Brock 'The Rock' Callahan

Brock gets caught in a dangerous triangle between a jockey, a mobster, and L.A.'s finest blonde Gloria Malone is a big woman with a little husband, and a problem only Brock Callahan can solve. Her jockey beau, Tip, has fallen in with a half-reformed gangster, and Gloria fears trouble for the pint-sized horseman. But as Brock quickly finds, L.A.'s criminals have more to fear from Tip than he does from them. The short man has a long mean streak, a girl on the side, and a couple of illegitimate children to boot. Even his horses don't like him. Brock isn't surprised when someone decides to end the little gremlin's racing career once and for all-with a carving knife.   The world of horse racing is buried under a layer of grime that's thicker than the Santa Anita racetrack's mud after a thunderstorm. To penetrate it, Brock will have to take the whip into his own hand and do whatever it takes to stay on the horse.

Newly rich, married, and bored, Brock investigates an upper-class tragedy Private detective Brock Callahan, onetime star of the Los Angeles Rams, is racing toward a touchdown when the morgue's phone call wakes him up. His only rich relative, Uncle Homer, has just flown through the windshield of his midlife-crisis Ferrari, and Brock will never have to work again. The private detective hangs up his license, marries his longtime girlfriend, and decamps for the California hills-where he finds life among the nouveau riche to be duller than he ever imagined.   However, there is one old lady-the quick-witted Maude Marner-who charms the old jock. But the day after she drops hints that she might have some work for him, she is found dead, having choked to death on her car's exhaust in a gruesome apparent suicide. As Brock digs into the dark corners of upper-crust suburbia, he finds that no matter how you dress it up, murder is always déclassé.

While tangling with radicals, Brock stumbles on a colleague's corpse Brock Callahan, ex-private investigator, is still not used to wealth and retirement. In fact he is struggling through a game of golf when the clubhouse calls with the curious news that his wife is in jail, pulled in at an anti-nuclear protest. Callahan hires Joe Puma, private detective and onetime peer, to post bail for the budding radical. A few days later, Puma is dead, and Brock begins to wonder where the student movement's shadowy roots lie.   The agitators want to stop the proposed Mirage Point reactor, which sits at the intersection of mob money, corrupt utilities, and the violent rage of the radical fringe. And as Callahan knows all too well, California doesn't run on nuclear energy; the state is powered by the dirtiest fuel there is-old-fashioned, murderous greed.

Brock finds a case that's too juicy to refuse Brock Callahan was still playing for the Los Angeles Rams when Alan Arthur Baker first conned him. Masquerading as an investment banker, Baker talked the hapless jock out of $5,000, returning it only when Brock threatened to snap his back in half. Years later, Brock is a retired private detective living in the splendor of the Los Angeles suburbs, and Baker needs help tailing his wife, a high-priced call girl who may be in danger. The old grifter is as crooked as they come, but too charming for Brock to say no.   Brock puts protégé Corey Raleigh on the case, but can't help keeping an eye on the investigation. When the boy detective runs into trouble, Brock throws himself into the middle of a mystery involving a retired palooka, a brutal heiress, and the famous estate of one of the richest men California has ever known.

Brock's boyhood idol moves in next door before vanishing and leaving a body in his wake In Hollywood's golden age, there was no finer swashbuckler than Fortney Grange. Decades after he last swung on a chandelier, Grange is nearly forgotten, his legacy surviving only in fuzzy black-and-white on the late-late movie channel. But to Brock Callahan, Grange remains a hero. When his idol shacks up with the aged widow next door, the ex-private investigator is starstruck. It takes a murder for the celluloid sheen to begin to fade.   A strange pair of Arizona blackmailers takes up residence in a van outside Grange's house. Grange and his new lady friend disappear, and a few days later, his agent is found dead. Though it breaks his heart, Callahan is forced to investigate the man who has given him so much joy. And it will take more than swordplay for this aging daredevil to escape the chair.

To hit Brock where it hurts the most, a vengeful stranger targets the people he loves It starts with the dead cat. Ex-private investigator Brock Callahan finds the Siamese by his mailbox, its throat cut, and assumes it is a message from some crook he put away long ago. Soon a letter arrives-"The cat was first. Who is second?"-and Brock knows the threat is no joke. He hires his protégé, the ambitious young detective Corey Raleigh, to help him guard his wife and housekeeper, but Corey has troubles of his own. The kid detective is about to get an inside look at the workings of criminal justice.   The cops find Corey not far from Brock's house-half-conscious with a gun in his hand and a dead man at his feet. It's an obvious frame-up, but to clear Corey's name Brock will have to find the real killer, and lock him away before his wife meets the same fate as the unfortunate Siamese.

In his final case, Brock investigates the murder of his troubled college roommate Maybe Mike Gregory was too smart for football. When he and Brock Callahan roomed together at Stanford University, Mike was a second-stringer with the skill to go pro. But he squandered his talent and drifted after college, briefly working as a stockbroker before descending down society's ladder, becoming a drunk, then an addict, and finally a snitch. The police aren't surprised when they find him in Santa Monica, face blown off with a sawed-off shotgun, but Brock is puzzled. Even at his lowest, Mike was too smart to go out like that.   Though he's been retired for years, Brock's investigative instincts kick in at Mike's funeral. As he plumbs the depths of his old friend's broken life, he uncovers a toxic cocktail of cultists, mobsters, and corrupt law enforcement. Caught in the middle, this unlucky snitch had nowhere to turn.