The Lime Pit

by Jonathan Valin

Stoner is a private eye in the classic a loner with a history of failed relationships with women and all-too-successful relationships with bottles of scotch. He's unable to look away from the world's corruption—and unable to avoid trying to do something about it.

His latest hopeless cause is Cindy Ann, a teenage hooker. She's not very pretty or bright or engaging … she doesn't have much to offer at all. So when she disappears, it's all the more disturbing for Stoner—who knows what can happen to girls that nobody wants. And he's got a sick hunch that he knows what happened to Cindy Ann, right across the Cincinnati border.

Stoner's hunches are almost always on the money—and they rarely feature happy endings.

259 pages

Published October 20, 2022

About the author

Jonathan Valin is an American mystery author best known for the Harry Stoner detective series. He won the Shamus Award for best mystery novel of 1989. After writing eleven Harry Stoner novels over a 14-year period, he took a break from mystery writing to help found Fi, a magazine of music criticism. He now works as an editor and reviewer for magazines.

He is an alumnus of the University of Chicago and lived there for many years.

Reviews

[Joe Nicholl · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Lime Pit (The First Harry Stoner Mystery) by Jonathan Valin (1980) is a good P.I. novel that also has one foot in the men's adventure genre. P.I. Harry Stoner is on the case of a missing 16-year old girl and the local is Cincinnati and across the Ohio in northern Kentucky. The story unfolds like many other P.I. novels without any real surprises but it is, I must say, well written. There are a number of typical scenes from the era, that being red-necks, macho-men (and gay), and the obligatory sex-scenes...but author Valin manages to string together these cliches and weave a pretty good story. In fact, it was a good enough book that I plan on reading the Second Harry Stoner Mystery one of these days. So, if you need something to read and like P.I. Books then I recommend...3.0 outa 5.0...