Harry Stoner is a Cincinnati private eye, who is hired by a record collector to discover who has stolen valuable items from his collection. But Stoner finds himself in deep trouble when the collector's girlfriend is kidnapped and appears to have been killed.

The Music Lovers

Valin, Jonathan

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Delacorte

Harry Stoner, a hard-boiled but sensitive detective, searches for Robbie Segal, a perfectly ordinary, teenaged girl who has disappeared

Day of Wrath

Literature & Fiction

United States

St.Martin's Press

Natural Causes

Harry Stoner investigates the mysterious fatal accident of Quentin Dover, an inquiry that takes him into the world of daytime television

Congdon & Weed

The first Harry Stoner mystery Harry Stoner is a private eye in the classic tradition. A loner with a history of failed relationships with women and all-too-successful relationships with bottles of scotch, he's unable to look away from the world's corruption and unable to avoid trying--futiley--to do something about it. His latest hopeless cause is Cindy Ann, a teenage hooker. Neither pretty nor engaging, she doesn't have much to offer at all, and somehow that makes her disappearance all the more disturbing for Stoner, who knows what can happen to girls nobody wants. And he's got a sick hunch that it happened to Cindy Ann, right across the Cincinnati border. As tough as Spenser in his heyday, Stoner is as hard-boiled as they come, but he's a lot more than a standard-issue pulp P.I. The story may be ugly, but in Valin's hands it has the brutal grace of a world-class boxing match.

Lime Pit

Mystery

Avon/Books

Final Notice

Detective Harry Stoner tries to find out who has been ripping up the art books in the Hyde Park Library and uncovers, with the help of an old librarian and a young woman, a trail leading to a murderous psychopath

Dead Letter

Professor Daryl Lovingwell hires detective Harry Stoner to retrieve some stolen government papers from the thief, Lovingwell's beloved daughter Sarah, without letting her know that she is being investigated

Jonathin Valin is one of the legitimate heirs of Ross MacDonald and detective Harry Stoner is very much in the mold of Lew Archer. Stoner rides the streets on Cincinnati in his Pinto, looking for runaways, armed with nothing but his righteous indignation and his Colt Gold Cup revolver. Harry's been hired by Mildred Segal to find her 14 year old daughter, Robbie, who has run away from their placid suburban home. Harry, who grew up in just such a place, knows all too well why kids flee Eastlawn Drive & mothers like Mildred. But then, while looking for Robbie's boyfriend Booby Caldwell, he finds the boy's corpse & suddenly, Robbie's disappearance looks more ominous. He backtracks the kids to a local guitar god/guru named Theo Clinger and a degenerate socialite, Irene Croft. But Croft is protected by a gangster, albeit a hyper-polite one, and Clinger has a Manson family style farm in Kentucky with armed guards. So getting Robbie back is not going to be easy. Valin hits all the right notes here & with similes like this one, the farm was "a fenced in field with a lumpy dirt access road cutting through it like a keloid scar", you know you're in the hands of a pro. Personally, I believe that this is the best of the modern private eye series.

Harry Stoner investigates the mysterious fatal accident of Quentin Dover, an inquiry that takes him into the world of daytime television

While tracking down a missing football star-turned-murderer, hard-boiled detective Harry Stoner explores the sordid world of drugs among the rough players of Cincinnati's professional football team

Life's Work

DELACORTE PRESS

When a friend from college becomes involved in a murder, Cincinnati private investigator Harry Stoner must venture into the treacherous drug underworld--and his own past--to uncover the mystery

Fire Lake

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Valin, Jonathan. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Valin, Jonathan

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Valin, Jonathan. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Music Lovers

Day of Wrath

Natural Causes

Lime Pit

Final Notice

Dead Letter

Day of Wrath

Natural Causes

Life's Work

Fire Lake