Showing results by publisher "Blackstone Publishing" in Modern Detectives

A plague has brought death to the city. Two feuding crime families with blood on their hands need our hard-boiled hero, The Redeemer, to broker peace. Both his instincts and the vacant streets warn him to stay indoors, but The Redeemer ventures out into the city’s underbelly to arrange for the exchange of the bodies they hold hostage.

Haunted by the disappearance of his mother when he was eight years old, detective Hud Matthews begins his own investigation to find out what really happened so many years before. When a rare murder occurs in the lakeside community, Hud’s veteran skills are called upon to capture the killer. Pulled deep into the threads of the community with ties to the past, Hud quickly becomes a target, not only of the killer, but of those who wish the past to be left alone.

Once a police detective in St. Paul, Minnesota, Rushmore McKenzie became an unlikely millionaire and an occasional unlicensed private investigator, doing favors for friends. But this time, he finds himself in dire need of working on his own behalf. His dear friend and first love Shelby Dunston attends a public reading by a psychic medium with the hope of connecting with her grandfather one final time. Instead, she hears McKenzie’s name spoken by the psychic in connection with a huge sum of stolen - and missing - money.

Louise Wykoff is arguably the most recognizable woman living in Minnesota, known for her presence in over 100 paintings by the late and brilliant Randolph McInnis. Louise, known better as “That Wykoff Woman”, was just a young apprentice when her intimate representation and the fact of the McInnis’ marriage caused rumors to fly - and Louise to hide away for decades. All of McInnis’ paintings are in museums or known private collections, until Louise confesses to having three more that no one has ever heard of - and now they’ve been stolen.

Once a police detective in St. Paul, Minnesota, Rushmore McKenzie has become not only an unlikely millionaire, but an occasional unlicensed private investigator, doing favors for friends and people in need. When his stepdaughter Erica asks him for just such a favor, McKenzie doesn’t have it in him to refuse. Even though it sounds like a very bad idea right from the start. The father of Malcolm Harris, a college friend of Erica’s, was found murdered a year ago in a park in New Brighton, a town just outside the Twin Cities.

Since becoming an unlikely millionaire and quitting the St. Paul Police Department, Rushmore McKenzie has been working as an unlicensed private investigator. But even for him, this latest job is unusual. He’s been asked to find a stolen Stradivarius, known as the Countess Borromeo, that only the violinist seems to want him to find. It was stolen from a locked room in a B&B in the violinist’s former hometown of Bayfield, Wisconsin. For McKenzie, helping means going against the local police, the insurance company, the FBI’s Art Crime division, and his own lawyer’s advice.

During one of the first heavy snows of the winter, on the interstate outside the Twin Cities, Rushmore McKenzie is behind a truck behaving erratically when the man in the truck bed dumps a body out onto the road, right in front of McKenzie’s car. McKenzie avoids hitting the body, a bound woman who is just barely alive, but his stopped car in the middle of the road starts a chain of accidents, resulting in a 37-car pile-up. By the time the police arrive, and the EMTs and ambulances have taken care of the immediate injuries, the truck is long gone.

Riley Brodin is the granddaughter of Walter Muehlenhaus - a man as rich, powerful, and connected as anyone since the days of J. P. Morgan. Despite her family’s connections, it’s McKenzie she reaches out to when her relatively new boyfriend goes missing. Despite his reservations about getting involved with the Muehlenhaus family - again - Mac McKenzie agrees to look for one Juan Carlos Navarre. What he finds, though, is a man who appears to be a ghost.

Several years ago, Rushmore McKenzie became an unexpected millionaire and set about doing not much of anything. Now, showing up at his doorstep is the insurance company that paid the settlement that made him rich - and they want a favor. Someone has stolen a very expensive gem from a local art museum and is willing to ransom it back. The only condition is that McKenzie has to be the go between. And this is no ordinary gem - it is a jade sculpture with a history going back to the Qing Dynasty and a reputed curse that stories claim has ruined or killed everyone who has ever owned it.

Rushmore McKenzie is a former cop, current millionaire, and an occasional unlicensed PI who does favors for friends. Yet he has reservations when his girlfriend’s daughter asks him to help her father, a man in serious trouble. En route from St. Paul to a Canadian blues festival on Highway 61, he met a girl, blacked out, and awoke hours later in a strange motel, with the girl’s murdered body on the floor. Slipping away unnoticed and heading home, he thought he’d got away - until he started getting texts with photos of the body and demands for blackmail payments he couldn’t pay.

Rushmore McKenzie is a retired cop, an unexpected millionaire, and an occasional unlicensed private investigator. So it isn't the biggest surprise in the world when he's attacked and kidnapped from his home - McKenzie has more than a few enemies out there with a grudge against him. But it is a surprise when it turns out his kidnapping is a case of mistaken identity.

Right up until they put him in jail, McKenzie thought the cops were kidding. After all, he did them a favor by stopping a rookie cop from roughing up a distraught woman at a murder scene. But the next thing he knows, he’s in jail, missing an important date with his girlfriend and reliving nightmares he thought he had left far behind him - and vowing payback for all of it. If that means sticking his nose into an ongoing murder investigation, well, he’s done it before.

Rushmore “Mac” McKenzie has a lot of old girlfriends, but only one went on to marry the current governor of the state of Minnesota. And only one is calling him with a desperate request to meet in secret. First Lady Lindsay Barrett is carrying an anonymous e-mail that contains the makings of an ugly rumor about her husband, the man about to run for higher office - perhaps even the highest office. Someone says they have evidence that Jack Barrett killed his high school sweetheart. Lindsay says it’s an outright lie, but the truth lies buried decades in the past.

Mac McKenzie is rich. So rich that he’s left his job as a Twin Cities police officer and spends his time doing favors large and small for friends. So when an old Marine buddy of his father’s calls with a request, Mac takes the time to help him out. And it is one of the stranger favors he’s ever been asked: The elderly Mr. Mosley, a beekeeper, wants Mac to find out why his bees are suddenly dying in droves. Mac does some digging and before long turns up a hornet’s nest of trouble in the person of Frank Crosetti, a new neighbor on the property abutting Mosley’s bees.

Caught in the Net, the first volume of Gaboriau's Slaves of Paris, centers on two young, penniless men who become trapped in a net of corruption and deception. Andre, a painter, is in love with Sabine, but they must meet in secret for Sabine comes from a noble family and Andre most prove his worth in society before they are able to marry.

Where the cream of humanity has left for the outworlds, leaving the rest behind; where genetically redesigned T-rexes have supplanted pit bulls; population control measures have created an underclass of Urchins, unlicensed children who have no rights - not even the right to exist; where wireheads with chips in their brains live vicariously through the downloaded experiences of others; and where the UN has been turned into a brothel known as Dydeetown, peopled by clones of famous personalities from history and entertainment.

From the author of the John J. Malone Mysteries: An estranged relative becomes heir to a Chesapeake Bay fortune - and his family’s ghostly history. If it hadn’t been for his great-uncle Philip, David Telefair would’ve grown up unwanted, forlorn, and poverty stricken in a New England parsonage. But for 20 years, David’s generous benefactor paid for his education, yearly summer camps, living expenses as he grew older, and any amenities he ever needed.

Former con-artist photographers Bingo Riggs and Handsome Kusak are en route from the grit of New York City to the glitter of Sunset Boulevard when their dreams are waylaid in a tragic roadside accident with an errant turkey. But getting stuck in the off-the-map community of Thursday County, Iowa, has an upside: a blushing farmer’s daughter with a promising sob story. To help her ailing grandma, the Halvorsen family turkey farm is up for grabs. With Thanksgiving just around the corner, Bingo and Handsome plan to make a bundle off the gobbling herd.

Resourceful Bingo Riggs and his partner, Handsome Kusak, are in the sucker-bait business, snapping candid pics of tourists off Central Park. Their fly-by-night enterprise can be irresistible to souvenir lovers, but with one camera in a pawnshop and their developing room in the bathtub of a two-room dump near Hell’s Kitchen, their venture is wretchedly underexposed - until they stumble upon an insurance fraud scheme between the allegedly dead eccentric Mr. S. S. Pigeon and his business partner and beneficiary.

Defense attorney John J. Malone may be a habitué of Windy City dive bars, but he's never lost his balance - until now. Not only is he shaken by the contract killing of his latest client, but one of his best friends, socialite Helene Justus, is turning into a complete stranger.