Mortimer Angel Books in Order

The Mortimer Angel books begin with a great comic noir premise. Mortimer, who much prefers Mort, quits the IRS after years of soul-killing work and decides to become a private investigator in Reno. In Gumshoe, he is barely hours into the new career before he is tangled up in a missing mayor, a missing district attorney, and a body part in the trunk of his ex-wife's car.

That is pretty much the series in miniature.

Mort is not a polished super-sleuth. He is stubborn, impulsive, wry, easily distracted by a beautiful woman, and just self-aware enough to know he is often making his life harder. He starts out training at his nephew's detective agency and later works cases through Clary Investigations, but the real through-line is not the office. It is Mort himself, blundering forward, taking hits, getting lucky, and refusing to back away once somebody is in trouble.

Reno and the wider Nevada landscape do a lot of the heavy lifting. These books move through casino bars, cheap motels, desert roads, small towns, and stretches of open country where help is far away and bad decisions last a long time. Leininger uses the West well. The distances matter. So do the odd characters who drift in and out of Mort's path, from clients with secrets to women who may need saving, may be running a scam, or may be both at once.

The cases have a habit of starting weird and then getting weirder. Gumshoe for Two sends Mort after a missing young woman and into the orbit of a vanished presidential candidate. Gumshoe on the Loose begins with a million-dollar demand and the body of a missing rapper. In Gumshoe Rock, the stripped skull of Mort's old IRS boss lands in his assistant Lucy's car. Gumshoe in the Dark starts with a stranded woman on a stormy road and turns into one of Mort's most dangerous hunts. Then Gumshoe Gone and Gumshoe Outlaw push him into still larger disappearances and higher-profile trouble.

What holds it together is the tone. These are hardboiled mysteries, but they are not solemn. Mort wisecracks, complains, gets embarrassed, gets beat up, and keeps going. The humor can be broad, the violence can be sharp, and the books know how absurd crime can look from ground level. At the same time, the stakes are real. Missing people stay missing. Powerful people lie. Mort's choices cost him.

If you are looking for sleek, clinical detective fiction, this is probably not that. If you want a series with a lived-in voice, western mileage, and a hero who feels like a smart mess instead of a machine, it is easy to see the appeal. Start with Gumshoe and read forward. Mort grows on you, partly because he keeps surviving cases that really ought to have finished him, and partly because underneath all the noise he has a decent heart.