A vanished corpse leads a hard-drinking PI on a madcap chase More than forty corpses fill the cold Chicago basement, but no crime has been committed here. After all, there are supposed to be bodies in the city morgue. Tonight, one is attracting particular attention: a beautiful young woman whose apparent suicide captured the imagination of every newspaper editor in town. Learning how and why she died is too great a task for any cub reporter. Only Detective Bill Crane is up to the job. A few minutes after Crane wakes from a nap in the morgue, the mysterious woman’s body has disappeared. With the howls of the mental patients as a soundtrack, Crane leads the police on a wild search through the hospital and across Chicago, stopping for a nap or a cocktail whenever the situation demands. It may be a matter of life and death, but that is no reason to rush.

Banned from publication in the U.S. due to its mature subject matter, Solomon's Vineyard is a tense, hard-boiled work starring Karl Craven, a non-nonsense guy who predates detectives like Lew Archer and Mike Hammer. Craven is out to rescue a wealthy heiress from a twisted cult. The novel's famous opening passage --FROM THE way her buttocks looked under the black silk dress, I knew she'd be good in bed. The silk was tight and under it the muscles worked slow and easy. I saw weight there, and control, and, brother, those are things I like in a woman. I put down my bags and went after her along the station platform--explains why this book was too hot for domestic publication. (Initially published in 1941 in the UK, a heavily bowdlerized version came out in the '50s, but the less said about that one the better.) Review "Jonathan Latimer is the best kept secret in noir fiction. One of the great unrecognized masters." --  Max Allan Collins, author of Road to Perdition