Murder in the Walls is the story of a murdered prostitute and a cop determined to find the killer. Flora Hobbs owned one of New Mexico's oldest Spanish-style houses, and shared it with a bevy of beautiful working girls. When one of them turned up dead -- in a locked room -- Detective Johnny Ortiz followed a scent that went straight beneath Santo Cristo's respectable facade into a world of hustlers, profiteers -- and at least one killer. Welcome to the first Johnny Ortiz mystery, which was set in motion by Richard Martin Stern (The Tower) in 1971. The New York Times Book Review said, "The author knows the country and his people. There is a feeling of desert and mesa, open air, spaciousness ... The prose is lean, the characters convincing, the plotting impeccable.
The Bright Road to Fear, first published in 1958, received the Edgar Award for best first novel for author Richard Martin Stern. The book describes an ambitious Italian crime syndicate and a young American who becomes involved in their shady dealings. Richard Stern would go on to write many suspense novels, notably The Tower (1973), which was made into a major motion picture. Stern died in 2001 at the age of 86.
What Is What Was, Richard Stern's fifth "orderly miscellany," is the first to meaningfully combine his fiction and nonfiction. Stories, such as the already well-known "My Ex, the Moral Philosopher," appear among portraits (of the sort Hugh Kenner praised as "almost the invention of a new genre"): Auden, Pound, Ellison, Terkel, W. C. Fields, Bertrand Russell, Walter Benjamin (in both essay and story), Jung and Freud, Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger. In the book's seven sections are analyses of the Wimbledon tennis tournament as an Anglification machine, of Silicon Valley at its shaky peak, of James and Dante as travel writers, a Lucretian look at today's cosmology, American fiction in detail and depth, a "thought experiment" for Clarence Thomas, a salvation scheme for Ross Perot, a semi-confession of the writer. The book contains but isn't philosophy, criticism, opinion, reportage, or autobiography (although the author says it is as much of this as he plans to write). There is a recurrent theme, the ways in which actuality is made and remade in description, argument and narration, fictional and nonfictional, but above all, What Is What Was is a provocative entertainment by a writer who, as Philip Roth once said, "knows as much as anyone writing American prose about family mischief, intellectual shenanigans, love blunders—and about writing American prose.
In a small town like Santo Cristo there are no coincidences. So when a collector for an East Coast syndicate gets ice-picked in a porn house, Detective Johnny Ortiz investigates and finds a real estate developer hungry for a $5 million profit.
When Detectives Shelly Lowenkopf and Homer Greely caught the speeding red Ferrari on the Bronx River Parkway, they found a nun behind the wheel and a notorious cocaine dealer as the owner. Soon they find themselves on the trail of a modern-day Robin Hood dishing out his own Bronx brand of justice.
When New York Sergeant Shelly Lowenkopf is shipped out of the Bronx on a brief assignment in California, he's like a fish out of water in the tinseltown glitz. As police consultant on a movie set, he runs into real-life drama when a movie executive is murdered.
Combining authentic details of high technology, natural disaster, and human weakness and greed, this spellbinding novel recounts the many-faceted drama that revolves around the construction of a gigantic suspension bridge over a treacherous gorge
Limns a portrait of catastrophic forest fire in New Mexico's Samrio National Forest, where a prolonged drought, the homes that fringe the forest, campers, and two escaped convicts are the ingredients for disaster
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