The Peaceful Valley Crime Wave by Bill Pronzini

The Peaceful Valley Crime Wave by Bill Pronzini

Bill Pronzini's riveting western mystery, The Peaceful Valley Crime Wave, takes on the modern world with old-fashioned violence--and his Peaceful Valley is anything but...

Nothing much happens in Peaceful Valley, Montana. And that's just how Sheriff Lucas Monk likes it.

Aside from the occasional drunken brawl or minor disturbance out on the reservation, he hasn't had to resort to his fists or sidearm in years.

That is, until mid-October, 1914, when the theft of a wooden cigar store Indian sets off a crime wave like nothing Lucas has ever seen. Teenager Charity Axthelm goes missing, Reba Purvis's housekeeper is poisoned with cyanide Reba is sure was meant for her, and Lucas's gut tells him that this is only the beginning.

It's not long before the first corpse shows up, bringing the peace in the valley to a thundering end.

Bill Pronzini is simply one of the masters. He seems to have taken a crack at just about every genre: mysteries, noirish thrillers, historicals, locked-room mysteries, adventure novels, spy capers, men's action, westerns, and, of course, his masterful, long-running Nameless private detective series, now entering its fourth decade, with no signs of creative flagging. He's also ghosted several Brett Halliday short stories as Michael Shayne for Mike Shayne's Mystery Magazine, and has managed to collaborate with such fellow writers as John Lutz, Barry Wahlberg, Collin Wilcox and Marcia Muller. Still, if he never ventured into fiction writing, his non-fiction work, as both writer and editor, would still earn him a place in the P.I. genre's Hall of Fame. Besides his two tributes to some of the very worst in crime fiction (what he calls alternative classics), Gun in Cheek and Son of Gun in Cheek, and one on western fiction (entitled Six Gun in Cheek, naturally), he's the co-author (with Marcia Muller) of 1001 Midnights. The Mystery Writers of America have nominated him for Edgar Awards several times and his work has been translated into numerous languages and he's published in almost thirty countries. He was the very first president of the Private Eye Writers of America, and he's received three Shamus Awards from them, as well as its Lifetime Achievement Award in 1987. His passion for the old crime pulps is largely responsible for keeping them in the public's eye. He's amassed a huge collection of books and magazines and has always been an omnivorous reader; all of which made him a natural when it came to editing various anthologies. He admits it was a pleasure tracking down good stories to fit a particular anthology theme. But after editing 80 or so of them over a period of twenty-some years, he decided it was more than enough.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781250823311
ISBN 10	1250823315
Title	The Peaceful Valley Crime Wave
Author	Bill Pronzini
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	St Martin's Press
Year published	2019-08-13
Number of pages	256
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.