Reno – it’s old school cool!! It’s Vegas before there was ever a Vegas. “The Biggest Little City in the World” with those Italian guys down around Lake Tahoe and with “business interests” in Nevada. Get divorced, gamble the alimony, read a crime novel….
Let’s start with a couple of series. First up, Dave Stanton’s Dan Reno nine book series set in Reno! In the first book, Stateline (2014), Private detective Dan Reno is broke and win ds up in Reno thinking maybe he can make his way back to some sort of financial security as a bounty hunter. But to make his stash he’s got to navigate a band of crooked cops.
And so the adventures of Dan Reno, and his good buddy Cody Gibbons, continue across another eight books. One problem is Reno drinks hard and can’t seem to avoid getting into hard-boiled messes that leaves dead bodies scattered all over northern Nevada. In subsequent novels we head out to Lake Tahoe’s backcountry, the desert outside of Carson City to encounter racist bikers, murderers, small town gangsters, Marine Corps deserters, home invasions, Russian mobsters. By book nine, The Last Boundary (2024), Reno is hunting vicious pimps between Reno and Las Vegas.
Catherine Dain (pseudonym for Judith Garwood) has started a new series, the Freddie O’Neal Mysteries. Book one is Lay it on the Line (2019). Freddie likes a game of Keno and hanging out with her cats…in Reno. Freddie figures she’s got some legwork to do when an ex-chorus girl asks for her help. Joan Halliday says her elderly father’s being conned by his caretakers—and a little investigation is needed. But the case gets more complicated when a murder—and a tangled mess of family secrets.
University of Nevada-Reno alumni and long-time Reno resident Bernard Schopen’s Drowning in the Desert (2023) bounces between Vegas and southern Nevada. Norman “Fats” Rangle, an ex–deputy sheriff, discovers the wreckage of a plane that crashed two years earlier. Although he reports his find to the authorities, he does not disclose that someone had already been to the crash site—evidence that Fats deliberately destroyed. Why? Well, in Schopen’s Nevada, corruption is a given and one thing is certain: water is a precious resource that can both kill and be killed for.
Schopen is also the author of the Jack Ross Reno-based PI series. In Big Silence (1989) Ross is hired by a young prostitute to find her long-missing grandfather, Reno private eye Jack Ross tracks the cold trail across the deserts and back alleys of the city to one of Nevada’s most influential families. Then in The Desert Look (1990) where Newswoman Miranda Santee lures former Reno private eye Jack Ross out of retirement with a thirty-year-old mystery–what happened to two Vegas show girls, one of whom is Ross’s mother, who embezzled thousands of dollars from a mobster and disappeared. In the third Jack Ross mystery, The Iris Deception (1996), Ross is hired by iris-eyed Patsy McLeod to resume a case abandoned as hopeless eighteen years earlier. Ross’s investigation leads him from a failed ranch in the desert north of Reno to Sacramento’s porno film industry and some fancy Lake Tahoe homes.
Schopen comes back and writes another book every so often – between The Iris Deception and his next book was nearly 20 years passed!! Calamity Jane (2013) takes a hard look at the realities of rural and ranching Nevada while also examining the enduring myths of the West. And then, finally, he returned to Jack Ross with The Dying Time (2019), a quarter century after the last Ross book. By now Ross has settled into his old age in Reno. He jogs. He eats right. He naps. He no longer involves himself with the actions or the people that have developed into a “nasty notoriety.” And then a case that harks back rears its head and he’s back in the PI game.
Gabriel Urza’s The Silver State (2025) tackles another of Reno’s obsessions – silver mines. Law school graduate Santi Elcano’s is bored. When a young mother, Anna Weston, is brutally murdered and her body is found near Reno’s infamous silver mines, Santi and his mentor in the public defender’s office, C.J., are tasked with defending Michael Atwood, a man arrested for Anna’s murder on scant physical evidence. Urza is a writer, attorney, and university professor originally from Reno.
One Reno true crime worth mentioning. Frank Bergon’s Wild Game (1995) is based on actual events that took place in Nevada during the 1980s. When Jack Irigaray, a biologist for the Division of Wildlife, agrees to go along as backup on what should be a routine arrest of a poacher in the Black Rock Desert, he has no way of knowing that the decision will irrevocably alter his life. In the space of a few hours he will see two men die, one a close friend; he will come near death himself; and he will plunge into a world of obsession, self-destruction, and vengeance that will consume years of his life.
And finally, two cold stone classics from a great author – Wily Vlautin’s Northline (2009) and Motel Life (2007). Motel Life was Vlautin’s debut novel. Frank and Jerry Lee Flannigan are two down-and-out brothers who live a meagre existence in Reno, Nevada. Both men are high school dropouts who live in cheap motel rooms, work at odd jobs for money, and drink heavily. One night, while driving drunk during a blizzard, Jerry Lee accidentally hits and kills a teenage boy on a bicycle. They flee the cops, but can’t escape Reno. In Northline twenty-two, Allison Johnson is lost, living among the lowlifes in Las Vegas, clinging to drink and to Jimmy, her abusive boyfriend whose child she is expecting. She’s hit rock bottom and so where else to go but Reno to try and start over. No lesser crime writing king than George Pelecanos said ‘Vlautin has written the American novel I’ve been hoping to find.’
But both Northline and Motel Life, so many of the other novels above here, are really about the Reno version of the American Dream – a place that welcomes you and wraps its jaggy, gnarly arms around you when you hit rock bottom. Failed marriage, at the bottom of a bottle, tapped out at the tables, on your last legs? Reno is for you.
