Brian M. Wiprud Standalone Novels
Nicholas Palihnic is a natty, tweed-suited hustler who knows every nook and cranny of New York–and a thousand ways to break a girl’s heart. Beatrice Belarus is a Manhattan art dealer with an insatiable appetite for money–and for anyone who gets in her way. And a painting titled Trampoline Nude, 1972 has neither nudity nor a trampoline. But when Nicholas is hired by an insurance company to find the recently stolen painting, a murdered art thief points him to a trove of gold buried beneath Manhattan–and suddenly all roads are leading back to Beatrice. As fortune hunters, lovers, and other strangers gather around him, there’s one thing Nicholas must remember above all else: in this business, it’s better to be crooked than dead....
Morty Martinez is known in the industry of estate liquidation as a "feeler." If you were to look him up in the Brooklyn yellow pages, he would be listed under "home content removal," but his real job is looking for stashes of cash crammed into tin cans that have been left out of wills, kept out of banks, and hidden away for decades by the frugal elderly suspicious of ATMs and the IRS. When Morty hits upon the biggest score of his life, over $800,000.00, he knows that news travels fast and he must operate quickly and carefully to safeguard his booty, his life and his destiny as patrician of a seaside Mexican village. But what he doesn't know is that there are others after the same buried treasure, including the recently paroled prison assassin Danny Kessel.
Tom Davin’s business is a bit unusual—he finds stolen art and sells it back to its owners for a good penny—until he uncovers a devious plot and finds himself on the run from a vicious Russian assassin Tom Davin is a Brooklyn insurance investigator in a jam. He arranged an art theft to cover a debt—only somebody swiped the paintings from his crew. Now the insurance company wants him to investigate his own art theft; the local bookie wants his money; his crew in the neighborhood is targeted by a sniper; both the mob and the cops think he’s the shooter; and his girlfriend split and stuck him with four cats that are redecorating his apartment. Six-foot-six Tommy nimbly navigates his troubles and Brooklyn with the help of tantric yoga, his father’s aphorisms, and a comely masseuse. But the question remains: do good things happen to good people? The answer lurks in a fiery Brooklyn scrap yard.
Charged with recovering a sacred relic for his La Paz diocese, Morty Martinez hunts down a gold ring that rests on the finger of New York City billionaire Robert Tyson Grant. The holy quest lands Morty squarely in murderous cross plots between the billionaire and his tabloid-prone stepdaughter, Purity. Grant’s conniving girlfriend, a decapitation-happy hit man, and an avaricious fortune teller have their own agendas that put Morty at the center of a sensational murder trial in Mexico. All as told by Morty the night before his execution.
