Do you remember the “broken cookie store?” Free dish night at the Marval Theater? Saturdays at the Rollercade? Crusin’ on Lorain Avenue? Riding the interurban? The smell of fresh bread coming from the neighborhood bakery? If so, this is the book for you. Inside are 72 stories about life on Cleveland’s Near West Side in the first half of the 20th Century, including . . . Summer afternoons at Perkins Beach . . . Playing “cops and robbers” in the alley . . . Hanging out at Heck’s . . . Visits from the “umbrella man” . . . penny candy at the corner store . . . and lots more!

Whatever Happened to the "Paper Rex" Man and Other Stories of Cleveland's Near West Side

Biographies & Memoirs

May Dugan Center, The

Historical

Gray and Company, Publishers

#1 in the Milan Jacovich mystery series . . . 
Introducing Milan Jacovich (pronounced MY-lan YOCK-ovich), Cleveland’s favorite private eye. 
Milan, an ex-cop, Vietnam veteran, and former football player, is a private investigator with a master’s degree, a taste for klobasa sandwiches and Stroh’s beer, and a knack for finding trouble. 
Milan gets a cryptic late-night phone call from high-powered advertising executive Richard Amber, who wants to pay him a thousand dollars for twelve hours of bodyguard service. But when Milan gets to the Amber house in the elegant suburb of Pepper Pike, no one is home. The next morning, Amber’s beautiful but brittle wife hires Milan to find her husband, who, it seems, has disappeared. 
The search will lead Milan through the haunts of the very rich, including an exclusive country club where the Slovenian American sleuth almost loses his life, and onto some of Cleveland’s meanest streets. He’ll meet Cleveland mob kingpin Don Giancarlo D’Allessandro and his sophisticated but deadly nephew Victor Gaimari, and even cross paths with the governor of Ohio.

Pepper Pike: A Milan Jacovich Mystery (Milan Jacovich Mysteries)

Literature & Fiction

Roberts, Les

United States

#2 in the Milan Jacovich mystery series . . . 
Polyester leisure suit, white patent leather shoes, matching white belt—that 1970s fashion statement was once unkindly dubbed the “full Cleveland.” And no one wears it with more flair and panache than Buddy Bustamente. Buddy (“he was medium-sized if you happened to be talking about Cape buffaloes”) is the hulking flunky assigned by mob kingpin Victor Gaimari to shadow Cleveland private eye Milan Jacovich (it’s pronounced MY-lan YOCK-ovich). 
Milan has been hired to find the perpetrator of a low-level scam who is selling local businessmen ads in a magazine that doesn’t exist. But the modest amount of money involved hardly seems worth the string of bodies he soon turns up. And why does it interest a mobster like Victor and his sugar-addict bird dog, Buddy? 
Milan starts liking Buddy in spite of himself. But he’s not easily fooled; Buddy is a recent ex-con, and Milan knows that behind the childlike façade and dubious fashion, he is potentially lethal.

Full Cleveland: A Milan Jacovich Mystery

Genre Fiction

#6 in the Milan Jacovich mystery series . . . “The wonderful thing about art is that it doesn’t really have to do anything . . . All that is asked of it is that it be beautiful. It doesn’t work that way with people.” So begins a sortie by Cleveland private investigator Milan Jacovich (it’s pronounced MY-lan YOCK-ovich) into the cutthroat world of fine art. A slumming young heiress, April Delavan, hires Milan to find her most recent boyfriend, a potter who has absconded with $18,000 of her trust fund money. But it doesn’t figure that his disappearance would pique the interest of someone like Victor Gaimari, the elegant and affable mob figure with whom straight arrow Milan seems to be developing a love-hate relationship. Milan soon learns that the former boyfriend may have made a few other enemies, and suddenly, fine art starts looking a little rough around the edges. It turns out truth and beauty don’t always mix well—at least in the art business.

The Duke of Cleveland: A Milan Jacovich Mystery (Milan Jacovich Mysteries)

#8 in the Milan Jacovich mystery series . . . Hotshot young Cleveland lawyer Joel Kerner is shotgunned to death on a lonely beach on the Caribbean island of San Carlos. The local police are inept, and the Cleveland cops can’t operate outside their jurisdiction, so Kerner’s sister Patrice comes to private eye Milan Jacovich (it’s pronounced MY-lan YOCK-ovich) to discover the truth about her brother’s murder. Milan flies to San Carlos to investigate—a pleasant three-day working vacation that doesn’t keep him from getting stabbed in an alley and rousted by a high-level international cop. Back in Cleveland, he asks his best friend, homicide lieutenant Marko Meglich, for some unofficial help. But he runs up against Kerner’s angry father, a world-famous labor attorney, along with the bevy of beautiful women Joel Kerner left behind and a powerful union leader known around town as “The Irish.” Milan marches forward to solve the case, though it will eventually cause him a tragic and insupportable personal loss.

The Cleveland Local: A Milan Jacovich Mystery (Milan Jacovich Mysteries)

#9 in the Milan Jacovich mystery series . . . 
Hollywood producer Sidney Friedman has chosen Cleveland as the location for his new hope-to-be-blockbuster film, Street Games. The “shoot” is just getting underway, and the film’s star is the movie industry’s most notorious bad boy, Darren Anderson. Friedman hires Cleveland private investigator Milan Jacovich (it’s pronounced MY-lan YOCK-ovich) to watch over the unruly young actor and keep him out of trouble. Milan, still suffering from the tragic loss of his friend, has no interest in moviemaking but signs on just to keep himself from going crazy brooding. 
Keeping Darren Anderson out of trouble is like keeping your hat dry during a downpour. He’s too rich, too famous, too good-looking, and too young to handle it responsibly. When he’s accused of seducing the fifteen-year-old daughter of a local furniture mogul, Milan gets disgusted and quits the job. But murder isn’t far behind—and suddenly Milan is elbow-deep in all sorts of things that have nothing to do with a Saturday afternoon at the movies.

A Shoot in Cleveland: A Milan Jacovich Mystery (Milan Jacovich Mysteries)

#11 in the Milan Jacovich mystery series . . . Veteran private eye Milan Jacovich (it’s pronounced MY-lan YOCK-ovitch) is rarely surprised. But his attention is grabbed one day by a Native American man wearing traditional clothing and waist-length, iron gray braids, sitting across the street from his suburban Cleveland apartment for twelve hours in a driving snowstorm. When the old man is found murdered and floating in the river the very next day, Milan feels the unsettling urge to do something about it. He’s already working on another case—a simple one, he thinks. The CEO of a local toy company has hired him for a background check on his new accountant, David Ream. Milan quickly learns Ream is not at all what he seems to be, and the case gets very messy, very fast. Dancing dangerously between the two cases, Milan runs into more murder and a suspense-filled finish including a shoot-out in the fountain plaza at downtown Tower City.

The Indian Sign: A Milan Jacovich Mystery (Milan Jacovich Mysteries)

#12 in the Milan Jacovich mystery series . . . 
In street parlance, “the dutch” is another expression for suicide. That’s what everyone assumes happened to Ellen Carnine when her broken body is found 150 feet below the Lorain-Carnegie Bridge in downtown Cleveland. A terse, sad suicide note has been left on the screen of her home computer. 
But her grieving father asks private eye Milan Jacovich (it’s pronounced MY-lan YOCK-ovitch) to figure out why a bright and successful, dot-com executive like Ellen took her own life. Milan is introduced to a different reality by Ellen’s four best female friends, an old lover, her employers, and some of the lowlifes from Cleveland’s meanest streets. 
The search for the truth leads Milan into the unfamiliar territory of Internet chat rooms, where he learns a great deal about the faceless people who live part of their lives behind a screen, becoming best friends—or bitter enemies—without actually meeting. 
Milan pushes too far—and uncovers the most brutal and heinous crime he’s ever faced.

The Dutch: A Milan Jacovich Mystery (#12) (Milan Jacovich Mysteries)

#13 in the Milan Jacovich mystery series . . . A slick con man, posing as a recent immigrant from County Mayo all alone in America, is preying on the clannish loyalties of the Irish community in Cleveland for gifts, money, and other less tangible treats. When Common Pleas Judge Maureen Hartigan realizes she’s been bamboozled, she and her daughter, Cathleen, hire private eye Milan Jacovich (it’s pronounced MY-lan YOCK-ovitch) to chase down the swindler. But the con man turns up dead in a skanky motel room, and Milan finds himself tangled in the world of the local Irish godfather, Con McCardle, who is connected with the IRA. Milan also finds himself once again face-to-face with Cathleen Hartigan, an old flame that never quite kindled. Their own feelings clash with the more urgent need to solve a murder. And he learns a few things about Irish customs and cultures—including “the Irish sports pages.”

The Irish Sports Pages: A Milan Jacovich Mystery (Milan Jacovich Mysteries)

“A Hall of Fame writer at the top of his game.” ― The Beacon JournalThe best sports writing of Hall-of-Fame sportswriter Hal Lebovitz, longtime dean of Cleveland sports journalists. Several generations of sports fans grew up reading Hal Lebovitz on the sports pages. Hal covered just about every major sports event over 60 years, reporting on each with honest, straightforward words and firm opinions―and most likely a scoop on the competition. He wrote about the greats―Jim Brown, Bob Feller, Ted Williams, Woody Hayes . . . and the great moments―the Indians’ 1948 playoff game, the Browns’ 1964 championship season, Rocky Colavito’s four consecutive home runs. His writing was featured 17 times in the annual Best Sports Stories and selected for numerous other anthologies. He won countless writing awards and been inducted into 12 halls of fame―including the National Baseball Hall of Fame. Always, Hal has written for the fans. And for as long as anyone can remember, fans have been reading Hal for his particular take on events. His constant, steady presence in the local sports pages for so many decades has made Hal Lebovitz a legitimate icon in Cleveland sports―a guy who, with his typewriter, has been as remarkable and consistent and rare as a .400 hitter.

The Best of Hal Lebovitz: Great Sportswriting from Six Decades in Cleveland

History

Lebovitz, Hal

Americas

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Gray and Company, Publishers publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Gray and Company, Publishers