Showing results by publisher "Blackstone Audio, Inc." in Police Procedurals

It's 1978 in "America’s Finest City" - San Diego, California - and one rookie cop is learning the hardest lessons the streets have to teach. Luke Jones - a recently graduated, Shakespeare-quoting literature major - is about to discover that dealing with crooks is the easiest part of his new job. For here, in a world populated by people ruled by their obsessions, Luke’s strong will and quick tongue alienate many of his senior officers, and he must fight for acceptance.

Ike Schwartz, former spook and erstwhile sheriff of Picketsville, has his vacation interrupted when an old CIA buddy asks him to look into a pilot's disappearance. What looks like a simple missing person's case soon catapults Ike into an international thriller with intimations of terrorism that might threaten the nation and its leaders.

In the bucolic mountain town of Trafalgar, British Columbia, a young woman is found dead of a heroin overdose, her baby lying at her side. While this should be an open-and-shut drug case, restraint marks on the victim suggest that the death might not have been completely accidental.

The sun-drenched Caribbean island of Guadeloupe is technically part of France, subject to French law, and loyal to the French Republic. But in 1980, the scars of colonialism are still fresh, and ethnic tensions and political unrest seethe just below the surface of everyday life. French-Algerian judge Anne Marie Laveaud relocated to this beautiful Caribbean island confident that she could make it her new home. But her day-to-day life is rife with frustration. Now she is assigned a murder case in which she is sure the chief suspect, an elderly ex-con named Hégésippe Bray, is a political scapegoat.

The past has always felt near in the historic house of Jonathon Lydell III, who proudly advertises his family connection to the Virginia Lees. But now, history is repeating itself in a truly bizarre and spooky way. Sheriff Ike Schwartz and FBI agent Karl Hedrick are dispatched to resolve the mystery of the strangely identical murders 150 years apart.

It has been nearly a year since psychologist Daniel Rinaldi, a trauma expert who consults with the Pittsburgh Police, helped unravel a baffling murder, and now he finds himself drawn into another case. In the midst of a blistering summer heat wave, a daring bank robbery has gone horribly wrong, resulting in the deaths of all the hostages except one, Treva Williams, and Rinaldi is called in to treat the young woman.

Former chief warrant officer and amputee Sam Blackman and his partner, Nakayla Robertson, are opening a detective agency. They have high hopes that the thriving Mountain Region will provide a steady stream of cases. Their first client, a quirky elderly woman in a retirement community, makes a strange request: she wants Sam to right a wrong she committed over 70 years ago. Her victim? F. Scott Fitzgerald. Her crime? Stealing a manuscript when Fitzgerald resided in the stately Grove Park Inn.

Rolly and Abigail Rogers, residents of Kanab, Utah, come from a long line of dedicated pot hunters who scour the desert southwest in search of valuable antiquities. When the couple fails to return from a weekend “skeleton picnic,” a pot-hunting trip, along the desolate Arizona Strip, local Sheriff Charley Sutter enlists the help of J. D. Books, law-enforcement ranger with the Bureau of Land Management.

The New York Times best-selling author of Ordinary People crafts a gripping, character-driven novel of suspense that explores the fragile dynamics of family in the aftermath of tragedy.

In the midst of a brutally cold winter in Pittsburgh, Daniel Rinaldi is asked to treat Lyle Barnes, a retired FBI profiler whose terrifying nocturnal visions cause him to wake up screaming. Barnes, after 20 years spent inside the minds of the nation’s worst serial killers, is not only falling apart psychologically but also finds himself the target of an unknown assassin, whose mounting list of victims is paralyzing the city. Hidden for his own protection by his former bureau colleagues, Barnes secretly escapes, drawing Daniel and a joint task force of the FBI and the Pittsburgh Police Department into a desperate manhunt. They must try to find the missing agent before the killer does.

After an absence of a year, Catherine LeVendeur and her husband Edgar are glad to return to Paris. When they enter the house, however, they are shocked by the discovery of the dead body of a Knight Templar. Although innocent, Catherine fears that she or her family will be incriminated. Her father Hubert has recently announced his Jewish roots, and twelfth-century Europe is not a safe place for Jews.

The private detective business starts out badly for former Phoenix deputy David Mapstone, who has teamed up with his old friend and boss, Sheriff Mike Peralta. Their first client is gunned down just after hiring them. The case involved the suspicious death of a young Arizona woman who fell from a condo tower in San Diego. The police call Grace Hunter’s death a suicide, but the client doesn’t buy it. He’s her brother - or is he? After his murder, police find multiple driver’s licenses, and his real identity is a mystery.

The armored-car robbery went awry, leaving two people dead, one a member of the gang believed responsible for the crime. Walter Bradshaw, 45, who leads an archconservative, antigovernment group of Mormon polygamists, is captured and charged with capital murder and aggravated robbery.

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.

The World Cup, which arrives in June, has ripple effects on all of South Africa’s neighbors. The arrival of soccer fans, team owners, sponsors, and world dignitaries makes southern Africa, particularly Botswana, ripe for all sorts of intrigue and illicit activities. The American Secretary of State will visit the Chobe; the North Koreans, the Okavango; Arabs, French, Chinese, and Russians are scattered among the various lodges and hotels in the country before, during, and after the games.

In A Corpse in the Koryo, James Church introduced readers to one of the most unique detectives to appear in print in years—the elusive Inspector O. The stunning mystery was named one of the best mystery/thrillers of 2006 by the Chicago Tribune for its beautifully spare prose and layered descriptions of a terrain Church knows by heart.

And now the inspector is back.

Detective First Grade Brian McKenna and his partner Cisco Sanchez are chasing a killer that all of New York City is rooting for, a vigilante of supreme technical skill, physical power, and intelligence who signs himself "Justice". Justice is executing drug dealers, helping the police close unsolved cases, and providing those in need with stolen drug money - creating a nightmare for the police commissioner, the mayor, and the two detectives

In December 1941, America is reeling from the brutal attack on Pearl Harbor. Both patriotism and paranoia grip New York as the city frantically mobilizes for war. Nurse Louise Hunter is outraged when the FBI, in a midnight sweep of prominent Japanese residents, storms in to arrest her patient’s wife. The desperately ill Professor Oakley is married to artist Masako Fumi. The nurse vows to help the professor free Masako. But when the murdered body of Masako’s art dealer is discovered in the gallery where he’d been closing down her controversial show, Masako’s troubles multiply.

Nashville private investigator Jared McKean has a son with Down syndrome, a best friend with AIDS, an ex-wife he can’t seem to fall out of love with, and a weakness for women in jeopardy - until one frames him for murder. His DNA and fingerprints are found at the murder scene, his voice is on the victim’s answering machine, and the victim was killed with a bullet from his gun.

In historian Lottie Albright’s western Kansas community, false accusations threaten senatorial candidate Brian Hadley’s political career. Secrets whispered to Lottie as editor of the county history books spur her into a personal search for his aunt’s murderer.