Reno \u2013 it\u2019s old school cool!! It\u2019s Vegas before there was ever a Vegas. \u201cThe Biggest Little City in the World\u201d with those Italian guys down around Lake Tahoe and with \u201cbusiness interests\u201d in Nevada. Get divorced, gamble the alimony, read a crime novel\u2026.<\/p>\n
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Let\u2019s start with a couple of series. First up, Dave Stanton\u2019s Dan Reno nine book series set in Reno! In the first book, Stateline <\/a>(2014), Private detective Dan Reno is broke and win ds up in Reno thinking maybe he can make his way back to some sort of financial security as a bounty hunter. But to make his stash he\u2019s got to navigate a band of crooked cops.<\/p>\n And so the adventures of Dan Reno, and his good buddy Cody Gibbons, continue across another eight books. One problem is Reno drinks hard and can\u2019t seem to avoid getting into hard-boiled messes that leaves dead bodies scattered all over northern Nevada. In subsequent novels we head out to Lake Tahoe\u2019s backcountry, the desert outside of Carson City to encounter racist bikers, murderers, small town gangsters, Marine Corps deserters, home invasions, Russian mobsters. By book nine, The Last Boundary (2024), Reno is hunting vicious pimps between Reno and Las Vegas.\u00a0<\/p>\n Catherine Dain (pseudonym for Judith Garwood) has started a new series, the Freddie O\u2019Neal Mysteries. Book one is Lay it on the Line (2019). Freddie likes a game of Keno and hanging out with her cats\u2026in Reno. Freddie figures she\u2019s got some legwork to do when an ex-chorus girl asks for her help. Joan Halliday says her elderly father\u2019s being conned by his caretakers\u2014and a little investigation is needed. But the case gets more complicated when a murder\u2014and a tangled mess of family secrets.<\/p>\n University of Nevada-Reno alumni and long-time Reno resident Bernard Schopen\u2019s Drowning in the Desert<\/a> (2023) bounces between Vegas and southern Nevada. Norman \u201cFats\u201d Rangle, an ex\u2013deputy sheriff, discovers the wreckage of a plane that crashed two years earlier. Although he reports his find to the authorities, he does not disclose that someone had already been to the crash site\u2014evidence that Fats deliberately destroyed. Why? Well, in Schopen\u2019s Nevada, corruption is a given and one thing is certain: water is a precious resource that can both kill and be killed for.\u00a0<\/p>\n Article continues after advertisement<\/p>\n Schopen is also the author of the Jack Ross Reno-based PI series. In Big Silence (1989) Ross is hired by a young prostitute to find her long-missing grandfather, Reno private eye Jack Ross tracks the cold trail across the deserts and back alleys of the city to one of Nevada\u2019s most influential families. Then in The Desert Look (1990) where Newswoman Miranda Santee lures former Reno private eye Jack Ross out of retirement with a thirty-year-old mystery\u2013what happened to two Vegas show girls, one of whom is Ross\u2019s mother, who embezzled thousands of dollars from a mobster and disappeared. In the third Jack Ross mystery, The Iris Deception (1996), Ross is hired by iris-eyed Patsy McLeod to resume a case abandoned as hopeless eighteen years earlier. Ross\u2019s investigation leads him from a failed ranch in the desert north of Reno to Sacramento\u2019s porno film industry and some fancy Lake Tahoe homes.\u00a0<\/p>\n Schopen comes back and writes another book every so often \u2013 between The Iris Deception and his next book was nearly 20 years passed!! Calamity Jane (2013) takes a hard look at the realities of rural and ranching Nevada while also examining the enduring myths of the West. And then, finally, he returned to Jack Ross with The Dying Time (2019), a quarter century after the last Ross book. By now\u00a0 Ross has settled into his old age in Reno. He jogs. He eats right. He naps. He no longer involves himself with the actions or the people that have developed into a \u201cnasty notoriety.\u201d And then a case that harks back rears its head and he\u2019s back in the PI game.\u00a0<\/p>\n