Showing results by publisher "Blackstone Audio, Inc." in Amateur Sleuths

As Lord Chamberlain, John spent his days counseling Emperor Justinian while passing the small hours of night in conversation with the solemn-eyed little girl depicted in a mosaic on his study wall. He never expected to meet her in a public square - or afterwards, to find her red-dyed corpse in a subterranean cistern.

Something terrifying is happening to the dogs in the mountain community of Mason County, Virginia. Pets are vanishing mysteriously and “missing dog” posters cover the waiting room walls at Dr. Rachel Goddard’s veterinary clinic. A pack of feral canines roams at night, attacking livestock in a desperate search for food. Now a prominent physician, Gordon Hall, has been found dead in his yard, his throat torn open. Sheriff’s Department investigator Tom Bridger believes the killing was premeditated murder, with a trained attack dog as the weapon.

San Francisco pastry chef Mary Ryan is back teaching at her old alma mater, trying to straddle the worlds of both her original mentors and her contemporaries. To make matters worse, Homicide Detective O'Connor has enrolled as a student, claiming to be on disability from the San Francisco Police Department.

Professor Karen Pelletier is about to realize her dream. After six years in the English department at New England's exclusive Enfield College, she is up for tenure. Then Professor Joseph Lone Wolf, her rival for the one tenured spot in the department, whose ethnicity gives him minority-preference status, is found dead from an overdose of Peyote buttons.

The dog days of summer have arrived, and Tai Randolph is feeling the heat. Running her uncle’s gun shop is more demanding than she had ever imagined. Her best friend, Rico, is competing for a national slam poetry title, and Atlanta is overrun with hundreds of fame-hungry performance poets clogging all the good bars.

Cal Claxton is determined to reinvent himself as a small-town lawyer in the aftermath of his wife's suicide. Once a hard-charging Los Angeles prosecutor, he nowlives in solitude in an old farmhouse overlooking Oregon's wine country. When a scruffy, tattooed kid shows up asking for help in solving a cold case - that of his mother's murder - Cal wants to say no. Times are tough, and he's no private eye, anyway. But the kid, who calls himself Picasso, has ridden a bicycle in the rain all the way from Portland, and something about his determination touches Cal.

The grouchiest chef in the world of haute cuisine, Bernard LeVasque, has opened a multimillion-dollar cooking school and made quite a splash in the quiet village of Hemlock Falls - even stealing customers from the Inn. Sisters Quill and Meg wished he would leave, but they never wished him dead - which is exactly what has happened, thanks to the knife in his neck. A mysterious scrap of a long-lost recipe found in his hands may hold clues to his killer, or maybe not....

On a sultry night in June 1897, Pyotr Ivanovich Balenov, a young Russian, and two young women transport a dead man through the narrow streets of a working-class neighborhood in northeastern Paris. They throw the body into the canal and the girls flee to the Latin Quarter to hide with one of the Russian's anarchist "comrades".

Russell Mullins has left intelligence work. When his wife died of cancer, Rusty quit the Secret Service to repurpose his life. He joins a private protection company in Washington, DC, and is assigned to guard Paul Luguire, a Federal Reserve executive and chief liaison with the US Treasury. Mullins and Luguire form a strong friendship. So when a police detective calls in the middle of the night with word of Luguire’s suicide, Mullins doesn’t buy it.

His doubts are reinforced by Amanda Church, a former Secret Service colleague now in the Federal Reserve’s cybersecurity unit. She uncovered a suspicious financial transaction initiated by Luguire only days before his death.

Junior Bender is back to untangle one of the weirdest mysteries in Tinseltown. LA burglar Junior Bender has, unfortunately, developed a reputation as a competent private investigator for crooks. The unfortunate part about this is that, regardless of whether he solves the crime or not, someone dangerous is going to be unhappy with him - either his suspect or his employer. Now Junior is being bullied into proving aging music-industry mogul Vinnie DiGaudio is innocent of the murder of a nasty tabloid journalist he'd threatened to kill a couple times.

When a hunted military whistleblower and his family need someplace to hide and someone to trust, Toussaint, Montana, is the place, and Gabriel Du Pre the man. The Metis Indian former cattle inspector and sometimes deputy is happy to offer protection, even though he's got his hands full with an ailing granddaughter, a meddling medicine man, and a Kazakh eagle hunter prowling the hills above town. As a guard at a Kabul prison, Hoyt Poe witnessed his fellow soldiers abusing the Afghan inmates. Poe's testimony threatens to expose the military contractor that led the interrogation program.

In the winter of 1839, a sensational disappearance rocks Springfield, Illinois, as headlines announce a local man has accused his two brothers of murder. Not one to pass up an opportunity, Abraham Lincoln takes up the case of the accused with the assistance of his best friend, Joshua Speed, to search for evidence of innocence.But just as soon as they begin, Lincoln and Speed find their friendship at grave risk of rupture as they vie for the hand a beautiful new arrival in town: an ambitious, outspoken young woman named Mary Todd. Can Lincoln and Speed put aside their differences?

Organizational psychologist Dr. Waters is a happily solitary guy with a few deep attachments, including to his boss Paresh Rajput, the owner of a thriving hi-tech aerospace company. Until something really bad happens to CEO Rajput, which throws Waters into a lunatic swirl of murderous stalkers, corporate intrigue, amorous female executives, and crafty cops who see the inscrutable psychologist as murder suspect number one.