The Black Door

By Collin Wilcox

A crime reporter with ESP tackles a double homicide.

In a San Francisco apartment building, a young woman is found strangled beside a piano player with a broken neck. He's a nobody -- a dreamer with little talent and no future -- but she is Roberta Grinnel, daughter of one of the wealthiest men in the Bay Area. Stephen Drake, crime reporter for the Sentinel, feels nothing when he looks at their corpses, and this is a troubling fact. For Drake is a psychic, and when his sixth sense fails him, that means more trouble ahead.

As Drake tries to come to grips with his cosmic gift, the mystery of the heiress and the piano player becomes the hottest story in town. To keep his gig at the paper, Drake will call on every source he has -- on this plane and the astral one -- but knowing danger's lurking doesn't guarantee he can stay out of its way.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Head of Zeus
• Release date: Jun 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781784089276

Collin Wilcox

Collin Wilcox (1924–1996) was an American author of mystery fiction. Born in Detroit, he set most of his work in San Francisco, beginning with 1967’s The Black Door—a noir thriller starring a crime reporter with extrasensory perception. Under the pen name Carter Wick, he published several standalone mysteries including The Faceless Man (1975) and Dark House, Dark Road (1982), but he found his greatest success under his own name, with the celebrated Frank Hastings series. Hastings, a football player turned San Francisco homicide detective, made his debut in The Lonely Hunter (1969), and Wilcox continued to follow him for the rest of his career, publishing nearly two dozen novels in the series, which concludes with Calculated Risk (1995). Wilcox’s other best-known series stars Alan Bernhardt, a theatrical director with a habit of getting involved in behind-the-scenes mysteries. Bernhardt appeared in four more books after his introduction in 1988’s Bernhardt’s Edge.