In “The Death Gods,” happy-go-lucky, Los Angeles Private Eye, Shell Scott, bulldozes his way thru thugs, often with light-hearted humor, and with a beauty or two along the way, in this final novel of the long-running Shell Scott Series by Richard S. Prather, published for the first time. Shell Scott is hired to locate a lost dog belonging to a local physician, Henry Hernandez, M.D. But Scott soon … Scott soon discovers the needs of Dr. Hernandez go far beyond his missing dog. There has been an attempt on the doctor’s life and Dr. Hernandez believes it is due to his knowing too much about a deadly virus that appears to be taking hold in the country. Dr. Hernandez sets out to not only prove to Shell Scott, but to the world, that the IFAI virus and the vaccine being developed by a well-known local medical researcher and his wealthy business partner, is a complete fraud. Shell Scott finds himself in deep and getting deeper by the hour in this battle of good against evil, life against death, and medical “quackery” against allopathic medicine. Can Scott convince a beautiful female medical author that the medical researcher she admires may not be all he claims to be? And what about Scott’s client, Dr. Henry Hernandez: is he a nut-case, a quack, as some claim? Shell Scott finds he is in the battle of his life and chances are he may not come out alive.
More than 40 million copies of Richard S. Prather’s hard-boiled Shell Scott mysteries have been sold in the U.S., with millions more world-wide since Shell Scott first appeared in 1950.
Richard S. Prather (1921-2007) received the Private Eye Writers of America Lifetime Achievement Award in 1986, and was twice on the Board of Directors of the Mystery Writers of America. He was Editor of “The Comfortable Coffin,” the 13th Mystery Writers of America Anthology. His stories have appeared in numerous magazines, “The Shell Scott Mystery Magazine,” and several anthologies.
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