Joe Copp

Don Pendleton is the creator of the enormously popular Executioner series, featuring Mack Bolan. Now he has created the Joe Copp Series, which develops against the backdrop of violence and corruption in Los Angeles. Joe Copp is an ex-cop - tough, smart, but caring and compassionate. In Copp for Hire, Joe is hired by a stripper to investigate a stalker, but before he can even begin the investigation, the woman is killed by a hit-and-run driver, who has now turned his sight on Joe.

In this second book of Don Pendleton's best-selling Joe Copp mystery series of six novels, private investigator, Joe Copp's case pulls him into the corporate halls and backlots of Hollywood, behind the glamorous facade of the movie industry, where subjects of a stakeout are murdered. After an undercover narcotics officer is nearly killed, Copp is charged as an accomplice to murder, and is thrown into a real-life Hollywood scenario where death becomes the favorite plot device for the whole bloody show.

Joe Copp is hired by old buddy ex-cop Tom Chase to protect him from the FBI. Chase is the security chief for a defense contractor, and Uncle Sam is following him and setting up his executives for a sting. Sure enough, two of them are stung.

Ex-police officer Joe Copp takes a case, and he's not even sure who he's working for. Surrounded by a cast of frightened actors, and the theater's gorgeous director, he's been assigned the role of bodyguard for the leading man. Suddenly, Copp is the new target. He's beaten, shot - but worst of all, he is a suspect in a kidnapping rap and the murders of four actors and one FBI informant. Now, government agents and mafia hoods are after him. They are convinced he's involved with an illicit sex and drug operation, and Copp is in the dark as to how it all fits together. All Copp can do is wait for the final curtain, and hope it doesn't fall on him.

Serious trouble is brewing in Brighton, California, a sprawling coastal community on the eastern edge of the Los Angeles Basin: Its Mayor has just been murdered, and the Chief of Police has resigned amid rumors of corruption in his department.

Joe Copp is recovering from a three week bout of partial amnesia after a perp almost blew him away with his own gun. His doctors have assured him his memory will eventually return, but that isn't soon enough. It seems that during the last three weeks he m