Davenport Blake, The Metropolitan Detective

A detective. A vanishing man. A woman who may be something far worse than a widow.

Davenport Blake has seen every variety of deception New York can produce. He knows missing men, forged identities, and planted evidence the moment they cross his desk. So when Waldo Southwick arrives at Blake's Sixth Avenue office with a story about his wealthy father disappearing without a trace, Blake listens carefully — and likes nothing about what he hears.

Someone is already running a game on him. An anonymous note. A mutilated body at the Morgue. A dead man's pocket-knife in the wrong suit of clothes. Every clue points somewhere deliberately, which means every clue points nowhere at all.

Blake follows the threads anyway — to a shuttered hotel room with bloodstained floors, to a beautiful and possibly lethal woman calling herself Regal Derby, to a network of conspirators who have already discussed killing him in the street.

They are not wrong to fear him. Blake is relentless, precise, and impossible to rattle. But he is also being watched, followed, and fed exactly the information his enemies want him to have.

As the trap tightens around him, Blake fights to separate the real crime from the elaborate theatre of misdirection built to conceal it.

Because someone has Anthony Southwick — and someone else is determined that Blake never finds out why.

Can Blake unravel the Harlem mystery before the conspirators decide a dead detective is simpler than a clever one?