William Bayer Books in Order

Bayer's 1962 debut novel is now a rare early work. Best for completists, it offers a look at the writer before the award-winning thrillers and detective novels that later made his name.

Bayer surveys sixty landmark films and explains what makes them endure. It is a compact guide for movie lovers who want smart, readable entry points into classic cinema.

One of Bayer's early standalones, this 1974 novel is now mostly of interest to completists. It offers an early look at his voice before the Janek books and the later psychological thrillers.

A fictionalized portrait of Isabelle Eberhardt, the restless writer and traveler who crossed borders of place, gender, and identity. Bayer turns her life into a moody historical novel about freedom, reinvention, and the cost of living outside the rules.

In Tangier's uneasy expatriate world, Moroccan police inspector Hamid watches rich foreigners, drifters, and spies circle one another in games of sex and power. As he tries to understand his enigmatic mistress, the city's secrets start to open.

After her beautiful sister Suzie is murdered in Bar Harbor, shy Penny Berring is left with an acquittal, a scandal, and too many unanswered questions. Years later, a secret diary pulls her back into the case and toward a darker family truth.

A trained peregrine falcon becomes a murder weapon in Manhattan, and NYPD detective Frank Janek is thrown into a case unlike any he has seen. As killings continue, a television reporter becomes dangerously entangled with the killer's obsession.

Two women are murdered in different parts of New York, and their severed heads are switched. Frank Janek must make sense of a crime that looks motiveless, while the case exposes old wounds inside the police department and in his own life.

In Jerusalem, detective David Bar-Lev investigates a string of murders linked only by strange markings on the bodies. The deeper he digs into zealotry, politics, and family secrets, the more the case begins to cut into his own life.

Night photographer Geoffrey Barnett is drawn in by actress Kimberly Yates, who jolts him out of his artistic dead end and into danger. When she disappears, he is pulled through a noir maze of blackmail, sadism, and murder.

Janek is called home from Venice after his goddaughter is murdered, apparently by a serial killer the FBI wants stopped fast. His search leads into damaged psyches, buried secrets, and a case that feels more personal with every step.

When a man is found dead after a bar pickup, Janek links the crime to a woman who drugs and robs men and to a much older sex murder. The trail leads him into a maze of abuse, corruption, and revenge.

Kay Farrow, a San Francisco photographer who sees only in black, white, and gray, investigates the brutal murder of male hustler Tim Lovsey. Her search ties a present killing to an older serial case and to her father's ruined police career.

After her mentor Maddy Yamada is killed in a late-night hit and run, photographer Kay Farrow refuses to accept it as an accident. Old film, hidden rooms, and a circle of wealthy collectors lead her toward a darker story.

Forensic sketch artist David Weiss returns to his hometown and becomes obsessed with an old double murder tied to a kidnapped child and his late psychoanalyst father. Diaries, case notes, and half-buried memories turn the investigation into a personal descent.

Part glossary, part survival manual, this nonfiction book walks through the practical language and hard realities of getting movies made. Bayer writes from firsthand film experience, so the advice stays concrete and unsentimental.

A prostitute's murder pulls incorruptible detective Marta Abecasis into a web of political power in Buenos Aires. Around her, a professor, a psychoanalyst, and a dealer chasing a Nazi dagger move toward the same dangerous crossroads.

At an arts-focused boarding school, senior Joel Barlev falls for gifted dancer and weaver Liv Anders. When tragedy strikes and something important is found hidden in one of her weavings, Joel and his friends start digging for the truth.

Performance artist Tess Berenson becomes obsessed with the murdered dominatrix who once lived in her Oakland loft. Her search leads from contemporary California to Freud's Vienna and to an infamous nineteenth-century photograph.

Former war photographer Jason Poe finds a haunting set of murals in the attic of an abandoned house and cannot let them go. With help from friends and a reporter, he starts uncovering a history of cult rumors, corruption, fire, and buried damage.