Joe Kozmarski

In his impressive and confident debut, Michael Wiley delivers a thrilling tale about how greed and revenge play out on the streets of Chicago. Private eye Joe Kozmarski has just been asked to clear his childhood friend Bob Piedras of murder. Bob's latest girlfriend, a young Vietnamese American beauty, has turned up dead in an airport hotel. No one is very surprised; she had a taste for hard liquor, drugs, and stripping in front of a camera. And Bob has a history of violence. But Bob's boss, retired judge Peter Rifkin, is convinced Bob is innocent and thinks Joe is the one to find the real killer. But Joe's life is complicated. He hasn't spoken to Rifkin for fifteen years-ever since his father, now dead, found out that the judge had double-crossed him. The dead woman's brothers, a pair of tough guys, are bent on being the first to find and punish her murderer. On top of that, Joe and his wife have separated, and his mother has dropped his eleven-year-old nephew on him. But the more obstacles Joe encounters, the more determined he becomes to see this case through. With its vividly realized characters and page-turning storyline, The Last Striptease won the 2006 St. Martin's Press / Private Eye Writers of America contest, which has accomplished its mission of finding amazing new talent in what has become a long tradition of excellent crime fiction.

Greg Samuelson, an unassuming bookkeeper, hired Joe Kozmarski to dig up dirt on his wife and her lover, Eric Stone. But now Samuelson has taken matters into his own hands. It looks like he's torched Stone's Mercedes, killed his boss, and then shot himself, all in the space of an hour. The police think they know how to put together this ugly puzzle. But as Kozmarski discovers, nothing's ever simple. Eric Stone wants to hire Kozmarski to clear Samuelson. Samuelson's dead boss, known as the Virginity Nun, has a saintly reputation but a red-hot past. And a gang led by an aging 1960s radical shows up in Kozmarski's office with a backpack full of payoff money, warning him to turn a blind eye to murder. At the same time, Kozmarski is working things out with his ex-wife, Corrine, his new partner, Lucinda Juarez, and his live-in nephew, Jason. If the bad guys don't do Kozmarski in, his family might.

Michael Wiley's third mystery-following The Bad Kitty Lounge and the Shamus-nominated The Last Striptease Working late-night surveillance at a luxury condominium development in a city world-famous for corruption, Chicago private detective Joe Kozmarski encounters a burglary crew. Two of the crew members show up in a police cruiser. In the chaos that follows, Kozmarski shoots and kills a thief, who is also one of Chicago's finest. Kozmarski is in for many a bad night's sleep. Kozmarski joins the criminal crew, working as an inside agent for his old friend Lieutenant Bill Gubman. Facing dangerous suspicions from both the criminal gang and the uncorrupted ranks of the police department, uncertain who wishes him to stay alive and who wishes him dead, Kozmarski takes a wild, dangerous ride. In the high-end spa club for gentlemen and couples, during a showdown with a consortium of Chicago street gangs, and in a breakneck rooftop chase, A Bad Night's Sleep pushes full throttle to a stunning conclusion.