Dave Brandstetter Books in Order

A popular singer's car goes off a bridge, but his body never turns up. In Dave Brandstetter's first case, a missing corpse leads to a smart, tough mystery about fame, reinvention, and the stories people tell to survive.

Rare book dealer John Oats is found smashed on the rocks below his beach house, and the authorities call it misadventure. Dave isn't convinced, and the search for answers becomes tangled with grief, secrecy, and desire.

A beloved beachfront club owner is found dead with a hustler standing over him and a gun in his hand. Dave sees the holes in the easy story and starts pulling at a case full of bad assumptions and hidden motives.

Police chief Ben Orton was feared, hated, and finally murdered in his own yard. Dave's investigation leads into a coastal town divided by corruption, activism, and a police force that wants the case closed fast.

When an anti-porn vigilante turns up dead, the obvious suspect is a soft-hearted bookstore owner everyone is ready to judge. Dave works the line between evangelical fury and the sex trade to find what really happened.

A disgraced lawyer files an insurance claim for his missing daughter after a cult massacre, then disappears himself. Dave follows the trail through lies, family damage, and a case that grows stranger and more dangerous at every turn.

This collection gathers five shorter works, including Brandstetter pieces and other Joseph Hansen fiction. It's a good way to see his range, from tightly wound mystery to sharp, character-rich suspense.

Dave investigates the fiery death of truck driver Paul Myers and finds links to a declining Los Angeles neighborhood and a dangerous cargo trail. The case mixes social decay, corporate wrongdoing, and real menace.

When globe-trotting reporter Adam Streeter is found dead, Dave doesn't buy the suicide story. The missing notes to Streeter's last investigation point toward exile politics, hidden enemies, and people willing to kill to bury the truth.

Back in Los Angeles, Dave finds a stabbed stranger dead on his doorstep while a killer stalks gay men already dying of AIDS. It's one of Hansen's bleakest, most urgent mysteries, and one of his most humane.

Dave comes out of retirement when a young man is accused of killing a Vietnamese businessman tied to a threatened houseboat community. The case pulls him into bigotry, development schemes, and a darker conspiracy than he expected.

Semi-retired Dave looks into the death of a TV station employee killed during a paintball war game. What looks accidental opens into murder, blackmail, and the ugly politics of a seemingly quiet California town.

Dave Brandstetter is older, sore, and supposed to be slowing down. Then a frightened child says he saw a pop star murdered, and Dave takes one last case that becomes a searching, melancholy farewell.