Showing results for "Clay" in Crime Fiction

Best-selling authors Jeffery Deaver and Anne Perry join rising stars like Dana Chamblee Carpenter and Paul Gail Benson in a collection that proves Music City is a deadly place to be when your song gets called. Featuring stories by Donald Bain, Robert Dugoni, Jefferson Bass, Mary Burton, Jonathan Stone, Steven James, Maggie Toussaint, Clay Stafford, Heywood Gould, Jaden Terrell, and more....

Jackson Clay used to be many things. An Army Ranger. A loving husband. A doting father. But that was a lifetime ago. Now, in the wake of unspeakable tragedy, he's simply the missing's last hope. When quiet high schooler Sara Beth Parker disappears in the night from her home in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, Detective Angela Cole is assigned the case. A black woman in a department full of white men, she's made a career for herself working harder and being better than the badges beside her.

On a warm May evening in the spring of 1979, the people of Heartsridge, Massachusetts, are living the American dream. Families are gathered for barbecues. Kids are playing in front yards. Gardens are being kept. Meanwhile, Kara Price stumbles home through the woods, raped and beaten, her life shattered by a wicked act of violence, perpetrated by one of the town's most beloved and public figures.

Henry Lindon's flight across the north Atlantic was turbulent and sleepless. His plane has just touched down in Amsterdam, where he’s come to work as a visiting professor. Lindon is torn about leaving his troubled wife, Marylou, behind in Dallas, but relieved and excited to start a new chapter in a lively city. But troubles from the past soon cross the Atlantic. Lindon discovers that notorious Dutch art forger Han van Meegeren, born in 1899, is about to play a part in Lindon’s own personal drama.

New York, 1938. The German consulate has been attacked, leaving all but one of the Nazi diplomatic corps brutally murdered. Only Jethro Dumont, the Green Lama, and his associates, Jean Farrell, Ken Clayton, and Lieutenant Caraway, can find out who's behind this horrible crime. But as the Green Lama's investigations deepen, he discovers a crime far greater than any ever committed by man and learns a secret that will define the course of his destiny.

Bruno Johnson, ex-detective with Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department and an ex-convict, is hiding out from the FBI in Costa Rica, tending bar to support eight children he illegally rescued from abusive homes. Partway through a normal day, Barbara Wicks, a former colleague and the chief of police for Montclair, California, walks into his bar. Bruno is shocked to the core. Is she there to arrest him and take him back to California? Turns out she's there to request Bruno's help. Two children have been kidnapped.

A wealthy widowed mother loses her only son in a shocking crime, leading her to avenge her sons senseless death when the courts fail and the killer walks. Then, with her power and wealth, she becomes a concierge of revenge justice, helping others to do the same.

A string of thefts ends in a grisly murder. Certain evidence leads Captain Barnwell to suspect a former thief, Rutherford Nordlinger, as the culprit. Carl Brooke becomes personally involved as Nordlinger’s guilt is questioned. In the style of Arthur Conan Doyle, Clay Boutwell brings back the Agora Society and its premiere scholar, Carl Brooke. This is the second novella in the Agora series, the first being Two Tocks Before Midnight.

Sometimes bad people just need to go down, and for whatever reason, there's usually no one else around to do it. He just wanted to pass through town unnoticed, but vicious outlaws made his business their own and picked a fight he was desperate to avoid. The worst sin yet, they've targeted an innocent woman and her child in their schemes. Austin must now take up his gun and do what he hates but is better at than anyone else: fight without mercy, fight to the end, and win at all costs....

When a flurry of forgeries appear in museums and among collectors, the members of the Agora, a society dedicated to the betterment of man, take it upon themselves to stop the rogues. But among the members, there is a traitor. Among the forgers, there is a murderer. As friends betray their own and souls are sentenced to death, suspicions and tensions mount. Only one man, Carl Brooke, has the knowledge and expertise to stop the murderer. But will he succeed?

Martial arts master Lin Su Yoshimura is a force to be reckoned with. Now in the US after being shunned as a mixed-race Chinese-Japanese girl, then kidnapped as a teen and sold into the sex-trafficking trade, Lin Su is rescued from an abusive New York pimp by one of the city’s top-level cocaine dealers. Navigating both back alleys and opulent venues with lethal grace, Lin Su finds her way forward through the underbelly of the city, as she wrestles with the horrors of her past.

Darfur, Sudan. 2009. Two doctors employed by NGOs stumble across a strange metallic cylinder, which has been embedded for perhaps millions of years in desert rock. Mystified by the object, they gather four of the world’s leading experts in science and technology a computer scientist, a physicist, a biochemist, and a genetic researcher and head to London to study it thoroughly. The six have barely begun running tests on the cylinder, when they suddenly disappear telling family members not to go looking for them.

Eco-Watch, the premier scientific research organization he founded, is being blamed for a series of violent eco-atrocities that ignite protests around the world. Behind the attacks is Garrick Pearce, a man from Donovan's past, who is bent on a ruthless vendetta. Garrick has promised that after he annihilates Eco-Watch, he'll murder everyone close to Nash. Recoiling from the damage, Donovan enlists the help of Erica, a woman who claims she has information Donovan needs, but her knowledge makes her a marked woman.

A small-time hood tries to escape the family business in this powerful story of crime and drug abuse in rural America. The town of Sewardville, Kentucky, teeters on the edge of a violent abyss, overrun with methamphetamine and prescription drug abuse. The Slone family controls everything. Patriarch Walt Slone is the town's mayor and head of one of the largest crime syndicates in the eastern United States.

Albert Jarvis is an unusually bright boy - a tragic temperament for the jailor's son in a gritty 1840s town at the edge of the American frontier. Desperate to belong, he fails repeatedly to prove himself worth his salt, until a captivating stranger offers an enchanting vision - a world where the path to heroism lies in words. The place is New York City. The stranger: Edward Rulloff, an accomplished physician, lawyer, professor, inventor, linguist fluent in 27 languages - and serial killer.

This fever dream begins on a stormy fall night at a lake house in the north woods of Minnesota, where we are introduced to a college professor who a few years earlier had written a novel in which he justified a gruesome campus murder under the nihilistic theory that there is no right or wrong, no moral center to man's activity. The writer returns to the lake house where he had spent his childhood summers and locks himself in the attic, intent on writing the final story of his life.

Lieutenant Colonel Eric West is the clinical director of the Combat Casualty Research Center (CCRC), an elite group of emergency physicians who provide operational medical support for the United States military, the FBI, the DEA, the ATF, and the Secret Service. Deployed throughout the world on a moment's notice, Eric begins to note a series of unusual deaths. Federal agents are dying from massive thromboses, their bodies solidifying into a mass of necrotic tissue.

Dale is a crooked cop. It started slow, but grew like a cancer and now he can’t get out from under the thumb of Tat, a would-be kingpin in every vice he can turn a profit with. And now Dale’s number is up — the top brass knows. But instead of getting busted, Dale gets an offer. The mayor’s daughter is being held by Tat in his fortress built from an abandoned office tower.

Tomek lives a seemingly quiet life as a spacecraft engineer for the interstellar Azten Empire of Federated Worlds. But no one knows that during Tomek's frequent "vacations", he volunteers for his planet's police force, tracking down convicted criminals and delivering them to justice. Known for taking on cases that no other volunteer will touch, Tomek uses the code name Negative Zero in order to protect himself and those he loves.

In this short, psychological thriller, Brad Johnson is having nightmares or is he waking up buried memories? While at work as a home inspector, Johnson finds a body beneath an old farm house. Scared and nervous that he won't be believed, he decides to find the killer himself and then report it to authorities. Not long after, Sheriffs Investigator Nick Marcus discovers the freshly moved body and begins his own hunt for the killer. Who gets to The Truth first, Nick or Brad?