I really enjoyed this book, it flowed really well, very good characters and kept me guessing until the end.

A man is missing, his sister asked private investigator Peter Bragg to find him, dead or alive. The sister’s motives aren’t completely out of concern for her brother, their uncle has just died leaving them $1000,000+. If her brother is dead, and he died before the uncle, she would inherit the lot, if not she would have to share it with his widow. Something she doesn’t want to do.

The search for the missing man, an insurance investigator leads Bragg to an artists community. The action is thick and fast. Bragg soon finds himself investigating, not one but two disappearances, and a serial killer.

This is a fast paced thriller, and even though the prologue gives clues to the killer, I didn’t guess who it was.

I enjoyed this book. Bragg is a very likeable protagonist who never gives up.

Does the sister get all the money? You’ll have to read it to find out.

This was a book with quite a few twists as the investigator is looking for a missing man. He finds a love interest and intrigue but sadly failed to enthuse me to the book.

first time i read this intelligent and entertaining crime thriller writer and I am hooked - okay there are times when it belaboured things (or seemed to), and the hidden double identities of a cooly psychopathic assassin was well handled - we spent the entire time watching Bragg (who is charming and susceptible in great way to women - sometimes the wrong ones) slowly unravel the spool until the killer/assassin is found - and character personalities have all to do with it - just because a young wife is stunning does not mean she's unfaithful - her weak-willed loser husband is the erring partner, and all is not as it seems Lynch still plays on gender stereotypes effectively - I am going to look for Bragg's other cases now. very intelligent

A first-rate detective story with a cast of characters that Damon Runyan would have been proud of. I was pleased by the level of development for all characters, minor as well as major. The hero is a weak man who does heroic things. The villain is an evil man who masquerades as a good old boy. As people become missing and dead, the mystery deepens, and the reader chases the clues along with the hero. Nothing is hidden, but the ending stills comes as a surprise. I highly recommend this book.

An absorbing book with lots of intertwining threads which like a row of dominoes all come falling down at the end. Good characters which were well developed and a believable conclusion. Kept me engaged to the end.

Thank you to NetGalley and Brash Books for this free copy. In an exchange for this copy I am giving an honest review.

More great writing from a new-to-me author! I love the name Jack Lynch, it's a great pen name. And it might not be a pen name, it could be his real name which means he was destined to write in this genre. Lynch died in 2008, unfortunately, but wrote 8 Bragg novels before he left this earth. I hope to get my hands on all of them to read. Brash Books is releasing updated editions of mystery/suspense books written in the 1980's and introducing them to new readers. I'm super glad, it's one of my favorite genres. In this Bragg Thriller the hunt is on for a missing person that turns into two missing persons and grows into 4 missing persons due to a small airplane crash. Not all who are missing will be found alive though. Peter Bragg, a private detective, is on the hunt to find as many alive as possible. The path he originally takes twists and turns and becomes something totally different by the time all the pieces fall into place. The villain of the story is a fascinating study in human psychology, I'd actually like to know more about him as well! Peter Bragg is a good to honest detective, a lone ranger willing to do what it takes to solve the riddles.

This is the second in the re-issued, Peter Bragg series. When I first started reading it, I was not sure if it was as good as the first one, but once I got into, I could not wait to finish it. These books are your old school Private Eye, who is hired to solve a seemingly simple situation (in this case a missing person) but it turns out to be just the tip of the iceberg.

Bragg is hired by TV personality, Janet Lind to find her missing brother, Jerry, who works for North Coast Insurance Investigators. As he begins to investigate the claim that Jerry was working on it starts to converge with another claim from the same company. Bragg follows the leads and ends up helping with a search and rescue of a boy and his father whose plane has crashed. It turns out that they are trying to find out about a missing relative. The Detective they are looking for has been investigating the same crime, or at least it started out that way. Once again Bragg is beaten up, almost killed and meets a girl. Of course he solves the crime, finds out about the missing person and takes down bad guys. I did not figure out who done it, which makes it a great read for me. Bragg is a likable and believable character with real flaws and talents. I am really enjoying this series and recommend it to anyone who loves that mystery, detective, noire genre. Looking for the next one.

Great detective / mystery story if a little dated( i.e there are no mobile phones and people use public phones instead.) i liked how it opened from the murderer's point of view, which the reader could then use to help decipher who he actually was. FYI : as soon as the murderer was introduced incognito, I recognised him. This could be from reading lots of similar novels, OR that the introduction was spot on to the characters mannerisms. Liked the main detective Bragg, although some of his notions are a trifle sexist but making him flawed made him more believable. Good read for those wishing to escape life into your classic private eye tale, set in the backwoods of USA.

Jerry Lind is missing, which is especially strange, given that he knows he is about to inherit a small fortune. It seems unlikely that he would take off for a long time without letting someone know about it. He ought to be back by now. Moreover, the next people in line to inherit his share are also wondering if he is okay. Not that they hope he isn’t. Of course not! And at this point I have to break my narrative to let you know that I was fortunate enough to get this DRC free, courtesy of Net Galley and Brash Books. It was previously published in the 1980’s and is just now being released digitally.

Back to Jerry. No, never mind, forget him for a minute. Let’s talk about our assassin.

Our assassin is not getting any younger, and his wife is exhausted from all the moves. Every time he carries out a contract, they have to either abandon their stuff or get a truck, and over years and years of professional killing, it wears a woman down. She wants a garden. From now on, he needs to either make do with the significant amount he’s squirreled away from his successful if messy business, or he’s going to have to goddamn hide the bodies.

It’s the least he can do for her.

Peter Bragg is our man. Jerry’s sister hires him to go to Barracks Cove, where Jerry was supposed to be running a professional errand, and see if he can’t track him down. And Bragg goes in prepared. If you are sick of reading wussy narratives that give flimsy reasons for the intrepid sleuth not to carry a gun and make sure he has bullets, this is your guy, and this is your story. Has he ever fired that thing? Oh yes. But not just for practice…in the line of duty? Again, oh hell yes.

And it’s a good thing, as it turns out.

By the time the thing is over, a great deal of action has taken place, and though I am a six-to-eight book-at-a-time reader, the urgent, taut narrative (reminiscent somewhat of the Richard Stark detective novels from about the same period) grabbed me by the front of my shirt and held me there until the last page was turned.

It was nominated for an Edgar, and the clever juggling of setting and character development, along with a plot line that is unbelievably lean and compelling, will probably leave you wondering, as it did me, why he was denied and just who exactly did get it.

The consolation? If you have a kindle, you can read this book right now. Change the window on your screen and order it up. You’ll have an excellent weekend…if you can wait that long!

I really enjoyed this book after I got in to it, I found it a bit slow to start but then it really picked up pace and kept that right u to the very end of the book. This is the first book that I have read by this author but I already have two more of his to read and I can't wait to get started on them. I received a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Read my review of the first book in the Peter Bragg series, The Dead Never Forget, here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1170683135.

I have mixed feelings about series. On the one hand, I enjoy seeing characters develop over time and through new situations; in the hands of a good author, a series gives the reader a whole new world to explore, inhabited by people whose eccentricities and foibles grow increasingly familiar. On the other hand, I am neurotic about reading a series in order, from first to last, which can become a problem if earlier books in the series are difficult to find or, conversely, if the author keeps adding new books. I follow a ridiculous number of series (677!) on FictFact.com; putting aside the question of how many books I can actually read before I keel over, I certainly can't finish a series which continues to grow as I read.

Jack Lynch's Peter Bragg series is the perfect series for a reader like me. Lynch died in 2008, so there will never be more than the manageable number of eight books. All of the books have been, or will soon be, reissued by Brash Books in readily available, reasonably priced Kindle editions. Most importantly, however, each book in the series appears able to stand on its own; while Bragg already feels like an old friend after only two books, I could have read The Missing and the Dead before The Dead Never Forget without losing anything. Lynch does not allude to any of the events in the previous book; instead, he gives the reader a brand-new, deliciously convoluted mystery involving a retired hit man, a painting stolen from an art museum, the reappearance of money taken in a payroll heist, not one but two philandering insurance investigators, a plane crash, an obsessed police detective, . . . Well, you get the picture. Lynch's successful juggling of such disparate elements kept me turning the pages at breakneck speed, and I figured out the killer's identity only pages before Bragg did.

Highly recommended. Now you'll have to excuse me; I'm off to follow Bragg on a bodyguard gig in Pieces of Death.

I received a free copy of The Missing and the Dead through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I’m a strong proponent of writers giving the reader a chance to solve the mystery—or as Larry Niven put it, outwit the author—before it’s explained at the end. That means you can’t pull out a secret tunnel in a locked room mystery, or have your detective use a clue to solve the mystery without it having been mentioned before. In this book most readers would have forgotten the prologue by the time they get to the meat of the mystery, but including it is exactly why this author didn’t cheat.
Former Seattle reporter now a PI in San Fran hunts for a missing man, partly because he’s got an inheritance coming to him, and party. . . well, he’s missing. This is another in a series where I’ve read two entries, but this one goes back to near-beginning, being the second. I think I liked this entry a little less than the others, but because it happened earlier in the author’s career it doesn’t bear much thinking. It was a little weird seeing characters, like his soon-to-be-girlfriend, who are new here when I feel like I already know them. But already so early on the author had a knack for entertaining plotting while giving his protagonist just enough of a sense of humor without becoming cloying.
I will say I’ve learned a lot about the San Francisco area, mostly its surroundings, from these books. Next time I go to Napa I may take the scenic route. . .