Dig Your Grave

Detective Alex Mills turns to psychic Gus Parker to help him solve a series of baffling murders perpetrated by a deranged killer who leaves his victims’ bodies and taunting clues in the cemeteries of Phoenix, AZ.

A killer is on the loose, burying his victims among the dead in Phoenix cemeteries, and leaving ghoulish signs that warn of more evil to come. It’s a crude camouflage that has Detective Alex Mills stumped. As he has done before, Mills turns to his buddy, the reluctant psychic Gus Parker. His visions, as cryptic and baffling as they sometimes are, mean something.

But just as the investigation heats up, and Mills needs him most, Gus Parker goes missing. Rock ’n’ roll legend Billie Welch, Gus’s love interest, is frantic to find him and turns to Mills for help. Is this a case of a crazed fan who is trying to get to Billie? Is Gus’s disappearance related to the spree of cemetery killings?

There are nefarious secrets hiding in the shadows of the valley’s most well-heeled neighborhoods, and some of the most prominent residents have the most to fear.

A Knife in the Fog

Physician Arthur Conan Doyle takes a break from his practice to assist London police in tracking down Jack the Ripper in this debut novel and series starter.

September 1888. A twenty-nine-year-old Arthur Conan Doyle practices medicine by day and writes at night. His first Sherlock Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet, although gaining critical and popular success, has only netted him twenty-five pounds. Embittered by the experience, he vows never to write another “crime story.” Then a messenger arrives with a mysterious summons from former Prime Minister William Gladstone, asking him to come to London immediately.

Once there, he is offered one month’s employment to assist the Metropolitan Police as a “consultant” in their hunt for the serial killer soon to be known as Jack the Ripper. Doyle agrees on the stipulation his old professor of surgery, Professor Joseph Bell—Doyle’s inspiration for Sherlock Holmes—agrees to work with him. Bell agrees, and soon the two are joined by Miss Margaret Harkness, an author residing in the East End who knows how to use a Derringer and serves as their guide and companion.

Pursuing leads through the dank alleys and courtyards of Whitechapel, they come upon the body of a savagely murdered fifth victim. Soon it becomes clear that the hunters have become the hunted when a knife-wielding figure approaches.

The Devil’s Wind

A historical mystery that blends nautical adventure in pirate waters with a locked-room murder mystery, featuring a pirate sleuth whose wits are as sharp as his blade.

1723—Spider John, longing to escape the pirate life he never wanted, has an honest seafaring job at last, aboard a sailing vessel, and is returning to his beloved Em and their child. But when Captain Brentwood is murdered in his cabin, Spider’s plans are tossed overboard.

Who killed Redemption’s captain? The mysterious pirate with a sadistic past? The beautiful redhead who hides guns beneath her skirt? One of the men pining for the captain’s daughter? There are plenty of suspects.

But how could anyone kill the captain in his locked quarters while the entire crew was gathered together on the deck? Before he can solve the puzzle, Spider John and his ex-pirate friends Hob and Odin will have to cope with violence, schemes, nosy Royal Navy officers, and a deadly trap set by the ruthless pirate Ned Low.

Heart Of Stone

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.

Idyll Threats

 

 

Clean-cut Thomas Lynch is police chief of Idyll, Connecticut, where serious crimes can be counted on one hand—until Cecilia North is found murdered on the town’s golf course.

 

By chance, Chief Lynch met her mere hours before she was killed. The case should be a slam dunk. But there’s a problem. If he tells his detectives about meeting the victim, he’ll reveal his greatest secret—he’s gay. 

So Lynch works angles of the case on his own. Without the aid of fellow detectives, he is forced to seek help from unlikely allies—a Goth teen and a UFO-obsessed conspiracy theorist. Meanwhile, he must contend with pressure from the mayor to solve the crime before the town’s biggest tourist event opens, all the while coping with the suspicions of his men, casual homophobia, and difficult memories of his partner’s recent death.

During the investigation, Lynch realizes that small town Idyll isn’t safe, especially for a man with secrets that threaten the thing that he loves most—his job.


A Killing at Cotton Hill

 

A lot of people had it in for Dora Lee . . .

 

The chief of police of Jarrett Creek, Texas, doubles as the town drunk. So when Dora Lee Parjeter is murdered, her old friend and former police chief Samuel Craddock steps in. He discovers that a lot of people may have had it in for Dora Lee—the conniving rascals on the farm next door, her estranged daughter, and her live-in grandson. And then there’s that stranger Dora Lee claimed was spying on her. As Craddock digs to find the identity of the killer, the human foibles of the small-town residents—their pettiness and generosity, their secret vices and true virtues—are also revealed.

 


The Secret Life of Anna Blanc

 

 

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..


Hollow Man

 

 

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.


The Guise of Another

 

 

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.


Idyll Hands

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.…