Don Winslow - Neal Carey series 1-5

1991 - NC 01 - A Cool Breeze on the Underground - 9:51 unb 48/44 mono
Neal Carey is a humble graduate student who dreams of becoming a literature professor. But he’s also the employee of the Kitteredges, a secretive New England banking family that knows how to make the embarrassing problems of its most powerful clients disappear. When Allie Chase—the troubled daughter of a U.S. senator and presidential hopeful—falls into drug use and runs away to England, the Kitteredge family calls on Carey to track her down. The raucous trail leads through London’s darkest, dingiest corners as the brilliant and cynical Carey matches wits with his spoiled butt precocious quarry.

1992 - NC 02 - The Trail to Buddha’s Mirror - 12:02 unb 64/44 mono
Robert Pendleton is a chemical genius with a fertilizer worth a fortune to whoever controls the formula. Not surprisingly, the Bank, his notoriously exclusive backer, wants to keep an eye on its investment. But so does the CIA. And the Chinese government. And a few shadier organizations. So when Pendleton disappears from a conference in San Francisco, along with all of his research, Neal Carey enters the picture. Neal knows the Bank is calling in its chips in return for paying his grad school bills. He thinks this assignment will be a no-brainer - until he meets the beguiling Li Lan and touches off a deadly game of hide-and-seek that will lead him from San Francisco’s Chinatown to the lawless back streets of Hong Kong, and finally into the dark heart of China. In a world where no one is what they seem, Neal must unravel the mystery of a beautiful woman and reach the fabled Buddha’s Mirror, a mist-shrouded lake where all secrets are revealed.

1993 - NC 03 - Way Down on the High Lonely - 9:13 unb 64/44 mono
Book three of the Neal Carey mystery series: PI Neal Carey heads out West, where a terrifying white supremacist ring tests his mettle as never before. Neal Carey is the best at what he does: tracking down missing persons who don’t necessarily want to be found. The only trouble is he’d rather do anything butt his job, since his cases have a way of ruining his life. When powerful employers send him after a divorced man who has abducted his own two-year-old son to a ranch run by white supremacists in Nevada, the brainy PI knows there will be trouble. And soon enough, Carey is forced to choose between his job, his safety, and the trust of those he loves.

1994 - NC 04 - A Long Walk Up the Water Slide - 7:40 unb 64/44 mono
Neal Carey has to keep the mob, the FBI, and a major television personality from killing his newest client - butt he’s tempted to do the job himself. Sometime student and ever-reluctant detective Neal Carey would rather be finishing a dull doctoral thesis than staring down the nose of a loaded gun - but his new assignment doesn’t sound dangerous. All he has to do is pull off the ultimate makeover: turn Polly Paget - a gum-chewing, foul-mouthed, big-haired broad - into a perfect lady in time to testify in a rape case against Jack Landis, head of the Family Cable Network and America’s most beloved family man. But Polly isn’t cooperating, and everyone - including a former FBI agent, an obsessive-compulsive hit man, the Mafia, a porn prince, and a slew of tabloid reporters - is on her trail, turning Neal’s “simple” assignment into a deadly game of duck-duck-goose. In a hellish and hilarious escapade that takes him from the deserts of Nevada to the bright lights of Las Vegas and finally to a hair-raising climax in a shoddily built amusement park, Neal tries to escape the mob’s big guns while taking a slippery walk up the world’s biggest water slide.

1996 NC 05 - While Drowning in the Desert
Shamus Award winner and Edgar Award nominee Don Winslow combines breathless suspense, zany wit, and whiplash action in his latest novel featuring grad student/private eye Neal Carey. Now Neal is assigned to escort monkeyish octogenarian Natty Silver home from Las Vegas to Palm Springs. Natty, once a burlesque top banana, has a nonstop barrage of corny jokes, an eye for an aging cocktail waitress, and a chronic disappearing act. When Neal catches up with him, he can see why Natty doesn’t want to go home. Sole witness to a crime, he’s now the quarry of hard-faced suits, a fascist con artist, and a career-track assassin. And bodyguard Neal - scorching through the trackless desert at 80 miles per hour, brooding on his inner child by freezing starlight, and looking down the barrel of one gun too many - is soon dodging vultures and on the brink of a surprise watery grave.