Private investigator Pete Shay was down on his luck-if he'd ever had any to begin with-so when a battered deck hand from Duluth named Thomas Jannssen offered him seven hundred dollars to track down his missing daughter, Shay agreed.His search for the girl led him straight to that section of New York's 8th Avenue known as the Minnesota Strip, where teenage hookers and their pimps make the scene in a twilight world of booze, drugs, and violence.Shay thought he'd seen every kind of depravity known to man.It took this case to prove that he was wrong. Peter J. McCurtin was born in Ireland on 15 October 1929, and immigrated to America when he was in his early twenties. Records also confirm that, in 1958, McCurtin co-edited the short-lived (one issue) New York Review with William Atkins. By the early 1960s, he was co-owner of a bookstore in Ogunquit, Maine, and often spent his summers there.McCurtin's first book, Mafioso (1970) was nominated for the prestigious Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award, and filmed in 1973 as The Boss, with Henry Silva. More books in the same vein quickly followed, including Cosa Nostra (1971), Omerta (1972), The Syndicate (1972) and Escape From Devil's Island (1972). 1970 also saw the publication of his first "Carmody" western, Hangtown.Peter McCurtin died in New York on 27 January 1997. His westerns in particular are distinguished by unusual plots with neatly resolved conclusions, well-drawn secondary characters, regular bursts of action and tight, smooth writing. If you haven't already checked him out, you have quite a treat in store.McCurtin also wrote under the name of Jack Slade and Gene Curry.
