Max Dietrich Books in Order

The Max Dietrich series moves Matthew Legare's historical-thriller approach to Depression-era America. Its first novel, An American Putsch, is set in New York City in November 1934, when unemployment, political anger, and the memory of the First World War still shape daily life.

Max Dietrich is a private investigator with a hard-edged reputation and limited patience for high-minded speeches. He makes his living finding dirt on corrupt politicians, but business is thin. When his old war friend Richard Osborn offers him a questionable job, Max takes it because he needs the money.

The assignment sounds direct enough: locate a cache of weapons stolen from arms dealer Elias Haskell. It quickly becomes clear that the missing guns are tied to much more than a private dispute. Haskell profits from foreign wars, Osborn has become a leader in an American fascist movement, and powerful people are looking for a way to turn fear and frustration into political control.

Max is not a clean-cut hero, and that matters. He knows how to bluff, pry, and move through New York's rougher corners, but he is also forced to reckon with old loyalties and the harm that can follow when cynical people decide nothing is worth defending. His past connection to Osborn keeps the investigation personal even as the stakes grow larger.

The series is a hard-boiled historical mystery with a political edge.

Legare fills the background with the pressures of the 1930s: veterans struggling after war, wealthy industrialists, street-level radicals, rival ideologies, and a public still battered by the Great Depression. The story uses those conditions to build suspense rather than turn into a history lesson. Clues lead Max through social clubs, back rooms, criminal circles, and the more polished spaces where influence is bought and traded.

Readers can expect a private-eye story in which the case widens from stolen property to a possible attack on the country's democratic institutions. An American Putsch works as the place to begin because it introduces Max, his history with Osborn, and the moral compromises that make the series tick. It is a tense, period-driven mystery for readers who enjoy 1930s New York, political conspiracies, and detectives who have to decide what they are willing to risk.