Showing results for "Ecstasy" in Crime Fiction

The poison was cyanide, slipped into the sacred wine of ecstasy just before it was presented to Miss Cara Quayne at the House of the Sacred Flame. The victim was a deeply religious initiate who had trained for a month for her last ceremony. She was also a very beautiful woman.... The suspects were the other initiates and the high priest. All claimed they were above earthly passions. But Cara Quayne had provoked lust, jealousy - and murder.

Once again, Roderick Alleyn is on the case of a killer who plucked the life from the newest initiate of The House of the Sacred Flame, just as she was about to drink the sacrificial wine, being as it was laced with cyanide. In investigating her death he finds the High Priest and his followers are more enmeshed is the earthly passions of lust and jealousy than they would like to imagine.

Bobby Palumbo is a low-level bagman for the Brooklyn mob. After he is persuaded to "borrow" $200,000 from his collection bag for 24 hours, he is left on the hook for the missing money. On the run, he hooks up with Frannie Jo Overby, a savvy young girl from the dying Texas town of Ecstasy. Bobby is largely clueless, and it's Frannie Jo who turns out to have the street smarts. She's the one who cooks up the scheme to save Bobby's bacon.