Bøger af Les Roberts

Russell Reinhart, a well-known author of private eye novels, is released from the Illinois State Prison in Joliet after serving seven years for the involuntary manslaughter of his wife. He returns to Chicago, welcomed home by his top-flight attorney who tucked away all his millions so no one could get hold of them while he was incarcerated, and rented him an elegant apartment in the Near North neighborhood, half a block from Lake Michigan. Reinert was an only child, adopted when an infant, and now he has no one to whom he can turn. His release from prison is reported by the local papers, and he's contacted by a man he's never heard of named Cole Cabot. A few years earlier, Cabot had married Reinert's extra-curricular girlfriend, Aubrey, who has suddenly gone missing. Russ pleads he's no private eye but just writes fiction about them, but worries his ex-lover has disappeared, so agrees to take on the case. He learns Aubrey was also the mistress of one of the world's richest men in America, Gaylord Ogilvie, at the same time she was with him. Having investigative trouble, he is helped by the young son of a man who met while he was in prison, a huge, half-illiterate black man named Denver Tolliver, who saved his life behind bars several times. Denver was locked up for life after killing a police officer, but his college-student son is brilliant loyal, intelligent and wise. Butting heads with Ogilvie and his minions, Russ also falls heads-over-heels in love with Cassidy Hammond, who he met while taking a Michigan Avenue Beach run for the first time in seven years. His adjustment to new freedom makes life more difficult than he'd ever imagined. When he runs into danger that might turn permanent, he hadn't forgotten how Denver Tolliver had taught him to prison-fight, and he eventually learns he's not that much alone as he thought he was. The first words of this book are identical to the last words in the book, too: "I am an only child..."

When a celebrity-packed motivational event turns deadly, Cleveland private eye Milan Jacovich (MY-lan YOCK-ovitch) finds himself caught up in the mess.Milan and his associate Kevin "K.O." O'Bannion are hired as extra security for several high-profile inspirational speakers at a convention in downtown Cleveland, where they get off to a rocky start. Each special guest seems more unpleasant than the last--particularly Tommy Triller, the main draw for the weekend, with an ego to match his bank account. Tensions run high, but Milan thinks they have things covered ... until Triller's dead body is found in his hotel room, a bullet hole between his eyes and a motivational CD jammed in his mouth.Among the suspects are fellow speakers, including southern psychologist Dr. Ben, who resented earning less than Triller; hip hop artist and convicted killer Hy Jinx; and former big-league baseball manager Tony Nardoianni, who might be willing to do almost anything for the right price.Milan figures he and K.O. are out of work when his significant other, Cleveland homicide detective Tobe Blaine, takes charge of the murder case. But to Milan's surprise, his old nemesis and local mob boss Victor Gaimari asks Milan to work for him. Nardoianni owes Victor, who wants to make sure the debt is paid--and that the aging athlete's gambling past stays under wraps as the murder investigation continues.Tobe's not happy to have Milan and K.O. operating on her turf. But a job is a job, and Milan is determined to clear his new client of murder ... by finding the real killer.

Slovenian-American Jericho Paich finds himself under arrest by snarling Cleveland police cop Keenan Mayo and forced to be a non-paid confidential informant, setting up friends and strangers to be hauled in for illegal drug use. He turns for help to his mother's live-in lover, ex-marine officer Laird Janiver. The two have never gotten along, but Jerry has nowhere else to turn. Janiver, a studious African American major who recalls how to kill, decides to help. That brings the two men into contact with a cruelly efficient albino drug lord, the suicidal memory of a lovely young college girl at OSU, and a beautiful woman with what might be a very dangerous past.

#18 in the Milan Jacovich mystery series. When Milan's beau--and Cleveland homicide detective--Tobe Blaine is tasked to investigate the first-ever murder in nearby Queenstown, Ohio, the two head to rural Ashtabula County--and an unfriendly reception. After another affluent citizen turns up dead, they discover that this small town has big secrets.

#15 in the Milan Jacovich mystery series . . . A simple missing-person case gets complicated when Milan Jacovich (pronounced MY-lan YOCK-ovich) discovers that 28-year-old Earl Dacey left behind a strange collection of voyeuristic videos in his mother's West Side Cleveland house. Was Earl just a pervert shadowing Catholic schoolgirls in Northeast Ohio shopping malls with his hidden camera . . . or had he become entangled with unsavory characters in the local adult film business? When Milan uncovers a possible link to organized crime, the FBI gets interested and Milan's "well connected" friend Victor Gaimari gets angry. After a dead body turns up, the Cleveland Police take over, and Milan figures he's off the case. So why does crusty Lieutenant McHargue ask him to lend a hand? Still feeling the effects of a recent concussion and well aware of his aging body, Milan takes the advice of a colleague and hires an assistant. Kevin O'Bannion is young and eager to learn the P.I. business. An Army veteran with combat experience and a juvenile-crime record, he definitely won't shy away from a fight. But will he be able to control his volatile temper and help get the job done? Milan finds out soon enough with his own life on the line.

Vietnam veteran Dominick Candiotti has been long estranged from his family. His late parents were close to the ruling mob clan in Youngstown, his sister was a bad-tempered and dissatisfied nag, and his middle brother was a corruptible police lieutenant. But in 1985, their oldest brother Richard Candiotti---beloved by every Italian Catholic in Youngstown as "Father Candy"---dies, and Dominick returns home for the funeral.Dominick is greatly disturbed by Richard's death, which has been ruled a suicide. Dissatisfied with this answer, he sets out to find the truth, revealing secrets and coming face-to-face with brutality and violence. Award-winning author Les Roberts pens a riveting and moving tale about walking the fragile tightrope between love and hatred.

#14 in the Milan Jacovich mystery series. Milan reluctantly attends his 40th high school reunion and gets a rude surprise: one of his classmates is found dead. Milan's hunt for the real killer leads him through the oddly intertwined worlds of Cleveland's medical community, organized crime, polite suburban society, and hard-core drug dealers.

Clevland, Ohio is a city of many faces. Home of one of the country's great symphony orchestras, it is home as well of "the only river in the world that's a fire hazard". It is also the home of a large population of immigrants from Central Europe, elderly now, who have brought with them and kept alive in their children, antagonisms that mirror the tragic conflicts even now tearing their former nations apart. Milan Jacovich, Roberts's likable and very human private eye, is American by birth, Slovene by heritage, and savvy enough to shy away from involvement in the enmity between Serbs and Croats. Until an appealing young woman convinces him to help in the search for her missing Serbian grandfather. Conscientiously, Milan follows the sparse clues in Bogdan Zdale's disappearance: He seeks out the formidable elder who rules Cleveland's Serbian community. He braves belligerant Croats. He investigates a possible connection with the sudden appearance in town of a mob hit man. As he digs deeper, he discovers there is more to the case than the wayward wandering of a forgetful old man. Zdale had a secret - one that goes back half a century with roots in World War II. Stirring up old hatreds results in an explosive - and surprising denoument, a dramatic ending to a story that rings as true as this morning's newspaper.

Former Irish mafia hitman Brock Sheehan lives quietly on a boat fifty miles from Cleveland. His "retirement" angered the mob boss and his former job caused the Sheehan family to disown him. But when his long-lost nephew, Linus Callahan, tracks him down and asks him for assistance, he agrees to help. A few days earlier, the nephew got into a push-and-shove bar argument with a multimillion-dollar basketball player just released from prison for running a high-level dog-fighting ring. Then the athlete is murdered, and Linus becomes the Cleveland police department's "person of interest." So while Brock Sheehan asks questions regarding the illegal dogfight community, the athlete's crazed fans subject him and his live-in girlfriend to a beating, and rapes one of his co-workers at the local animal shelter. In his travels all over NE Ohio, Brock finds himself in Youngstown where he discovers the woman he's loved all his life, Arizona Skye, who walked out on him years ago and disappeared because of his violent profession. Now she works as a TV news reporter in Youngstown and he hopes to somehow rekindle that love from ten years ago. Investigating the athlete's former dogfight ring, Brock gets most unpleasant with the remaining partner-and winds up with a pit bull of his own, which he names Conor, after an Irish saint. And eventually, with Conor's instincts, he discovers and turns over to the police the real killer of the dog-killer turned sports legend.

Spatial Anthropology draws together a number of interrelated strands of research focused on landscape, place and cultural memory in the north-west of England. At the core of the book lies an engagement with the methodological opportunities offered by new interdisciplinary frameworks of research and practice that have emerged in the wake of a putative ';spatial turn' in arts and humanities scholarship in recent years. The spatial methods explored in the book represent a consolidation of site-specific interventions enacted in landscapes located in the north-west and beyond. Utilising digital tools and geospatial technologies alongside ethnographic, performative and autoethnographic modes of spatio-cultural analysis, spatial anthropology is presented as a geographically immersive and critically reflexive set of practices designed to explore the embodied and increasingly multi-faceted spatialities of place, mobility and memory. From the radically placeless environment of a motorway traffic island, to the ';affective archipelago' of former cinema sites, or the ';songlines' and micro-geographies of musical memory, Spatial Anthropology offers a rich tapestry of landscapes, practices and spatial stories that speaks to both the particularities of place and locality as well as the more delocalised topographies of regional, national and global mobility.