative of Chicago’s A-1 Detective Agency, Nate Heller, doesn’t care. His job is to protect Long against an assassination attempt. Despite Heller’s best efforts, Long is murdered by a lone gunman, Dr. Carl Weiss. A year later, Heller is summoned back to bayou country at the mutual request of Mrs. Long and her husband’s life-insurance carrier. She feels the governor may have been accidentally shot by one of his own trigger-happy bodyguards. If so, the insurance company would not be able to claim its homicide exclusion. Both Mrs. Long and the insurers have agreed to abide by Heller’s independent investigation. What Heller discovers is a mild-mannered ear, nose, and throat specialist in Dr. Weiss whose family integrity may have been undermined by the ruthless, manipulative Long.
08. Damned in Paradise
Collins gives us pre-statehood Hawaii and the Massie case, which revolved around the alleged abduction and rape of a Navy lieutenant’s wife and the subsequent murder of a suspect by lieutenant Thomas Massie and his mother-in-law. The sensational crime stirred racial hatreds in Hawaii and stoked a movement to place the territory under military rather than civilian rule. It’s 1932, and Heller, wrapping up his involvement in the Lindbergh kidnapping case (Stolen Away), lunches with Clarence Darrow. Darrow has been lured out of semi-retirement to defend Massie, his mother-in-law Grace Fortescue and two seamen against charges of murdering one of the five mixed-race youths accused of raping Thalia Massie. As Darrow’s investigator, Heller cuts through the incompetence, corruption and confusion that surrounded both the original crime and the subsequent murder of the suspect. Collins’s vivid sketch of a deeply divided polyglot culture is spiced with colorful real-life characters in Darrow, Buster Crabbe and Chang Apana, the Hawaiian policeman who served as a model for Charlie Chan.
09. Flying Blind
Blending solid research with reasoned speculation and adding fictional enhancements has proven to be a highly successful formula for eight Nate Heller mysteries, which have explored fascinating events like the Lindbergh kidnapping (Stolen Away, 1991) and the assassination of Huey Long (Blood and Thunder, 1995). In 1970, Chicago-based PI Heller is enjoying semi-retirement in Florida when he’s approached by a wealthy Texan interested in making yet another attempt to solve the mystery of the disappearance of Amelia Earhart. This narrative reveals the truth about the disappearance of the world’s most famous aviatrix as only Heller knows it, having been hired in 1935 by Earhart’s husband, G.P. Putnam, to provide security for one of Earhart’s triumphant appearances (this one at Marshall Field’s to launch a new line of clothing she had designed). Heller, who became friends with Earhart, agrees to help the curious Texan, and the result is an entertaining and provocative look at Earhart’s career and personal life and the "true" story of her ill-fated round-the-world flight in 1937.
10. Majic Man
Paranoia overruns rather than creeps into Chicago PI Nathan Heller’s 10th historical case (Flying Blind, etc.). In 1949, longtime client James Forrestal, the outgoing U.S. secretary of defense, believes himself the target of Communist forces within the federal government who have him under personal and electronic surveillance. He hires Heller to prove it shortly before his enforced resignation, afraid that "I’ve betrayed my country by trying to serve it." Forrestal is being watched by a number of parties who want to exploit Heller’s proximity and keep a lid on some undefined intelligence. Conspiracies nest like Russian dolls, involving the U.S. government, the Haganah (the underground Zionist defense organization), a ruthless national columnist and the famous 1947 incident in Roswell, N.M., where a UFO allegedly crashed. The lunatic effect is not lost on Heller, who muses: "Weren’t Commies, Zionists, and Nazis enough? Must I add spacemen to the list?" Collins overloads the book with references (Sinatra, Truman, Capone). He needn’t have bothered. Heller possesses a refreshingly gritty underside, reflected in a past that encompasses a stay in a psychiatric ward, perjury and sensitive casework for the highest levels of society and government.
11. Angel in Black
Honeymooning in LA, private detective Nate Heller is a suspect in the LAPD’s Black Dahlia murder investigation and must rely on old friend Eliot Ness to help solve the crime before it’s too late.
12. Chicago Confidential
"I had done jobs for Nitti, and Nitti had done me favors, like not having me whacked," PI Nate Heller recalls in the latest entertaining installment of his "memoirs," which takes him back to his old stomping grounds in Chicago. It’s 1950, the moment in American history when the Mafia becomes a household name, and Senator estes Kefauver is investigating organized crime. The PI walks the thin line between keeping his underworld sources confidential and holding the Feds at bay, but when a crusading ex-cop who once saved his life is murdered, Heller knows revenge is in order. Fourteen novels ago the prolific Collins (who has also scripted the Batman comic and novelized Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan) introduced Heller in True Detective (1983), set in the Chitown of Capone and Nitti. More recently Heller has wandered the country, investigating now-famous crimes such as the Black Dahlia and the assassination of Huey Long, always set in a factual here-and-now crossbred with the jazzy pulp stylings of such paperback original writers as Mickey Spillane. A famous starlet-to-be has a cameo role ("her elaborately brassiered breasts punched at the light fabric like shells almost breaching a submarine’s hull"). While the crime elements are strictly pro forma for the hard-boiled genre, Collins excels in the dialogue with the Made Guys, and every time Frank Sinatra (whose career Heller figures is finished) appears, the pages sing. Light and fast-paced, this is criminal history made easy and fun.
14. Target Lancer
An explosive novel that uncovers new facts about the deadly conspiracy to assassinate John F. Kennedy
Long before November 22, 1963, Nathan Heller, “P.I. to the Stars,” knows that a conspiracy is in the works. Several years earlier, Heller had been involved with the Kennedys, the Mob, and the CIA in the early stages of a plan to assassinate Fidel Castro. Shortly after, Heller’s Mafia contact is murdered.
After being interrogated by gangsters and contacted by U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy, Heller realizes that he may be the one person who can prevent a devastating political assassination. Only he knows all the players; only he knows why a web of conspirators has targeted the man known to the Secret Service as “Lancer,” John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
Rigorously researched, Max Allan Collins’sTarget Lancer is far more truth than fiction.
15. Ask Not
Chicago, September 1964. Beatlemania sweeps the nation, the Vietnam War looms, and the Warren Commission prepares to blame a “lone-nut” assassin for the killing of President John F. Kennedy. But as the post-Camelot era begins, a suspicious outbreak of suicides, accidental deaths, and outright murders decimates assassination witnesses. When Nathan Heller and his son are nearly run down on a city street, the private detective wonders if he himself might be a loose end.…
Soon a faked suicide linked to President Johnson’s corrupt cronies takes Heller to Texas, where celebrity columnist Flo Kilgore implores him to explore that growing list of dead witnesses. With the blessing of Bobby Kennedy—former US attorney general, now running for Senator from New York—Heller and Flo investigate the increasing wave of violence that seems to emanate from the notorious Mac Wallace, rumored to be LBJ’s personal hatchet man.
Fifty years after JFK’s tragic death, Collins’s rigorous research for Ask Not raises new questions about the most controversial assassination of our time.
Download Instructions:
http://festyy.com/wK15yl
Mirror:
http://festyy.com/wK15yc
13. Bye, Bye Baby
already released
viewtopic.php?f=121&t=272001&start=0&hilit=Max+Allan+Collins
Triple Play
already released
viewtopic.php?f=121&t=330654
Chicago Lightning Nathan Heller Short Stories
already released
viewtopic.php?f=121&t=265006&start=0&hilit=Max+Allan+collins
