Showing results by publisher "Wordwooze Publishing" in Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Here is a time when the old west became new - the 1930s-50s - as Louis L'Amour witnessed it first-hand in Southern California before and after World War II. Many people think the age of gunmen, scheming land barons, murderous bad guys, and the determined men who stood up against them, went out with the end of the Old West around the 1890s. But, in L’Amour’s own time in the New West, there were far more bad men toting guns and making grabs for far more wealth and valuable land than in the fabled days of the Old West.

She needed to learn the hard way that bad girls who spy on men like me don't just get spanked. They get taken roughly and shamefully, with every climax more overwhelming than the one before.

Ryan Morgan, a married man, comes to Banning in a panic. He is being blackmailed with incriminating photos of Ryan with an attractive coworker. To Banning, with years of experience as a private eye, there is nothing unusual about that. What is unusual is that the photos show the pair in places where they have never been.

The head of one of the largest investment banking and securities firms in the United States has been assassinated in Times Square in the middle of New York City’s annual celebration of Halloween, the Festival of the Dead. Louis Martelli, NYPD, is one of the first detectives on the scene.

There are hours of listening pleasure in The Legendary Detectives: 9 Classic Novelettes Starring the World's Greatest Super-Sleuths. You'll find gathered together a clutch of classic mysteries starring nine of the world's most famous fictional sleuths: The Thinking Machine, the Old Man in the Corner, Max Carrados, Morris Klaw, Sanders of the River, Reggie Fortune, Father Brown, Craig Kennedy, and, of course, the greatest and most famous of them all - Sherlock Holmes.

George Barrett is a detective in the Sioux Bend Police Department. For the first time in six years, George and his family are going on vacation to the most exclusive resort in the west—Moonlight Cove Resort in Wild River, Wyoming. The first morning there, George and his daughter, Karen, go for a run. Near the end of the trail, Karen hears music. When she follows the sound, she discovers two young people tied to pine trees, with arrows in their stomachs. One victim was the son of the Lakota County sheriff and the other was the daughter of the executive director of Moonlight Cove.

In one of the first crime novels ever set behind the scenes of big-time television, Clarence Budington Kelland has plotted a thrilling adventure of danger and death which climaxes in a series of fast-moving surprises. Peter Mortain, one of the youngest directors in this very young medium, was beleaguered enough, directing the first episode of the most expensive variety show ever produced. He had a cast whose first appearance on television made them skittish, a thousand technical details to handle, and a star…who was also his boss!

Gloria Morris is a respected private detective with an explosive sense of honor who cherishes frisky ladies, reads Poe and Twain, believes in justice, and kicks a lot of ass. Her investigation into the disappearance of a popular and notorious seductress, whose pervasive presence affects the lives of two compelling women, takes her to San Francisco’s sexual underground and the discovery of treasonous political intrigue.

In this dual series mystery, Lanie Anders and Cosmo Hill (Piney Falls Mysteries) are excited to share a Christmas celebration with Lanie's newly identified cousin, only to discover he's changed his plans at the last minute. Feather Jones (Charming Mysteries) and her boyfriend, Tug, are in Piney Falls, Oregon to celebrate the holiday, their first away from Charming as a couple. Upon arrival, they are shocked to learn that their hotel room is no longer available because a murder occurred there earlier in the day.

Even as a child, Katlyn Lundquist was drop-dead gorgeous. She also was willful. In her teens, perhaps out of spite, she created her own name and persona. As she grew up, she readily accepted money and gifts from her parents but thumbed her nose at society and her parent's way of life. A seeming infatuation with Tommie Lupinacci, head of a major crime-infested cartage association based in Brooklyn, led her to move east with the mobster. But when she showed up dead with a bullet in the back of her head, NYPD Detectives Louis Martelli and Sean O'Keeffe were stumped.

Barker, the mysterious homeless detective with no memory of his past, returns in the wild, third installment of the Barker Mysteries. Sequestered in a thrown-together shack beneath the soggy planks of California’s Old Fisherman’s Wharf, Barker and his gaggle of street dogs have kept largely to themselves since the events of Monterey Pulp.

Joel Marcus, a young, successful Manhattan DA, stuck in a loveless marriage, is with his beautiful DA girlfriend when he rescues an elderly Haitian woman from muggers. She rewards him with a voodoo ceremony. Now when he dies, his spirit will survive and pass into the one nearest him. When he is, in fact, soon murdered, his spirit does pass into the one nearest him: the Black hitman who murdered him. While trying to convince loved ones he's still alive, he's being sought by the police as the prime suspect in his own murder.

Blood ties. The family we’ve been given, the friends we make, the loves we keep, and those we lost. The 26 stories in Family and Other Ailments teeter on the brink, hover at the periphery, or even the possibility, of crime. Under a soft light and at an angle, they're all love stories. The collection opens with “Spy Head”, a tale of friendship after a crushing trauma. In “Texas Two-Step”, brotherhood leads to a wicked double-cross. “Razorbills” shows a young woman seeking freedom from the prison-like caring of her sibling.

It’s 1993—a year of optimism, change, and killer music—when Kees VanSpyker, a penniless Gulf War veteran and would-be guitar hero, takes a job with the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) to infiltrate a Wisconsin mink ranch and find out what happened to the last guy they sent there who subsequently vanished. Kees just wants to earn enough cash to take his guitar and follow the stampede to Seattle, but finding out what happened proves hairier than he bargained for. Sinister doings and suspects abound on the ranch, in Madison, and among the ALF members themselves.

One frightened blonde, eight chorus girls, a singer and three strippers... Hundreds of rancorous Reenactors itching to fight the Civil War all over again... Harry Horne hot on the trail of a stolen million somewhere on the battlefield.... A dozen big-city mobsters with .45s in Civil War regalia hot on Harry’s trail... It’s a recipe for excitement, sex, and lots of action.

Rita Collins, a reporter and writer for a local Washington DC television station, faces apparently unexplained rejection by her husband, who has suffered amputation of both legs during the Iraq War. He refuses both her affection and any attempts at rehabilitation.

In the fourth book of the Piney Falls Mysteries Series, the wedding event of the decade is about to take place in Piney Falls. From the decorations to the cake and music, every single citizen has contributed in some way to make this day perfect. Until Cosmo and Lanie begin their lives together, everyone is on their best behavior, trying to assure no mystery disrupts the one thing they’ve all worked in unison to achieve.

The wheels on the Syndicate's deadliest racket–taking over unions to leverage the old protection racket on whole industries–have begun to steam-roll over the shipping business in the quiet California town of Pacific Port. They send an S.O.S. for the one-man army–P.I. and ex-spy Morocco Jones.

Archibald Cloyd was an ubergeek and as pedantic as it is possible to be. Hollywood hired him at thousands of dollars a week as the technical director on a movie about Napoleon. Wilson Page, Archibald's secretary, figured he didn't deserve anything better than being nursemaid to a strutting egomaniac.

Morocco Jones figured this assignment would be a breeze. After all, sending a guy who specialized in busting up crime syndicates and international spy rings to Los Angeles to track down some two-bit blackmailer seemed like using a cannon to kill a mosquito. To Morocco, it seemed like a good excuse for a nice little Hollywood vacation—catch a bit of sun, bed a few starlets, and relax poolside with a large snifter of brandy.