Showing results by publisher "Audible Studios" in Modern Detectives

In the middle of the afternoon on a busy downtown Toronto street a man is shot in the head behind the wheel of his SUV. The killer drives away before the light changes. It could be road rage, or it could be a random act of violence. It could be, but it isn’t. What it is, is opportunity. For everyone involved.

The witness, Roxanne Keyes, a real estate agent trying desperately to lease out space in unwanted office space, recognizes the killer - a man who had once looked to rent with her.

Ater a tour in Vietnam and several years working the streets of Detroit as a private investigator, Amos Walker has seen a lot. But he’s never encountered anything quite like his newest assignment. Ann Maringer, an aging stripper hard at work at one of the city’s many low-grade joints, hires him to find a missing person: herself. She expects to disappear any day now, she says, and she wants to be found.

For small-town, Iowa lawyer, Sam McCain, the year 1965 is not a sweet one. His father is gravely ill. His elitist boss is just coming out of rehab. And, the brilliant lawyer he hoped to start a relationship with has gone back to her husband. Still, McCain tries to enjoy himself during the town's Labor Day weekend party, reuniting with several old friends - until two of them are murdered for what seems to be a motive buried in the past...

Jersey Leo is the quintessential outsider - an albino of mixed race. Known as "Snowball" on the street, he makes a living as the bartender at a mob-run speakeasy in Prohibition-era Hell's Kitchen. Being neither black nor white, he has no group to call his own. His own mother abandoned him as a baby. And his father - a former boxing champ with his own secrets - disapproves of Jersey's work at a dive owned by one of New York's most notorious gangsters. So when he inadvertently purchases counterfeit moonshine ("sugar pop moon") with his boss's money - a potentially fatal mistake - he must go undercover to track down the bootlegger who took him in.

In Berkeley, California, Telegraph Avenue is the headquarters for the city’s strangest inhabitants. Cultists, drug addicts, and hippie burnouts wander its streets, looking to raise their consciousness or, if that fails, to just get high. And Jill Smith walks with them, a beat cop with her finger on the pulse of one of the most unique neighborhoods in America. With time on her hands after her divorce, Jill lets a friend drag her to hear the district’s hot new guru, a Buddhist holy man from Bhutan.

The tabloids were full of it. Constance Thayer, after a night of clubbing, drinks, and drugs, had taken an automatic pistol from the collection of her industrialist husband Doyle Thayer Jr. and emptied it into his back, as he lay naked and unconscious in their Iroquois Heights home. The news of Constance Thayer's X-rated past breathed new life into the scandal for another month. Walker's job was to gather enough dirt on the late Mr. Thayer to make his widow look clean by comparison. What he found was a monstrous magnate, a dubious corpse, and a gang of country-style gunrunners.

Charlie Bradshaw is spending his 41st birthday in New York, trying to track down Sam, the son of his great high school love. Sam has gotten himself involved in a big-time drug deal, and everyone - from Sam to the New York cop on the case - wishes Charlie would go back to Saratoga to do his sleuthing. But a combination of stubbornness and savvy - to say nothing of Sam's enticing girlfriend - keeps the small-town cop deep in the Big City mystery.

Berkeley cop Jill Smith is back in another adventure that could only occur in this brazen, eccentric town. Gym owner and former Olympic diver Bryn Wiley is in a turf war with sixties radical Sam Johnson, who owns a competing gym. When Bryn is shot, Sam is a prime suspect. Throughout her investigation into the naked truth, Jill is sidetracked by a band of nude citizens protesting the citys new anti-nudity ordinance.

Savannah Reid may have a few extra curves on her full-figured body, but that hasn't stopped her from becoming one of California's most successful private investigators. Her latest case puts her hot on the trail of a shady weight loss therapist who's made a killing treating - and cheating - his overweight patients. The question is, did he kill his wife, too? Pound for pound, this is shaping up to be one of Savannah's toughest cases ever. But she'd better find the killer soon...or else the bodies will just keep piling up.

Laura and Sam are obsessed with film noir. In their sun-drenched apartment in Miami, they watch 1940's black and white movies, whose characters move in shadows and narrow slats of light. They're fascinated by a Hollywood genre without happy endings, where everyone is corrupt, where lovers betray one another, where the war might be over and the boys might be home, but where nothing is going back to the way it was.

Barry Stackpole was tough once. Amos Walker met him in a Cambodian shell crater when Walker was serving his country and Stackpole was on the payroll of the Detroit News, and they formed the kind of bond that war often creates. At war’s end, they returned to the Motor City, where Stackpole took to reporting crimes and Walker to solving them. A violent run-in with a big time mobster left Stackpole a leg and two fingers short, and he became an alcoholic. He has made several attempts to get his life straight since, but never quite managed.

Arthur Vance walks into P.I. Joe Scintilla's office and tells him an incredible story: his wife, Katharine, had commited suicide a year and a half before, and yet he is convinced that she is now passing under the name of Elena Cavalieri, having just been married to another man. Is Vance merely distraught over his wife's death, or is he correct in believing that "The Removal Company" - a shadowy organization that appears to help those who wish to slough off the burden of existence, and which assisted Katharine in her self-destruction-is something much more sinister than it appears?

Jay has never forgotten the photo once sent to him of his young fiancée - naked in the arms of another man. Now on his deathbed and convinced the photo was a fake, the hunt is on for a modern-day witchfinder. And Amos Walker is the man for the job.

Myron Foote is a private investigator who has seen better days...but he drank them away. Now he’s in a dumpy office working bottom-of-the-barrel divorce cases...until a gorgeous redhead named Cynthia Thacketer walks into his life and offers him $105,000 to pose as her uncle Percy. It sounds simple. Too simple. But Foote is a man in need.

Hiram Gottschalk, owner of the Palm Beach shop Parrots Unlimited, fears for his life. First, he finds a photo of himself and his deceased wife slashed to ribbons; then, a Mass card with his name on it is taped inside of his closet door; now, someone has wrung the neck of his beloved pet bird. In desperation, he turns to McNally & Son for a private investigation. McNally meets with Gottschalk, along with his client's cursing parrot.

In a city overwhelmed with murder and mayhem, the last homicide before a Category 5 hurricane wipes out New Orleans is quickly forgotten and remains unsolved. Until now.Calling to mind Chinatown’s Jake Gittes or Chandler’s Philip Marlowe comes a new kind of private detective - a mixed-martial arts coach and bare-knuckled former cop who investigates a curious missing persons/murder case.

Charming, wealthy Randle Kennedy has a secret: he's British Columbia’s most prolific producer of boutique marijuana. He’s developed strains of B.C. Bud to please the most sophisticated palates and produce any desired effect, from a light contemplative buzz to the most mind-warping stone. His medical varieties offer relief for conditions ranging from cancer to Alzheimer's disease. Come legalization, he'll be the first on the market with marijuana's answer to single-malt Scotch.

A call from an ex-husband is never welcome. For Berkeley cop Jill Smith it wins a Nobel Prize for chutzpah. Her ex wants a favor. His "friend" and co-worker, Anne Spaulding, is missing. Anne's ransacked apartment - complete with blood-sprayed walls - gives Jill the chilling feeling that her ex may be up to his arrogant neck in murder. Now Jill's out with the street people of Berkeley and the crazies of People's Park to uncover the fate of a welfare worker. But her best suspect is her ex: the former "significant other" who still pushes her buttons.

When a chorus girl is found dead on a Broadway stage dressed in the leading lady's costume, there are no signs of violence, no cuts, no bruises, no marks at all. If pressed, the coroner would call it a suicide, but then that would make her the second girl to turn up dead in such a manner in the last few weeks. And the news of a possible serial killer would be potentially disastrous to the burgeoning theater world, not to mention the citizens of New York.

A call from Stella’s little sister brings the news that Stella’s step-nephew, Chip, has been threatened with serious bodily harm if he doesn’t settle his unpaid gambling debts. Stella makes the drive to Chip’s home in Wisconsin, only to walk in on a wee-hours dismemberment.