Maxine O'Callaghan

Maxine O'Callaghan

Author of the groundbreaking Delilah West  private eye series

Private Eye Writers of America Lifetime Achievement Award Winner

Shamus, Anthony and Bram Stoker Award Nominee

Maxine O’Callaghan was born in Tennessee in 1937 and grew up in the boot heel of Missouri as a sharecropper’s child.  She was the first in her large extended family to finish high school and left a few days after graduation with ten dollars and a bus ticket for Memphis.  She went from there to Miami where she joined the Marine Corp Reserve and then to Chicago where she went on active duty for a while and got her first taste of California during basic training at the Recruit Depot in San Diego.

In 1972 she moved with her husband and two children to Orange County, CA, a long way from the cotton fields of her childhood.  As a stay-at-home mom she began her writing career with short stories, including one to Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine about a private detective named Delilah West, which predates both Marcia Muller and Sue Grafton’s entry into the female PI genre. She published thirteen novels and a collection of short stories.  She has been nominated for both the Anthony and Bram Stoker award.  Her novels and short fiction featuring Delilah West were honored by the Private Eye Writers of America with their lifetime achievement award, The Eye, for her contribution to the field.

Books by Maxine O'Callaghan

Delilah West Volume 2

Delilah West Volume 2

The final four novels in the incredible Delliah West series by Maxine O'Callaghan, winner of the Private Eye Writers of America Lifetime Achievement Award

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Down for the Count

Down for the Count

It's tough times for P.I. Delilah West. She kills a mass shooter at a shopping mall, is hired by a twelve year-old to find his missing Dad...and then she and her wealthy boyfriend's teenage daughter are taken hostage by a brutal kidnapper. But Delilah's troubles are only just beginning...

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Trade Off

Trade Off

Delilah West is hired to find a missing teenager, who may have witnessed the murder of her next-door neighbor and could be on-the-run from the killer...if the she isn't dead already. 

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Reviews For Maxine O'Callaghan

Creating Delilah West: Can’t swim? Dive in Anyway 5.0

Before dozens of fictional female private investigators took to the mean streets...before dozens of women authors began to alter the face of a previously male-dominated subgenre, Maxine O’Callaghan introduced her engaging detective to wide audiences in the action-packed and emotionally charged novel Death is Forever

Marcia Muller

Creating Delilah West: Can’t swim? Dive in Anyway 5.0

Maxine O'Callaghan doesn't make one false move and never lets the story lag, nor does the author make Delilah into a superhero. Delilah's mistakes and emotional turmoil have a refreshing realism

Oline Codgill, Sun-Sentinel

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