Month: April 2019

A multimillion-dollar plot and a perpetrator who will kill to keep it secret.

What starts as a routine security assignment turns out to be anything but for
down-on-his-luck private eye Eli Paxton. Hired to guard the high-priced yearlings of “Trojan,” a recently retired classic winner in Lexington, Kentucky, Paxton is no sooner on the job than he must respond to a fracas in the horse barn. Rushing in, he’s just in time to thwart a vicious attack on a young groom. The assailants get away, leaving the groom bloodied and too terrified to talk. The next day he doesn’t show up for work, and the Trojan colt that was in his keeping sells for a record price.

Now assigned to investigate the boy’s disappearance, Paxton focuses on the Lexington breeding farm. It turns out that two other staff members have disappeared in the past couple of months. And the owner of the farm, while denying it, appears to be in financial straits.

As Paxton worries that all three missing boys may never be found, he runs smack into a multimillion-dollar plot that the perpetrator will kill to keep secret.

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The quintessential outsider—with a price on his head in two cities.

Jersey Leo is the quintessential outsider—an albino of mixed race. Known as “Snowball” on the street, he makes a living as the bartender at a mob-run speakeasy in Prohibition-era Hell’s Kitchen. Being neither black nor white, he has no group to call his own. His own mother abandoned him as a baby. And his father—a former boxing champ with his own secrets—disapproves of Jersey’s work at a dive owned by one of New York’s most notorious gangsters.

So when he inadvertently purchases counterfeit moonshine (“sugar pop moon”) with his boss’s money—a potentially fatal mistake—he must go undercover to track down the bootlegger who took him in. The clues lead to Philadelphia, where he runs into a cleaver-swinging madman out for his femurs and a cold-blooded gangster holed up on a Christmas-tree farm. Now with a price on his head in two cities, Jersey seeks help from the only man he can trust, his father. As the two delve into the origins of the mysterious sugar pop moon, stunning secrets about Jersey’s past come to light. To ensure his future, Jersey must face his past, even if it means that life will never return to normal.

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Ellie Stone, a young newspaper reporter in 1960s’ upstate New York, investigates a double murder at an abandoned stud farm near glamorous Saratoga Springs.

August 1962. A suspicious fire claims a tumbledown foaling barn on the grounds of the once-proud Tempesta Stud Farm, halfway between New Holland and Saratoga Springs, NY. The blaze, one of several in recent years at the abandoned farm, barely prompts a shrug from the local sheriff. That is until “girl reporter” Ellie Stone, first on the scene, uncovers a singed length of racing silk in the rubble of the barn. And it’s wrapped around the neck of one of two charred bodies buried in the ashes. A bullet between the eyes of one of the victims confirms it’s murder, and the police suspect gamblers. Ellie digs deeper.

The double murder, committed on a ghostly stud farm in the dead of night, leads Ellie down a haunted path, just a stone’s throw from the glamour of Saratoga Springs, to a place where dangerous men don’t like to lose. Unraveling secrets from the past—crushing failure and heartless betrayal—she’s learning that arson can be cold revenge.

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December 21, 1960, the shortest day of the year: Fifteen-year-old Darleen Hicks slips away from her school bus as it idles in the junior-high parking lot, waiting to depart.

Moments later the bus rumbles away without her, and she is never seen again.

New Year’s Eve 1960: The small upstate town of New Holland, New York, is in the grips of a severe cold snap, when Ellie Stone receives a late-night caller—Irene Metzger, the grieving mother of Darleen Hicks. She tells Ellie that the local police won’t help her, that they believe Darleen has run off with some older boy and will return when she is ready. Irene has read Ellie’s stories in the paper on an earlier murder case and believes Ellie is her last hope.

Stone Cold Dead takes Ellie Stone on a chilling journey to a place of uncertainty, loss, teenage passion, and vulnerability—a place where Ellie’s questions are unwanted and her life is in danger.

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American novelist Helen Hancock is in Paris to research her work-in-progress and teach a writing class when she discovers a spy camera hidden in her room at the luxury Hotel Sorbonne. Hancock notifies the US embassy, which dispatches former FBI profiler Hugo Marston to investigate.

Almost immediately the stakes are raised when a bell-hop is found dead in the hotel’s stairwell. Police tell Hugo they have discovered evidence on the dead man’s computer suggesting that he was the one who bugged Hancock’s room.

The next day things become even more complicated when a salacious video clip explodes across the Internet showing Hancock in the embrace of Ambrosio Silva, one of her writing students—both are naked and nothing is left to the imagination. But when Hugo tries to find him, his investigation leads only to Silva’s dead body. He too has been murdered.

Through a series of sharp deductions, Hugo uncovers new evidence pointing to the most surprising suspect of all. A close call with a dark figure on the steps of his own apartment building proves that he’s on the right track and leaves no doubt that he is next on the hit list.

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Introducing a new line of Carolyn Hart Classics

Beijing, 1941: The ancient bones of the famed “Peking Man” are placed in two wooden crates for shipment to the United States to escape the invading Japanese army. The bones are never seen again.

New York City, 1970s: a mysterious woman offers to sell the bones to an unknown man on top of the Empire State Building. But when someone takes a photograph, she makes a hasty retreat and disappears forever. San Francisco, 1980s: The greatest treasure in the history of paleontology remains missing—until a frantic stranger named Jimmy calls on noted anthropologist

Ellen Christie and shares a scintillating secret with her: he has evidence of the bones in his backpack. She becomes convinced that he is right. But when she visits his Chinatown home, Jimmy must flee with the evidence, as a couple of thugs are also after the treasure.

As Ellen and Jimmy’s brother, Dan, navigate the treachery of the city’s elite criminals, her dreams of academic stardom draw closer. Unfortunately, so does danger.

Can Ellen really trust Jimmy? And if she can’t, will her own ambition and her growing attraction to Dan lead her astray? Ellen will soon discover that the real world is greyer than the black-and-white lines of science, and the blurrier the lines, the more fun they are to cross!

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Marjorie Trumaine, a freelance indexer from rural North Dakota in the 1960s, risks her life to help local law enforcement track down a missing, disabled girl.

Dickinson, North Dakota, 1965. It’s a harsh winter and freelance indexer Marjorie Trumaine struggles to complete a lengthy index while still mourning the recent loss of her husband, Hank. The bleakness of the weather seems to compound her grief and then she gets more bad news: a neighbor’s fourteen-year-old disabled daughter, Tina Rinkerman, has disappeared. Feeling she needs to do something to help the Rinkerman family, Marjorie joins Sheriff Guy Reinhardt in the search for the missing girl. Their investigation quickly leads to a shocking discovery and further complications. Not far from the Rinkerman’s house, the body of grocery store manager Nils Jacobsen is found with a bullet in his head.

Despite a looming deadline for the book index, Marjorie is more and more distracted by the disturbing events surrounding the hunt for Tina Rinkerman. Instead of focusing on her work, she follows leads that take her all the way to the Grafton State School, some five hours away. Until recently, Tina had been a resident there. The information she uncovers raises more questions, but it ties together the murder of Nils Jacobsen and the girl’s disappearance.

On a treacherous drive home to Dickinson, she becomes aware that someone doesn’t want her to return. She fears the person who murdered Nils will not hesitate to silence her, now that she knows an age-old secret.

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October 1964—just months after freelance indexer Marjorie Trumaine helped solve a series of murders in Dickinson, North Dakota, she is faced with another death that pulls her into an unwanted investigation.

Calla Eltmore, the local librarian, is found dead at work and everyone considers it suicide. But Marjorie can’t believe that Calla would be capable of doing such a thing.

Marjorie’s suspicions are further aroused when she notices something amiss at Calla’s wake. But the police seem uninterested in her observations.

Despite pressing job commitments and the burden of caring for a husband in declining health, Marjorie sets out to uncover the truth. What she finds is a labyrinth of secrets — and threats from someone who will kill to keep these secrets hidden.

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A twenty-something American model, Amy Dreiss, disappears in Paris.

Her father turns for help to his old friend Hugo Marston, the security chief at the American Embassy. Marston makes some enquiries and quickly realizes something is amiss: Amy was not a model, as she claimed, but a dancer at a seedy bar. Now she’s in Spain with a guy named Felix.

With his friend and former CIA agent Tom Green, Marston heads for Barcelona. Breaking into Felix’s house, the two sleuths encounter a shocking scene: Amy’s father, Bart, standing over the dead and battered body of their chief suspect. Though Bart protests his innocence, under the damning circumstances, Spanish authorities arrest him for murder.

Then Felix’s body disappears from the morgue and Marston receives a grisly package containing human body parts. The two American investigators are faced with their biggest challenge ever: find the real killer, prove Bart’s innocence, and locate his missing daughter-without getting killed along the way.

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When Lewis Wilkins, a physician with a vacation home in Jarrett Creek, is attacked by vicious dogs, and several pet dogs in the area around Jarrett Creek disappear, Police Chief Samuel Craddock suspects that a dog fighting ring is operating in his territory.

He has to tread carefully in his investigation, as lawmen who meddle in dog fighting put their lives at risk. The investigation is hampered because Wilkins is not a local.

Craddock’s focus on the investigation is thrown off by the appearance of a new woman in his life, as well as his accidental acquisition of a puppy.

Digging deeper, Craddock discovers that the public face Wilkins presented was at odds with his private actions. A terrible mistake led to his disgrace as a physician, and far from being a stranger, he has ongoing acquaintances with a number of county residents who play fast and loose with the law.

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