Kilroy Mystery Books in Order

The Kilroy books bring Stephen Mertz back to private-eye fiction, but with a strong retro pulse. These stories are set in 1970s Denver, a city of bars, cheap offices, hustlers, musicians, fixers, and rich people who think money can hide whatever they have done.

Kilroy is old-school, and he knows it.

He is a tough private eye who wears his heart on his sleeve and carries a .44 in a shoulder holster. He is not polished, and he is not trying to be. What he does have is persistence, a feel for trouble, and the kind of stubborn moral streak that gets detectives hurt in hardboiled fiction. Cases begin with something that sounds manageable, a missing woman, a vanished singer, a blackmail scheme, and then open out into vice, violence, and the kind of corruption that reaches much farther than expected.

The tone is one of the best things here. These books have the bones of classic paperback PI fiction, but they do not feel embalmed. They move quickly, they are happy to get rough, and they still leave space for humor and character beats. Kilroy can wisecrack, but the wisecracks never hide the fact that the world around him is dangerous and often ugly.

Denver matters, too. This is not a generic noir city with the labels changed. Mertz gives it a lived-in, regional feel, and the 1970s setting adds a loose, anything-goes edge that suits the stories. The clubs, the streets, the local power brokers, and the half-shady social world all help the series feel grounded.

One nice extra layer is that the line eventually circles back to Some Die Hard, one of Mertz's earliest detective novels. That gives the Kilroy books a sense of connection to his own paperback past. If you want private-eye stories with old-school grit, fast pacing, and a strong period mood, this is a very good corner of his work to explore.