Publication Date: January 20, 2026
Nobody believes her.
Twelve-year-old Abani Singh claims to have witnessed a self-driving car murder a man and drive away with no one inside. Even private detective Mark St. Johns, grandson of the famous Los Angeles sleuth “The Falcon,” believes that the distressed girl made a mistake or fabricated the story. Her claim; that the car hit the man, backed up, struck him again and drove off on a major highway, seems impossible.
But when killers target Abani, Mark discovers a threat of impossible power—one that can hide, lie, steal, and kill more destructively than any criminal he’s ever faced.
Mark St. Johns may have stepped into the family business as a private detective, but his reputation is crafted around tenacity.
Author Bob Reiss delivers a well-crafted mystery in The Impossible Detective. When a young girl approaches Mark, aka The Falcon, after she witnesses something everyone else dismisses as impossible, he initially doesn’t buy into the idea of a murderous, driverless car.
The storyline unfolds amid the chaos of New York City, where technology emerges capable of unimaginable destruction. Mix in a cult determined to fulfill a mission, and you have the recipe for conflict.
The pacing is solid, with the story shifting smoothly among characters to keep readers engaged. The techno themes may have at one time seemed far-fetched, but they are all too real with today’s advancements.
The Impossible Detective offers a multi-layered mystery brimming with suspense.
Bestselling author and journalist Bob Reiss is fascinated by the border between order and anarchy. His nonfiction work has covered trouble spots around the world, including the Amazon, Antarctica, the Arctic, Sudan, and Somalia. His fiction tends to ask “what if” when it comes to big questions facing society. All told, Bob has published twenty-three books of fiction and nonfiction.
Bob is a graduate of Northwestern University and the University of Oregon. He has taught writing at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Yale University in Singapore, Montclair University, the University of North Carolina MFA program, and on a Coast Guard ship in the Arctic Ocean.
