Showing results by publisher "Blackstone Audio, Inc." in Modern Detectives

Aimée Leduc is happy her long-time business partner René has found a girlfriend. Really, she is. It’s not her fault if she can’t suppress her doubts about the relationship; René is moving way too fast, and Aimée’s instincts tell her Meizi, this supposed love of René’s life, isn’t trustworthy. And her misgivings may not be far off the mark: Meizi disappears during a Chinatown dinner to take a phone call and never comes back to the restaurant. Minutes later, the body of a young man, a science prodigy and volunteer at the nearby Musée, is found shrink-wrapped in an alleyway....

One of hundreds of simple homicides each year, indistinguishable from any other in 1938, was the death of a spinster nurse killed in her apartment. A suspect is caught and convicted. Private Investigator Fintan Dunne is lured into the case and coerced by conscience into unraveling the setup that has put an innocent man on death row. Following the trail leads him into a murder conspiracy of a scope that defies imagination.

Rome. Holy Thursday. A limousine carrying two pilgrims speeds toward the city. Rail, an American publisher, an obese voluptuary, perspires in the heat and shivers with the icy premonition of death. His companion, Harwell, is running a cold fever of bigotry and violence, self-indulgence, and sadism: He is an American Nazi. The two must separate soon, must not be seen together, for they are to be the instruments of a public murder.

Under the guise of machinery for making dumplings, a Spanish factory near Barcelona is secretly producing a key component in the production of nuclear weapons. When information finds its way to the inboxes of Western intelligence agencies that this "dumpling maker" is meant for North Korea, orders go out that the shipment must be stopped. Either the machine must be disabled while still in the factory, or the transportation route must be discovered so the equipment can be intercepted before it reaches its destination.

Coleridge Taylor is searching for his next scoop on the police beat. A source sends Taylor down to Alphabet City, where he finds two dead bodies: a punk named Johnny Mort and a cop named Robert Dodd. Each looks too messed up to have killed the other, so Taylor starts asking around. The punk was a good kid, the peace-loving guardian angel of the neighborhood's stray dogs. What led him to mug a woman at gunpoint? And why is officer Samantha Callahan being accused of leaving her partner to die?

In March of 1975, as New York City hurtles toward bankruptcy and the Bronx burns, newsman Coleridge Taylor roams police precincts and ERs. He is looking for the story that will deliver him from obits. A break comes at Bellevue, where Taylor views the body of a homeless teen picked up in the Meatpacking District. Taylor smells a rat: The dead boy looks too clean, and he's wearing a distinctive army field jacket.

On the eve of the US Bicentennial, newsman Coleridge Taylor is covering Operation Sail. New York Harbor is teeming with tall ships from all over the world. While enjoying the spectacle, Taylor is still a police reporter. He wants to cover real stories, and gritty New York City still has plenty of those in July of 1976. One surfaces right in front of him when a housewife is fished out of the harbor wearing bricks of heroin, inferior stuff users have been rejecting for China White.

Los Angeles burglar Junior Bender is in the middle of burgling a house and has just gotten his hands on one of the world's rarest stamps when the job goes terrifically wrong. After barely escaping, Junior realizes the danger is far from over. He's gotten himself on the wrong side of a man whose name is synonymous with violence, and to save his own skin he's set off a chain reaction of blackmail, strong-arming, and escalating crime.

Orchard Grove is a town like any other, with quiet neighborhoods and apple groves...though Ethan, the depressed screenplay writer, and his secretive wife, Susan, would tell you differently. So would the seductive serial killer living next door. The apple trees are fertilized with evil, and the backyard fences aren't enough to stop the manipulative mind games and dangerous lies. The lines between good and evil are blurred and then erased as Ethan does what it takes to survive.

Max Fisher used to run a computer company; Angela Petrakos was his assistant and mistress. But that was last year. Now Max is reinventing himself as a hip-hop crack dealer, and Angela is back in Ireland hooking up with a would-be record setter - in the field of serial killing. Will their paths cross again?

Edgar and Macavity Award nominee Timothy Hallinan's Simeon Grist private-eye novels have become cult favorites. This sixth series installment takes place in the West Hollywood of 1995, where the community is shaken by the brutal killing of an older man who was widely loved for his generosity and kindness. In a time when the police were largely indifferent to crimes against gay people, Simeon is hired to catch the murderer - and finds himself up against the most dangerous adversary of his career.

Simeon Grist is about to face off against his mostterrifying adversary - a madman who's setting fire to the homeless. As Simeon isdrawn into the case, very much against his will, he realizes that the "Incinerator" has a huge advantage. Somewhere, years ago, the two of them met,and the Incinerator has been nursing hatred and resentment for years. Now, ashelpless people burst into flame on Skid Row, Simeon has to scour thewastelands of Los Angeles, and his own past, looking for the face of a killer.

Simeon Grist takes a case that leads him to the phantom neighborhoods of Los Angeles' lost children. Missing 13-year-old Aimee Sorrell ran all the way from Kansas to be a star. But Aimee's trail soon leads Simeon to the city morgue, the first stop on a perilous journey to find out what happens to America's lost children when they go looking for love in all the wrong places.

For a fee so big he can't turn it down, Simeon Grist is hired to watchdog the kind of guy he'd usually prefer to throw through the nearest window. Toby Vane is the golden boy of prime-time television, whose gee-whiz smile and chiseled features mask a dark secret that would take the shine off for his millions of adoring female fans: every now and then he beats up a woman, and almost any woman will do.

When one of the beautiful Le sisters is killed, Hartford, Connecticut's small Vietnamese community is stunned. Mary Le Vu, wife of a poor grocery store owner, is gunned down in a drive-by shooting. Her twin sister insists that dutiful Mary wouldn't be caught dead in that drug-infested zone, but the police rule it an unlucky accident. Skeptics hire private eye Rick Van Lam to get to the truth.

Quarry is a pro in the murder business. When the mysterious man he works for becomes a target himself, Quarry is sent south to remove a traitor in the ranks. But in this wide-open city - with sin everywhere and betrayal around every corner - Quarry must make the most dangerous choice of his deadly career: who to kill?

In the first audiobook, The Gumshoe Diaries: Fortune Cookies Always Lie, he introduces us to Whitey Roode, a shaggy but likeable former LAPD gold shield who turned private investigator after (as he tells it) being invited to retire by the brass. Stanton then takes us on a wheels-within-wheels scavenger hunt for the killer - or killers - of pretty Mei Li Teng (a.k.a Sally November), the not-so-innocent niece of Whitey's close friends and occasionally accurate snitches, Jai Lai and Lu Rong.

The horrific slaughter of a prominent doctor, his wife, and their ten-year-old son inside their Scottsdale home brings US senatorial candidate Juliana Thorsson to private investigator Lena Jones. The slain family's 14-year-old, Alison, and her boyfriend, Kyle, have confessed to the murders. Thorsson wants to hire Lena to discover if Alison is telling the truth, but before accepting the job, Lena demands to know why a rising political star wants to involve herself with the fate of a girl she's never met.

Eddie Piron thinks that performing in jazz clubs in Nazi-occupied Paris is bad enough, but when the drummer in his band is found face down in the Seine and the police start asking questions, he realizes that his trouble is just beginning. Paris, 1941. American jazz musician Eddie Piron has lived in the City of Light since before the war began. But Paris under occupation is not what it once was, and things are looking a lot darker for a man like Eddie.

The crime: murder. The accused: a wealthy Texas congressman. The victim: a young intern with whom he was having an affair. Attorney Sharon Hays is reluctant to defend this charismatic politician - for highly personal reasons. Now she must either withdraw from the case, confessing to the secrets of her own past, or remain silent and defend a man she has every reason to hate.