Month: April 2019

In the waning days of a lazy August holiday, Ellie Stone is enjoying a bright Adirondack-lake morning.

Nearby, two men plummet to their deaths just a few feet short of the water of a dangerous diving pool. A tragic accident, it seems. But the police quickly establish that the two victims—one a stranger to the lake and the other a teenaged boy from a nearby music camp—surely didn’t know each other. So how did they come to die together?

Wading into a slippery morass of free-love intellectuals and charismatic evangelicals, Ellie’s investigation forces her to navigate old grudges and cold war passions, lost ideals and betrayed loves. As usual, she sticks her nose where it’s unwanted, rattling nerves and putting herself in jeopardy. But this time it’s her heart that’s also at risk.

It’s 1907 Los Angeles.

Mischievous socialite Anna Blanc is the kind of young woman who devours purloined crime novels—but must disguise them behind covers of more domestically-appropriate reading. She could match wits with Sherlock Holmes, but in her world women are not allowed to hunt criminals.

Determined to break free of the era’s rigid social roles, Anna buys off the chaperone assigned by her domineering father and, using an alias, takes a job as a police matron with the Los Angeles Police Department. There she discovers a string of brothel murders, which the cops are unwilling to investigate. Seizing her one chance to solve a crime, she takes on the investigation herself.

If the police find out, she’ll get fired; if her father finds out, he’ll disown her; and if her fiancé finds out, he’ll cancel the wedding and stop pouring money into her father’s collapsing bank. Midway into her investigation, the police chief’s son, Joe Singer, learns her true identity. And shortly thereafter she learns about blackmail.

Anna must choose—either hunt the villain and risk losing her father, fiancé, and wealth, or abandon her dream and leave the killer on the loose..

Dominic is a prosecutor, a musician, and an Englishman living in Texas.

He’s also a psychopath.

His main goal is to hide his condition and lead a seemingly normal life in hopes to pay off his debts and become a full-time musician in Austin’s club scene. But on one lousy day his carefully-controlled world starts to shatter: he’s demoted at work and accused of stealing a fellow musician’s song.

He also meets a beautiful woman in a lime green dress—perhaps the biggest threat to his safety of all. At her urging, Dominic hatches a plan to steal a van he knows will be filled with cash. He picks two friends as accomplices, insisting on no guns and no violence. But a security guard catches them in the act and simple theft turns into capital murder.

Cracks start to show in the conspiracy and, with no allegiance to anyone but himself, Dominic has to decide whether to stick by his partners in crime, or let his true nature come out to play.

Who was James Putnam? The answer to that question may help Minnesota detective Alexander Rupert salvage the wreck of his career.

A former Medal of Valor winner, Rupert is now under subpoena by a grand jury on suspicion of corruption. So when he’s asked to look into the false identity of a car-accident victim named James Putnam, a man who in fact died fifteen years earlier, Rupert sees a potentially big case and an opportunity to regain his respectability.

But the investigation puts him in the path of “the Beast,” the nom de guerre of Drago Basta, a cunning veteran of the Balkan wars and a sociopath assassin who has been searching for Putnam for years. Putnam had something that Basta still wants.

If Rupert’s life was in shambles before, it’s now also in danger. Threatened by the Beast and suspecting his wife of cheating, Rupert falls for the seductions of the dead man’s former girlfriend. As he feels his life spinning out of control, his steadfast brother and fellow police detective Max may be Rupert’s last hope.

In the small, sleepy town of Idyll, Connecticut, Police Chief Thomas Lynch assists police officer Michael Finnegan to uncover clues to his sister’s disappearance two decades ago.

Charleston, Massachusetts, 1972: Rookie cop Michael Finnegan gets a call from his mother. His youngest sister, Susan, has disappeared, the same sister who ran away two years earlier. Anxious not to waste police resources, Finnegan advises his family to wait and search on their own. But a week turns into two decades, and Susan is never found.

Idyll, Connecticut, 1999: In the woods outside of town, a young woman’s corpse is discovered, and Detective Finnegan seems unusually disturbed by the case. When Police Chief Thomas Lynch learns about Finnegan’s past, he makes a bargain with his officer: He will allow Finnegan to investigate the body found in the woods—if Finnegan lets the bored Lynch secretly look into the disappearance of his sister.

Both cases reveal old secrets—about the murder, and about the men inside the Idyll Police Station and what they’ve been hiding from each other their whole careers.…

A young man, caught in the dark maze of circumstances surrounding a crime that occurred thirty years ago, must confront several ugly truths as well as direct threats to his own life.

College student Joe Talbert has the modest goal of completing a writing assignment for an English class. His task is to interview a stranger and write a brief biography of the person. With deadlines looming, Joe heads to a nearby nursing home to find a willing subject. There he meets Carl Iverson, and soon nothing in Joe’s life is ever the same.

Iverson is a dying Vietnam veteran-and a convicted murderer. With only a few months to live, he has been medically paroled to a nursing home, after spending thirty years in prison for the crimes of rape and murder.

As Joe writes about Carl’s life, especially Carl’s valor in Vietnam, he cannot reconcile the heroism of the soldier with the despicable acts of the convict. Joe, along with his skeptical female neighbor, throws himself into uncovering the truth, but he is hamstrung in his efforts by having to deal with his dangerously dysfunctional mother, the guilt of leaving his autistic brother vulnerable, and a haunting childhood memory.

Thread by thread, Joe unravels the tapestry of Carl’s conviction. But by the time Joe discovers the truth, it is too late to escape the fallout.

Master ninja Hiro Hattori and Jesuit Father Mateo head up to Mount Koya, only to find themselves embroiled in yet another mystery, this time in a Shingon Buddhist temple atop one of Japan’s most sacred peaks.

November, 1565: Master ninja Hiro Hattori and Portuguese Jesuit Father Mateo travel to a Buddhist temple at the summit of Mount Koya, carrying a secret message for an Iga spy posing as a priest on the sacred mountain. When a snowstorm strikes the peak, a killer begins murdering the temple’s priests and posing them as Buddhist judges of the afterlife—the Kings of Hell. Hiro and Father Mateo must unravel the mystery before the remaining priests—including Father Mateo—become unwilling members of the killer’s grisly council of the dead.