Cooper MacLeish

Originally published in 1992, this second entry in the Cooper MacLeish series finds Cooper living with his girlfriend Diana, content with his lot in life. But Diana has a past, and it comes back to bite her when Tommy Thorne, an ex-boyfriend, shows up wanting Diana's help in running a blackmail scheme on the publisher of a sleazy men's magazine. The porn tycoon is hiding something, and he's got some nasty employees to help him keep the lid on. All Cooper wants is to keep Diana out of it, but to do that he's going to have to get his hands dirty.

In the fifth book of the Cooper MacLeish series, Cooper is making his living chauffeuring wealthy clients around Chicago while his wife Diana is pursuing her literary passion in graduate school. Diana has a new best friend in classmate Isabel Albala, the wife of a high-powered lawyer. A stalker is making Isabel's life miserable, and when Cooper confronts him, bad things happen. The stalker may not be what he seems, and once again Cooper is in the crosshairs.

Originally published in 1993, the third volume in the Cooper MacLeish series takes Cooper deep into the murky waters of Chicago politics as he agrees to accompany his reporter friend Melvin Moreland to a midnight meeting with a source. When the source turns up dead, Moreland knows he's onto something big. What Cooper knows is that his friend is in over his head and is going to need somebody to watch his back. And Cooper knows he's elected.

First published in 1991, Sam Reaves's debut novel features Chicago taxi driver Cooper MacLeish, a Vietnam veteran with a philosophical bent and a stubborn reluctance to let bad guys get away with things. When he reads of the apparent suicide of Vivian Horstmann, whom he once loved, Cooper finds himself drawn into the drama of an unhappy family as he tracks down Vivian's runaway son, who insists that her death was no suicide. Drama escalates to crisis as it becomes clear that somebody wants the boy as dead as his mother; Cooper will need all the rock-hard toughness he brought out of the A Shau valley to keep the boy alive and uncover the truth about Vivian's death.

Originally published in 1995, the fourth title in the Cooper MacLeish series finds Coop working as chauffeur and factotum for Regis Swanson, a wealthy Chicago real estate developer. When Swanson's wayward son is murdered in what the cops and the DEA insist is a drug deal gone bad, Cooper smells a rat: he knows the kid wasn't into that. Figuring out what really happened will pit Cooper against federal law enforcement hard-liners and some hired guns out to recover a stray suitcase full of cash.