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ก้าวเข้าสู่โลกแห่งเรื่องราวอันไม่มีที่สิ้นสุด

ฟังและอ่าน

Stephen Marlowe

To find his ex-wife’s killer, Drum takes on the Communist Party

Deirdre Hartsell loved life too much to shoot herself in her pretty head. She’d been a high-society party girl since her days at college, and her two greatest passions were keeping up appearances and having a roaring good time. Women like that don’t kill themselves, and Deirdre’s father wants to prove that his girl didn’t die by her own hand. To get the truth, he hires Washington DC’s sharpest private detective, Chester Drum. After all, Drum knew Deirdre better than anyone—he was married to her. But in a town built on lies, Deirdre lived with more than her fair share of secrets, and the first thing Drum learns is that his late ex-wife was a prominent member of the Communist Party, supporting the local cell with endless donations from her fat checkbook. Did leftist sympathies get Deirdre killed? The truth lies in Venezuela—and Chester Drum has gone farther than that for answers before.

MysteriousPress.com/Open Road

The Chester Drum Mysteries

The Second Longest Night

A PI heads from DC to Saudi Arabia to save the life of a client targeted by a hit man. 

Nothing will stop the beautiful Fawzia Totah and her lover, US Army colonel Lyman Tyler, from boarding a plane for the Middle East to make their pilgrimage to Mecca. So Fawzia hires Washington PI Chester Drum to serve as bodyguard until she’s safely out of the country.

But Lyman’s wealthy mother, Davisa, doesn’t want Fawzia to go anywhere safely. The violently bigoted, socially connected woman comes from old Virginia money, and she’s not about to let this former dancer from Jordan risk her precious Southern reputation. Not only is her son prepared to convert to Islam for the woman he loves, he’s also already married. When Davisa hires a hit man to track down Fawzia and take her out, Drum has no choice but to follow. However, Davisa’s motives aren’t as simple as they first seem—and the road to Mecca has a sudden turn no one will see coming.

This is a twisting, fast-paced mystery in the vintage series that “combined elements of the hard-boiled detective story and the international espionage thriller” by a recipient of the Private Eye Writers of America’s lifetime achievement award (The New York Times).

Mecca for Murder is the 2nd book in the Chester Drum Mysteries, but you may enjoy reading the series in any order.

Mecca for Murder

A missing politician sucks Drum into the three-ring circus of Cold War Germany

On the eve of becoming a vice-presidential candidate, Fred Severing vanishes in Germany, where he made his name twelve years earlier during the madness that followed World War II. To find the American, his party hires globe-trotting private detective Chester Drum, and it isn’t long before Drum’s investigation lands him in the Rhine River along with an elderly war criminal. Drum is meeting with Wilhelm Rust, a mid-level ex-Nazi, when Communist spies storm their boat. Drum jumps into the river, taking Rust with him, and inadvertently saves the ex-Nazi’s life. His investigation may be all wet, but Drum isn’t one to quit. Finding Severing will mean lying to West Germans, East Germans, and Nazis, and perfecting the triple-cross that is the favorite pastime of European Cold Warriors.

Trouble Is My Name

Crossing the Atlantic on NATO’s behalf, Drum tangles with mobsters, blackmail, and murder

As the H. M. S. Queen Victoria pulls out of New York Harbor, danger encircles Chester Drum. He’s sailing for Europe on the largest luxury liner ever built, but it’s not big enough to hold the secrets on board—or the men who keep them. And by the time the liner reaches Southampton, she will be missing a few passengers. Drum can only hope he isn’t among those who don’t make it to shore. Hired by a NATO functionary as a bodyguard, the private investigator quickly learns his real assignment: protecting his client from a Chicago mobster with dreams of blackmail. Keeping the mafia at bay is tricky enough, but when a State Department colleague ends up in the line of fire, Drum sets his mind on getting even. After all, there is no better spot for vengeance than the icy waters of the open sea.

Terror Is My Trade

When Drum picks up a hitchhiker, trouble follows her into the car

A monsoon is hammering Washington, DC, when Chester Drum spots Anita Sparrow on the roadside in the middle of the night. Sixteen, frail, and soaking wet, she is trying to find help for her brother, Donny, a photographer with cerebral palsy who was beaten nearly to death a mile up the road. Drum takes Donny to the hospital and drives Anita home, where he finds her house ransacked, her brother’s darkroom destroyed. It seems Donny took a picture of something he wasn’t supposed to see, and powerful men will kill to ensure the negative is never developed. 

On top of it all, Drum soon learns that the Sparrows have ties to some of the biggest names inside the Beltway, and Anita is not as innocent as she appears. Her family story simmers with pornography, corruption, and murder—not polite topics for dinner table conversation, but ones that make Chester Drum feel right at home.

Homicide Is My Game

In Rome for the Olympics, Drum witnesses an assassination

When he was in college, Kyle Ryder picked up athletic records effortlessly. Now he picks up girls. An Olympic-quality javelin thrower, he has recently fallen for a Czechoslovakian Amazon named Hilda, whose weapon of choice is the discus. On the eve of the Rome summer Olympics, Kyle’s father hires private detective Chester Drum to follow his son. He doesn’t mind the girl—it’s her Soviet handlers who make him nervous. The Olympic torch hasn’t even been lit when their love affair takes its first casualty. Their Italian go-between, Signor Mozzoni, is crossing the street when a Citroën runs him down. With their protector dead, Kyle and his girlfriend vanish. If Drum doesn’t find the missing athletes quickly, the Soviet trainers will give them a workout from which they’ll never recover.

Peril Is My Pay

Caught in the middle of an Arab civil war, Drum looks for a missing surgeon

Chester Drum knows it’s over for Qasr Tabuk when he sees the city’s prostitutes taking flight. He came to this war-torn Arab country in search of an American surgeon, Turner Capeheart, who disappeared when the rebels took up arms. His search turned up nothing, and now that the working girls are leaving, he decides to do the same. Death is coming to Qasr Tabuk, and though Drum may evade it for now, it will haunt him as long as he remains in this blighted desert land. On the road out of town, he offers a lift to a girl whose car has broken down. She is Samia Falcon, daughter of the rebel leader, and she knows where Dr. Capeheart is hiding. An army stands between them and the rebels, but Chester Drum doesn’t mind being outnumbered.

Manhunt Is My Mission

An old flame’s fiancé is missing, and only Drum can save him from the Soviets

Chester Drum will never love another woman the way he loves Marianne. After years of on-and-off romance, he tells her that his work as a private detective is too dangerous for him to ever marry, so she ends the affair and moves to West Berlin, to report on the Cold War from its front lines. There she falls in love with Quentin Hammond, ace foreign correspondent, and Drum is happy for her until her new man disappears behind the Iron Curtain. She telegraphs for help, and Drum is on the next plane. Hammond was close to winning the scoop of the century, by cooperating with an exiled East German dissident to tunnel beneath the Berlin Wall and free thousands of people from the other side. Before they could complete their audacious scheme, though, the Stasi kidnapped them. Only Drum has the skills to go behind the wall and return with the man who’s stolen the woman he loves.

Drumbeat – Berlin

In Spain for a wedding, Drum must rescue the kidnapped bride

Although a fugitive from twenty-six world governments, Axel Spade has minimal trouble crossing the border into Spain. Though briefly arrested, the guards let him go when they learn the identity of his future father-in-law: Colonel Santiago Sotomayor, whose name can open the lock of any Spanish dungeon. And so Spade and his best man, Washington PI Chester Drum, cross the frontier. Sotomayor is not thrilled to see his daughter become the sixth Mrs. Spade, but he has given his begrudging consent. 

The wedding party comes off like any jet-set gathering, complete with one of the fiancée’s ex-lovers making threats against Spade’s life. But one key piece never arrives: the bride. She has been kidnapped, and to get her back, Drum and Spade will pit their wits against the toughest thugs and slipperiest bureaucrats that Fascist Spain has to offer.

Drumbeat – Madrid

A sadistic KGB colonel hires Drum to locate a dead man

Axel Spade would not have liked the way he died. An international fugitive, Spade would have preferred being gored by a bull or gunned down by Interpol to dying quietly in his bed. But a weak heart claimed him in his sleep, and so Chester Drum, Washington PI and the closest thing Spade had to a friend, scatters his ashes in the Atlantic. Drum’s old flame, Marianne Baker, is by his side, but she leaves before grief has a chance to reignite their faded passion. That night, Drum is awoken by a KGB operative who has kidnapped Marianne. Axel Spade is alive, the agent insists, and he wants Drum to find him. To save Marianne, Drum will do the impossible, and bring Axel Spade back from the dead.