During the summer of 1936, destitute farmers from the Dust Bowl swarm into California, and an old friend brings police detective Tom Hickey a manuscript, a clue to the mystery of his father Charlie’s long-ago disappearance. Tom chooses to risk losing his job and family to follow this lead. Even his oldest friend and mentor, retired cop Leo Weiss, opposes Tom’s decision. Why so passionately?_x000D_ _x000D_Tom lures the novelist B. Traven to a meeting on Catalina and accuses him of manuscript-theft and homicide. Traven replies that the Sundance Kid, having escaped from his reputed death in Bolivia, killed Charlie. Tom crosses the desert to Tucson, tracking the person or ghost of the legendary outlaw, and meets a young Dust Bowl refugee intent on avenging the enslavement of his sister by an L.A. cop on temporary border duty in Yuma. Tom frees the sister, delivers the boy's revenge, and becomes a fugitive, wanted for felony assault by the L.A.P.D., his now former employer. _x000D__x000D_What he learns in Tucson sends Tom up against powerful newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst. He hopes to enlist Leo, but instead Leo offers evidence that Tom's father was a criminal. For Tom and his sister, both victims of Charlie’s wife, their crazy mother, what now? _x000D__x000D_This is the final chapter in the Hickey saga that ranges across the 1900s, the California Century.

Product Description: [MP3CD audiobook format in vinyl case.] It's late summer 1972 in the redwood forests of northern California. It seems a safe and wondrous place, but some of the population of the town of Evergreen is growing pot in the trees, and others are bent on stealing it...read more

Product Description: [Audiobook CD Library Edition in vinyl case.] It's late summer 1972 in the redwood forests of northern California. It seems a safe and wondrous place, but some of the population of the town of Evergreen is growing pot in the trees, and others are bent on stealing it...read more

Product Description: [Audiobook CASSETTE Library Edition in vinyl case.][Read by Ray Porter] In 1926, when musician Tom Hickey reads in a broadside about a lynching the Los Angeles newspapers failed to report, and discovers the Negro victim was an old friend, he goes to his neighbor Leo Weiss, an LAPD detective...read more

In 1926, when musician Tom Hickey reads in a broadside about a lynching the Los Angeles newspapers failed to report, and discovers the Negro victim was an old friend, he goes to his neighbor Leo Weiss, an LAPD detective. Leo confirms that, officially, the lynching didn’t occur.Tom has a dance orchestra to lead and a wild younger sister to raise. Yet he decides to investigate the murder. Since the lynching occurred in Echo Park, across the street from evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson’s Angelus Temple, he goes there looking for clues and is greeted and watched by an usher who follows him after the service and continues to shadow him daily. The investigation earns Tom beatings, gunfire meant to dissuade him, and warnings from Leo, a speakeasy owner, and a Klansman, that he’s made formidable enemies. Among them may be infamous Police Chief Two Gun Davis, Examiner publisher and political heavyweight William   Randolph Hearst, and Harry Chandler, owner of the Times, who owns more land than any man in the world. After Sister Aimee announces that on November 2, election day, she will preach a sermon entitled “The Biggest Liar in Los Angeles,” Tom deduces that the cover up may involve local politics, perhaps a   ballot referendum that will decide who the city’s future belongs to: the railroads, whose plans include subways and elevated trains; or the oil, automobile, and suburban development interests, devoted to building highways.Meanwhile, Tom also discovers that the key to the murder, as is too often the case, lies close to home.   

On the eve of the 1979 Mexican national elections, San Diego private detective Alvaro Hickey is hired by Lourdes Shuler to look into rumors of the Holy Virgin's appearance warning the locals to vote the corrupt PRI out of power, and finds himself embroiled in a case involving a fortune in stolen Nazi gold, an infamous police comandante, and murder.

Product Description: As The Angel Gang begins, thoughtful, capable ex-private detective Tom Hickey is married to the delicate Wendy, whose unworldly innocence and faith in her “angels” provides her with a stronger shield against evil than even Hickey’s devotion and the gun he carries...read more

Product Description: While the rest of San Diego is dealing with the rages of World War II, Tom Hickey--half owner of a local club--is making money. But when the clubs young singer Cynthia Moon disappears, business drops precipitously. Sometime private detective Hickey sets off looking for the girl, but instead discovers her bizarre and tragic family, including her mother Venus...read more

On the home front during World War II, Military Police border guard Tom Hickey calls on his skills as a private eye to help a naive farm boy retrieve his sister from a sordid Tijuana dive, where she is the prisoner of a gang of German and Mexican Nazis. Reprint.

Happily married to Wendy, living in Tahoe, and expecting a baby, Tom Hickey has his peaceful life turned upside down by the reappearance of a young singer--a former client--who asks him to clear her of a murder charge.