John Oats is dead: drowned in the treacherous waves of the Pacific. He was in great pain, and reliant on morphine; it could easily have been accident or suicide.

But with thousands of dollars in insurance at stake, on a policy which the dead man had meant to change the day he died, Dave Brandstetter thinks it was murder. And between the mysteriously absent son, the bitter ex-wife and the current lover, there are plenty of people with reason to lie to Dave about what really happened that night. And why...

Death Claims is the second Dave Brandstetter novel - one of the best fictional PIs in the business, and one of the first ever gay ones. Joseph Hansen's groundbreaking novels follow Brandstetter as he investigates cases in which motives are murky, passions run high, and nothing is ever as simple as it looks. Set in 1970s and 80s California, the series is a fascinating portrait of a time and a place, with mysteries to match Chandler and Macdonald.