1: Beast of Burden(ARC) – Ray Banks: down-at-heels private eye Cal Innes is at the end of his rope. He’s mourning his brother and walking with a cane, barely able to speak, the result of a massive drug-related stroke. It’s the Tiernans he’s investigating. Not only him, but his enemy, Detective Sergeant “Donkey” Donkin. All he wants to do is settle cores with Donkin and the Tiernans. And his own troubled past.

2: Act of Deceit(ARC) – Steven Gore: Harlan Donnally started out helping his late friend who died of cancer. A promise to find the man’s siser and tell her her history, plus turn the estate over to her(he’s the executor). Finding her wasn’t hard. She’d been murdered years before and Harlan was incensed that the murderer, known to all, had never been prosecuted. Mentally incompetent, he’d been consigned to hospitals, shuffled from one place to another, not been tested in over ten years, then simply walked away from the halfway house. And nobody cared.

As he began investigating, things started to get really ugly and every rock he turned over led to another slimy one. It was more than a simple murder case.

3: Tractor Girl(ebook) – James Reasoner: James’ homage to the Gold Medal crime novels of the fifties/sixties. A man about to be killed for seeing something he shouldn’t escapes, not without a bullet wound or two, to be rescued by an angel on a tractor. But thigs are not always as they seem.

Short with a nice, tight plot and plenty of action and almost cliff-hanger chapter endings. Read this one in just a couple of hours. Good.

4: The Best Go First – Frank O’Malley: Texas PI Mike Cavanaugh takes a well paying shadow job that turns into something more(where would a good PI novel be if they didn’t). This one is at the top of my TBR pile. O’Malley is a pen name of Frank O’Rourke, known for his westerns.