Mike Angel Mystery Books

This first in the Mike Angel Mystery Series is a wild ride set in the New York/New Jersey and Chicago areas in 1960. If you like complex plots, soul-tortured protagonists, and suspense, you'll be hooked by this series. Hardboiled and historical fiction, involving names and places connected with remnants of the infamous Purple Gang of the 1930s. Suspense, seduction and even some supernatural elements involved. Burdened by the unsolved murder of his father, a career NYPD lieutenant whose "voice" warns whenever danger is near, 30-year-old Mike Angel is a Korean vet and bored private investigator of insurance fraud. When a wealthy ex-college buddy hires him to tail Joe Ambler, a petty blackmailer, Mike fixates on Kimbra, the blackmailer's woman, a stunning beauty who commits murder. Mike impulsively helps her dispose of the body and finds himself on the wrong side of the law. Mike then discovers the dead man was the grandson of a feared and legendary mob leader, founder of Detroit's Purple Gang of the 1920s and 30s, possibly still alive. The same week, a well-dressed thug comes looking for Ambler, and the wealthy buddy who hired Mike runs off with Kimbra and is murdered in the Bahamas. Kimbra disappears. While searching for her Mike stumbles across connections to the Russian-Cuban branch of the ring responsible for a string of unsolved murders in three states. Mike is led to the final showdown at Russian mob headquarters outside the small town of Mattoon, Illinois, where he hopes to discover who killed his father and save the life of Nika, a woman he has fallen for. You may have quite a few laughs at Mike's sarcasm and approach throughout.

Plenty of action and seduction confronts 32-year-old Mike Angel as he continues to struggle with being a private eye in Chicago in the early 1960s. Rescue of a bound beauty from a fire begins a chase into a white-slaver and murder for profit ring that runs sex shows and then dumps its victims into Lake Michigan. Molly, Mike's love interest, is abducted and flown to New Orleans, forcing Mike to follow. His volunteer partner, Rick Anthony, a retired NYC detective and partner of Mike's late father, provides a wise and analytical balance to Mike's headlong approach. In New Orleans Mike struggles to penetrate the white-slaver and prostitution markets, all the while fearing Molly's memory has been drug erased, trained to be a queen-prototype in the flesh markets. The ending twist reveals the mastermind behind the international crime ring. Dark Lake is the 2nd Mike Angel novel and is set in 1961. Warning-Adult situations and themes.

Julia Gateswood hires reluctant PI, Mike Angel, to find her missing sister, but Julia’s social position and the sordid past of the sister make this anything but a simple case. Julia’s a mysterious ex-beauty queen, who married for ambition to congressman Henry Gateswood, a charismatic ex-professor running for a vacated US Senate seat from Illinois in 1962. When Julia’s sister Gail, a loose woman with past shady connections, disappears, Julia calls on private eye Mike Angel, who quickly learns his new employer isn’t everything she seems to be, but what she is beyond a doubt is a great hypnotist of Mike’s libido. Before Mike is hardly into the case, he’s visited by Julia’s strange secretary, who later finds the missing sister’s headless body in the guesthouse of the Gateswood estate. Mike and his unofficial partner, Rick Anthony, a 25 year veteran of the NYC detective force and, whose vocabulary suffers from too many NYU grad classes, get to the crime scene before the police and follow clues that pit them against powerful Chicago mobsters. Rick was a partner for many years with Mike’s late father, who was murdered on his first case as a private investigator. O.W. Wilson, a famous police chief and gangbuster from Kansas City, has taken over the Chicago force and enlists Mike to seek the department mole connected with the year old Summerfield scandal, where police were in cahoots with robbers. Mike hunts for Gail’s killer while sorting out the threads of motive, political intrigue, bad cops and an arrogant DA, and Henry Gateswood’s role. All the while Mike becomes conflicted by attraction to Julia, who disappears at a critical juncture, only to discover that her husband has placed her in a sanitarium. What were Henry’s real motives for putting her away? Who killed Gail and how does she fit into Chicago mobsters on the run from the Summerfield scandal? Mike and Rick follow too many clues to a surprising conclusion. One twisting aspect of Mike’s investigative instincts is often timely warnings from the “voice” of his late father, and also through sensations felt in a long scar Mike won during a shootout with the Russian mob who was behind his father’s death. He also struggles with a desire to commit to Molly Bennett, his office manager and love interest, while conflicted with an over-healthy desire for attractive women who cross his path. This is the third in a series of four Mike Angel novels. These take place in NY/NJ (Dark Quarry), and Chicago in the early 1960s (Dark Quarry, Dark Lake, Dark Blonde, Dark Poison). Some actual historical characters and events are used. At this time only Dark Poison is published.

Dark Poison is set in Chicago in 1963. When a grotesque and melodramatic female seeks protection from a convict Mike helped to send up, Mike suffers paralysis. While she rifles his office, he can only watch her take a file and leave. The next morning he awakes and tries to identify what was taken. Once he pinpoints the case file he stumbles through a chain of events involving three murders (one body found in his own kitchen!), an interview with the convict at Joliet, and a reinvestigation of the diamond heist and killing--which in turn uncovers a suspicious international gem company with ties to Argentina, escaped Nazis, the Daley administration, and the CIA. The escalating case further tangles when the famous Chicago Police Commissioner, O.W. Wilson, taps Mike to flush out the Nazi mastermind for the Israeli secret police. Throughout the episode Mike struggles against attraction for Rebecca Lutz, a vulnerable blonde employed by the gem company whose sister is named in the stolen file. Rebecca becomes the client and helps Mike uncover the truth about the company. Tension builds from this triangle, which includes Molly Bennett, and parallels the building suspense in solving the murders and capturing the escaped Nazi. In a twisting climax, Mike finds himself in crossfire between the CIA, the demands of the Israeli Mossad, and the FBI. A plot to insure that the master criminal will not be taken alive unfolds to hide collusion about other Nazis who worked for West Germany against the Soviet Communists.

Set in 1964 amidst racial divisions in Chicago, Mike receives an anonymous note with a 1934 $10,000 Federal Reserve Note with a cryptic message that the bill is payment for an unspecified future trouble. Tracking down the sender spins into a 40 year old kidnaping case involving four US Army officers in World War One, stolen gold with connections to the French Bonnot gang (the first to use autos in bank robberies), a Babylonian sex goddess cult, and trouble from Henry Ford's grandson. Death stalks Mike and Rick on this one, and threatens their client. Murder, action, suspense and the typical quicksand that is Mike's struggle about love and commitment to Molly.

Set in Portland, Oregon, 1965. Mike befriends an eccentric veteran with a drinking problem, whose estranged wife has been sleeping with hoodlums and racketeers. One night the man shows up at Mike’s office asking for a ride to the US side of the Canadian border. On the way the man discloses his wife had been murdered and he was being framed. Expecting a nice quiet life and a new start with love interest Molly Bennett, Mike is shaken by the history of crime and corruption still going on in the Rose City. Mike agrees to find the woman’s killer, but the more he follows her trail the more suspects are in the picture, with too few clues. The Police Chief enlists Mike to infiltrate a famous whorehouse poker game to look into connections to the murder between the Teamsters, Big Jim Elkins, and other local hoodlums. Rick decides to put on his professor speech and infiltrate the house a day earlier than Mike. When Rick doesn’t return in twenty-four hours, Mike heads in the Victorian red light house of infamous Madam Little Rusty to find himself inside up against seven armed men, including three in police uniforms. In this episode Mike is tempted by two seductive roommates, one who attacks him sexually at gunpoint. Historical fiction based on Phil Stanford’s Portland Confidential (2004) by WestWinds Press.

In late 1966, the world’s richest man, Howard Hughes, took occupancy of the top two floors of the Desert Inn on the Strip in Las Vegas. After his time was up he refused to vacate the space, and wound up buying the Inn for thirteen million dollars from the Mob. Earlier that year Mike and Rick were called to an empty apartment where the body of a world-famous glamour model, a twin, was posed with flowers. The scene tipped Mike’s equilibrium, and when the surviving twin hit town he struggled with his darker fantasies. Mike crosses the line when he breaks into a gallery’s back office and dark room to discover a strange pornographic film involving the dead twin and an underage boy. After viewing the film with Rick and Molly, Mike is persuaded to turn it over to the police, and take the heat for his actions. The film mysteriously disappears from the police evidence locker. Hired by the surviving twin, also a model who makes Molly a bit jealous, the case leads Mike to Las Vegas, connections to local racketeer Big Jim Elkins, L.A. mobster Mickey Cohen, and then to Howard Hughes in Las Vegas. Can Mike gain entrance into the Hughes penthouse and verify Hughes’ possession of the porno film involving the dead twin? He’ll need an ingenious plan, which is supplied by a sexy Swedish blonde he meets at the newly opened Caesar’s Palace. If the plan to get in works, can he escape alive and get out of town? He cannot trust the Vegas authorities or even the FBI, who have been surveilling Hughes for bigger issues and offer no help. Set in Portland and Las Vegas in 1966, Dark Fantasy is the 7th in the Mike Angel Series, and follows Dark Moon. Just over 72,000 words.

Mike is shot after chasing a naked blonde down a dark street one wet night in Portland, Oregon. His near death experience, surgery and a long recovery convince him that the time’s right to marry Molly Bennett. But first Mike vows to catch the killer, whose victim turns out to be the granddaughter of the L.A. mob boss, Nick Licata. The girl was involved with a Marxist group headed by a Reed College professor, who heads anti-war rallies at the school and holds perverted bondage sessions in his basement. The girl’s brother hires Mike to protect him and soon after the brother’s homosexual roommate is bludgeoned to death. Investigating the two murders, Mike uncovers a communist plot hatched by the professor to bomb a Navy destroyer at the river wall during Portland’s Rose Festival in 1967. After deducing the scheme’s target hour, Mike, Molly and Rick scramble to identify all the conspirators and stop their plan to use a Vietnam War protest as cover. Dark Conspiracy is the 8th in the novel series, each stand alone. Seduction, strong adult content.

Mike and Molly are married on Christmas Day in 1967, but upon leaving the Reno chapel a stray bullet strikes Molly in the head. As desperate weeks and months pass with Molly in a coma, Mike cannot go south to find the shooter. Sanity forces him to take on a routine insurance fraud case, reported stolen jewelry by a mysterious redhead. Her connections throw Mike into the world of international drug cartels, ice pick murders, and even an apparition in Tonopah, Arizona, where Mike searches for a missing FBI secretary, also a redhead. The two redheads couldn’t be more different and Mike struggles to find boundaries between Platonic friendship, seduction, and fidelity to Molly. The case also involves Mike interviewing a dismemberment killer on Nevada’s death row in Carson City, and falling into Latino gang dangers in Sacramento. #9 in the series of stand alone mysteries.

In 1969 private eye Mike Angel works a routine missing persons case that falls into Albina, the black section of Portland, where a seductive light-skinned siren coaxes Mike to help black businessmen carry out a boycott of corrupt white bar owners and illegal gambling. She also coaxes him carnally, as does an infamous black fan dancer, in cahoots with white bar owners run by mysterious brothers. Black businessmen hire Mike to lead a boycott that threatens to inflame racial passions, all the while Mike closes in on an elusive kingpin who directs arson, kidnapping, and murder, including framing Mike for killing a black leader. Another complex and action-packed stand alone mystery novel, #10 in the series. Adult language and scenes.

After Mike witnesses a barefoot bank robber who got away in a hail of bullets, an iron-fisted longshoreman union boss hires Mike to find the killer of his granddaughter, a loose-morals woman who slept with both sides of a labor war. A second murder confuses his case, but the bank robbery connects somehow with the murder. Even though directed not to pry into union affairs, every lead takes Mike there, in ever deeper danger, until he’s shanghaied in a shipping container en route to Tokyo. His initial theory doesn’t fit the limited evidence. Mike is tempted by three different women, one of whom comes on to Molly as well. Once again solo as Rick is mostly retired and Molly puts her lack of reflexes in a desk job downtown. Mike and the police see things as wrapped up, but are they? Set in Portland, Oregon in 1970 Dark Union is number 11 in the series.

In Dark Drama, the 12th novel in the series set in Portland in 1971, Mike Angel stumbles into his office during a power outage to discover a stunning look-alike for Hollywood actress Hedy Lamarr posed in his loveseat. At first he talks to the woman, then discovers to his horror she’s been murdered with a bullet in her brain. His partner discovers Mike’s business card in the dead woman’s panties. The murder leads Mike to the girl’s family, then into a thicket of smut film productions made to order with Hollywood diva look-alikes for rich Arab shieks. Chasing leads takes Mike to Boise, Idaho City, and Tijuana, as he identifies all the actors and crew who filmed a death scene where blanks were switched with live ammunition. Seemingly everyone he talks to had motive and opportunity. Break-ins, and a stand-in for porno screen tests yields valuable clues. Mike takes direct action in a convoluted mess of a case he grows to hate.

Dark Jaws (Mike Angel Mystery series # 13) In 1972 Mike takes on a case searching for a stolen inheritance. The next day his dowager client is killed on a downtown Portland street. Clues she left leads Mike on a meandering case with murder, seduction and twists over three states, chasing a carnival con man and his stolen and counterfeit money. The finale carnival act involves a dangerous dance of death over an alligator tank. A twisted path takes Mike to Hardin Montana for the reenactment of Sitting Bull’s victory over Custer at Little Big Horn. Along the way Mike learns his suspect is connected to the most elusive counterfeiter in US history, “Mister 880.” Mike suffers hypnosis by a stunning belly dancer, is fascinated in Butte Montana by an Annie Oakley type and strung up and left to die in Vale, Oregon.

In what Mike hopes will be his last case, he eventually comes face to face with a man he believes is D.B. Cooper, the infamous hijacker of Northwest Airlines Flight 305 on Nov. 24, 1971. When Mike renovates an old house to begin a new career, he uncovers a shrouded corpse. The wrapper turns out to be the very parachute D.B. Cooper jumped with. The FBI at first confirms then denies it was Cooper’s chute, revealing a cover-up dictated by the late J. Edgar Hoover. Mike is hired by the dead man’s sister to find the killer. The case takes him to Canada and Montana to reunite with irrepressible Dakota Cassidy. Kidnapping, money laundering, murder, and a chase to the Oregon coast embroil Mike in one of his biggest cases — the search for Cooper. Set in Portland, Oregon in 1973. Adult language and situations.

Mike becomes embroiled in the Patty Hearst kidnap case when he discovers the missing man he seeks was invited to join the Symbionese Liberation Army, the ragtag revolutionary group who kidnapped Hearst. Mike navigates feelings for an admired female FBI agent and gets caught in the web of a voracious nymphomaniac, half-sister to the missing man. Mike doctors up murder scenes and chases links from the man-child movement to change age-of-consent laws, precursor to NAMBLA. The 15th in the series, set in Portland and Berkeley, California in 1974.

In Dark Arson (#16) set in Portland in 1975, Mike’s neighborhood is victim to a series of mysterious arson cases, including a house he was renovating. When an old lady at the end of his block is killed in a fire, her daughter, a stunning redhead psychiatrist from Olympia, Washington, hires Mike to find the arsonist. His investigation leads to a famous bank robber of the 1930s and 40s, Eddie Bentz, who consulted on hundreds of bank robberies for various crooks and hid untold wealth in flophouses around the country. Mike teams up with Dan Ahrens, a Seattle detective and learns that past accomplices of Bentz are squeezing him to find out his hiding places. Fire chases Mike as he chases a man thought to have drowned in a 1962 escape from Alcatraz. Lots of twists and turns in this adult language and seduction situation novel.

What do missing Romanov Czarist Jewels have to do with Mike Angel private eye? Mike gets between remnants of killer White Russians and Soviets after tripping over a triple murder case he’s warned not to investigate by the new Portland Police Chief. Along the way he tangles with the nastiest female he’s ever met, one who loves to torture innocents with a diabolical copulating machine. A bizarre rescue, shootouts, bodies galore and several trips to Southern Oregon frame this incredible case. #17: Adult language and situations, set in 1976.

Dark Oath, #18 in the Mike Angel PI Series. Drawn to follow a mysterious blonde with a more than ample backside, Mike falls into a case chasing a stolen relic of ancient Hawaiian King Kamehameha the First, reputed to bestow long life to the age of 130. After his Korean buddy is murdered in a downtown Portland alley by one of the several elements after the artifact, Mike feels obligated to forge on, thwarted by repeated female traps, one involving abduction by the Chinese Triad gang. Set in 1977 in Portland, and the Hawaiian Islands aided by the famous prosecutor Charles F. Marsland, Mike helps a brother-sister team, whose late father uncovered the relic. Adult language and situations: sex, violence, violent sex and sexy violence. Dark Quarry, Dark Lake, Dark Blonde Dark Poison, Dark Idol, Dark Moon Dark Fantasy, Dark Conspiracy Dark Red, Dark Eyes, Dark Union Dark Drama, Dark Jaws, Dark Tattoo, Dark House Dark Arson, Dark Sleep, Dark Oath

Behind a remote lodge overlooking Crescent City California, stands a mysterious lookout tower used to signal the shoreline and ships at sea. The signals coordinate marijuana shipments. Mike seeks two women missing from the same area. Were they abducted by a drug cartel? Mike comes in contact with weird personalities, including a professional wrestler, a wide-eyed motel desk man, a blonde with a past who plays him for a sap, and an ex-Nazi who the US government has installed in a group exploring biological warfare, Operation Paperclip. He follows the husband of one of the missing women and discovers the remote lodge and lookout tower. He sneaks inside and eavesdrops on the group’s nasty plan. He joins forces with the FBI to raid the lodge headquarters but ignores orders to stay back. Adult situations and language. Number 19 in the series set in Portland, Eugene, Bandon and Crescent City in 1978.

#20 in the series set in Portland and British Columbia. This last episode begins when a vision from Mike’s first big case visits his office using lies and hypnosis to achieve her ends. The woman is a spitting image of her aunt who died in a hail of bullets in the 1960 case, a woman Mike became obsessed with. More diamonds from that old case surface. They get passed around between a murder in Spokane that fits into the South Hill rape cases; an attack by a gang on his partner Rick and wife; Mike being waylaid by a Ma Kettle type and two daughters in Rogers Pass; and a shootout at a remote cabin, hideout of Thuggees. Survival for Mike, Rick, Molly and Cathy hang by a thread, with a shocking conclusion. Will Mike survive his last big case? You’ll love this fast moving complex case.