Triple Play — Max Allan Collins

Since his introduction in 1983's True Detective, Chicago-based private eye Nathan Heller has handily earned his spot alongside American crime-fiction greats Phillip Marlowe, Archie Goodwin, and Mike Hammer. Now the classic gumshoe is back in this collection of three novellas, all based on real cases of the 1940s, '50s, and '60s. In Dying in the Post-War World, Heller returns from combat to find his marriage a shambles and himself square in the middle of the notorious Lipstick Killer case of 1946. Kisses of Death follows the PI into the 1950s, when he is hired to guard Marilyn Monroe. The famous starlet's intellectual pursuits eventually take Heller to Greenwich Village and a grisly murder. And in Strike Zone, Heller is hired by zany baseball boss Bill Veeck to investigate the 1961 murder of a famous pinch hitter, whose private life will suck Nate into a dangerous new world of little people and big sins. With Triple Play, New York Times-bestselling author Max Allan Collins has pried back the lid of history to reveal the ugly, entertaining truth behind three of the twentieth century's most shocking crimes.