Introducing Junior Bender, the favorite burglar turned private investigator of Hollywood crooks.

Junior Bender is a Los Angeles burglar with a magic touch. Since he first started breaking into houses at age fourteen, he's never once been caught. But now, after twenty-two years building an exemplary career, Junior has been blackmailed by Trey Annunziato, one of the most powerful crime bosses in LA, into acting as a private investigator on the set of Trey's porn venture, which someone keeps sabotaging. The star Trey has lined up to do all that's unwholesome on camera is Thistle Downing, America's beloved child star, who now lives alone in a drug-induced stupor, destitute and uninsurable. Her starring role will be the scandalous fall-from-grace gossip of rubberneckers across the country. No wonder Trey needs help keeping the production on track.

Junior knows what he should do - but doing the right thing will land him on the wrong side of LA's scariest mob boss. With the help of his precocious twelve-year-old daughter, Rina, and his criminal sidekick, ex-getaway driver Louie the Lost, Junior will have to pull off a miracle to get out of this mess.

Timothy Hallinan is the Edgar - and Macavity Award - nominated author of over a dozen widely praised books, including the Poke Rafferty Bangkok thrillers and the Junior Bender series. In 2010 he conceived and edited an e-book of original short stories by twenty mystery writers, Shaken: Stories for Japan, with 100 percent of the proceeds going to Japanese disaster relief.