The Deep Dark Descending

Homicide Detective Max Rupert never fully accepted his wife’s death, even when he believed that a reckless hit and run driver was the cause.

But when he learns that in fact she was murdered, he devotes himself to hunting down her killers. Most of his life he had thought of himself as a decent man. But now he’s so consumed with thoughts of retribution that he questions whether he will take that last step and enact the vengeance he longs for.

On a frozen lake near the US-Canadian border, he wrestles with a decision that could change his life forever, as his hatred threatens to turn him into the kind of person he has spent a career bringing to justice.


Death by Surprise

A woman is out to clear her cousin of murder charges after a blackmailer targeting the wealthy Carlisle family turns up dead.

K.C. Carlisle and her cousin Kenneth Carlisle both grew up rich. Kenneth is a corporate lawyer in an exclusive Northern California seaside community while K.C. has a storefront office on the seedy side of town. She takes whatever kind of case walks in her door.

But trouble appears one day when Francine Boutelle shows up pretending she wants to write an expose of the Carlisle family, including some dirt on K.C.’s late and highly respectable father. Francine has visited most of the family and is willing to keep the family secrets in exchange for cash. When Kenneth is accused of murdering the blackmailer, K.C. is determined to prove his innocence, no matter where the trail of blood and deception leads.


Deadly Ruse

A routine night at the movies turns dramatic when Mac’s girlfriend Kate believes she sees a ghost from her past in the lobby. Mac’s investigation uncovers a pattern of deceit that could have life-threatening consequences.

Mac’s girlfriend, Kate Bell, thinks she’s seen a ghost. Wes Harrison, Kate’s former boyfriend, supposedly perished twelve years ago in a boating accident. But now she swears a man she spotted in a crowded theater lobby is Wes. Mac has his doubts-it was only a fleeting glimpse. But to calm her shattered nerves, he starts making inquiries.

A clue leads him from his home in St. George, Florida, to a Texas orphanage. There he uncovers startling information that turns both his and Kate’s world upside-down. Diamond smuggling, sex, deceit, and murder are just part of the twisted tale that emerges from Kate’s earlier life. Using wit, grit, and the ingrained military training of a former Marine, Mac starts to fit the pieces of this scrambled puzzle together.

Further clues point to the Palmetto Royale Casino and Resort near St. George. He and Kate discover that the casino is a front for big drug deals. When they barely escape a murder attempt, Mac knows he’s on the right track.

But he better play his cards right-because losing this high-stakes game could cost him his life.


Deadly Catch

After twenty-four years in the marines, Mac McClellan is happy to be a civilian again and let others take charge, but that’s not going to happen until he clears his name as the number one suspect in a murder.

When recently retired U.S. Marine Mac McClellan hooks a badly decomposed body while enjoying a leisurely fishing vacation in the Florida panhandle, and then a bag of rare marijuana is discovered stashed aboard his rental boat, he realizes someone is setting him up to take the fall for murder and drug smuggling. Mac and Kate Bell, a feisty saleslady at the local marina with whom he has struck up a promising relationship, launch an investigation to clear his name. Along the way Mac must butt heads and match wits with local law enforcement officials, shady politicians, and strong-armed thugs from the Eastern Seaboard to sniff out and bring the real smugglers and killer to justice.


Dead Broke in Jarrett Creek

With Jarrett Creek bankrupt and the police department in disarray, Samuel Craddock takes on a murder investigation. He discovers that the town’s financial woes had nothing to do with incompetence and that murder is only one of the crimes he must solve.

Jarrett Creek is bankrupt. Gary Dellmore, heir apparent to the main bank, is dead, apparently murdered. Samuel Craddock thought he was retired but now he’s been asked to return as police chief. Dellmore supposedly had a roving eye, although his wife says he was never serious about dallying. Still, Craddock wonders: Did the husbands and fathers of women he flirted with think he was harmless? What about his current lover, who insists that Dellmore was going to leave his wife for her?

Craddock discovers that Dellmore had a record of bad business investments. Even worse, he took a kickback from a loan he procured, which ultimately drove the town into bankruptcy. Many people had motive to want Dellmore dead.

Then the investigation turns up another crime. As Craddock digs down to the root of this mess, many in Jarrett Creek are left wondering what happened to the innocence of their close-knit community.


Dante’s Dilemma

Psychiatrist Mark Angelotti has a physical disability—legal blindness—that complicates his fact-finding and forces him to rely on unique skills to solve crimes while acting as an expert witness or psychiatric evaluator.

Blind psychiatrist Mark Angelotti is faced with his most troubling case yet when he is asked to evaluate Rachel Lazarus, the estranged wife of a slain University of Chicago professor.

Months earlier, the professor’s body was found stuffed into one of the exhibits at “Scav,” the school’s world-famous annual scavenger hunt, and – in a feast for the press – missing a vital piece of its anatomy. Though she’s confessed to her husband’s murder, Rachel is mounting a battered woman’s defense.

Forced into helping the prosecution, Mark becomes unsure of his objectivity when his investigation uncovers uncomfortable parallels between Rachel’s history and his own. That concern proves well-founded when his damaging admission at trial all but convicts Rachel. Then a tip connects the case to another suspected murder and evidence that Rachel may not be guilty after all. As he plows ahead during a brutal Chicago winter, Mark soon learns he has far more to worry about than treacherous snow and ice: someone will do anything to guarantee that Rachel takes the fall.


Dante’s Poison

Blind psychiatrist Mark Angelotti has just enrolled in a drug trial that holds out hope of restoring his eyesight when he is enlisted to act as an expert witness in a case that is rocking the Chicago legal community.

Attorney Jane Barrett knows all about Lucitrol. She defended the manufacturer of the powerful antipsychotic drug against product liability claims. So when Barrett’s lover, investigative journalist Rory Gallagher, collapses from a fatal dose of the same drug, it falls to Hallie Sanchez, Barrett’s oldest friend, to defend her on murder charges.

Could Barrett be guilty of what prosecutors are calling the perfect crime? Or is something afoot in the world of Big Pharma that someone was desperate to keep Gallagher from bringing to light?

Amid growing doubts about Barrett’s innocence, Hallie recruits blind psychiatrist Mark Angelotti to help her discredit the testimony of a crucial eyewitness. The pair succeeds in obtaining Barrett’s release, but at a dreadful price.


The Crypt Thief

Hugo Marston must investigate a twisted grave robber . . . and a killer.

It’s summer in Paris and two tourists have been killed in Père La Chaise cemetery in front of Jim Morrison’s grave. One of the dead tourists is American and the other a woman linked to a known terrorist; so the US ambassador sends his best man and the embassy’s head of security–Hugo Marston–to help the French police with their investigation. At first, Hugo is stumped. How does this killer operate unseen? And why is he stealing the bones of once-famous can-can girls?

Hugo cracks the secrets of the graveyard, but soon realizes that old bones aren’t all this serial killer wants: his ultimate plan requires the flesh and organs of the living. And when the crypt thief spots the former FBI agent on his tail, he decides that Hugo’s body will do just fine.


Cat on a Cold Tin Roof

In the third Eli Paxton mystery, the search for a missing cat leads the private investigator into a web of intrigue involving murder and big drug money.

Hard-luck gumshoe Eli Paxton is hired to find a missing cat-a very important cat, it turns out, because its collar is studded with diamonds worth a small fortune. What starts as a routine search of animal shelters soon becomes a perilous journey through a murky underworld. The woman who hired Paxton is the wealthy widow of a recently murdered financial adviser with an alias and mobster ties.

Eli finds the cat, but not the collar. Eventually, he’s forced to unravel an intricate plot involving a Bolivian drug cartel. On top of all this, the temperamental widow is more likely to throw things at Eli than pay him for his services.

As he turns up one clue after another, leading him ever deeper into a treacherous maze, Eli hopes, first, to survive, and then to make enough money to afford a new transmission for his broken-down car.


Cast the First Stone

February 1962: Tony Eberle has just scored his first role in a Hollywood movie, and the publisher of his hometown newspaper in upstate New York wants a profile of the local boy who’s made good.

Reporter Ellie Stone is dispatched to Los Angeles for the story. But when she arrives on set to meet her subject, Tony has vanished. The director is apoplectic, his agent is stumped, and the producer is dead.

Ellie is on the story, diving headfirst into a treacherous demimonde of Hollywood wannabes, beautiful young men, desperately ambitious ingénues, panderers, and pornography hobbyists. Then there are some real movie stars with reputations to protect. To find the killer, Ellie must separate the lies from the truth, unearthing secrets no one wants revealed along the way. But before she can solve producer Bertram Wallis’s murder, she must locate Tony Eberle.