Showing results by author "Blake Banner" in All Categories

October, 2010, Sally Jones had been stabbed in the heart in her apartment on Commonwealth Avenue, in the Bronx. Her coat was on the back of her chair. Her shoes were beside her bed, her clothes were neatly folded, and she was dead under the sheets.

When Karl and Christen Redfern were brutally murdered in their apartment in the Bronx, a lot of things were never explained, like why he was stabbed only twice, with clinical precision, but she was stabbed 20 times in the heart, in a crazed frenzy; like what happened to their Chevy Impala, and why Christen’s sister, Ingrid, had never reported it missing. But the biggest mystery of all was perhaps where Karl and Christen’s daughter Amy had disappeared to, along with her boyfriend, Charlie, on the very night of her parents’ murder.

There is a time bomb ticking down toward a global extinction event. The bomb has a name, and everybody knows where it is. In fact, people pay to go and see it, and have picnics around it. It’s called the Yellowstone Caldera, and when it next blows it will probably take out mankind.

It was the first time John Stone had been back to London for 15 years. Last time had been on an exchange program between the NYPD and Scotland Yard: an exchange of skills and experience that was supposed to last six months, but went one for a year and a half.

SAS veteran Lacklan Walker has been searching for Marni. She murdered his father, but his father’s dying wish was that Lacklan should keep her safe; safe from Omega, the government-within-the government, whose plans for humanity Marni has sworn to expose. And that is anything but safe.

Detective John Stone is taking early retirement. He has informed the chief, Inspector John Newman; and his partner and wife, Carmen Dehan, is retiring with him. She is pregnant and both Stone and Dehan want a safe, secure environment for their future child. Their sights are set on New England, where Stone will write his memoirs. So the last thing either of them expects is a curtain call from one of Stone’s old flames. Yet that is exactly what happens when actress Jane Morley shows up and asks Stone to investigate a very particular cold case.

Hurricane Sarah, the largest in recorded history, is howling in off the Atlantic, straight toward New Orleans—and Lacklan Walker is headed for the eye of the storm. His father’s dying wish was that he keep Marni safe, but Marni has sworn to bring down Omega, the government-within-the government, and that is anything but safe.

In the wake of the Vietnam debacle, when the mighty USA was humiliated by Soviet-backed Vietcong, the CIA plotted to drag the USSR into a "Russian Vietnam" in Afghanistan. The plan was such a success it led ultimately to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Now, 40 years on, as Russia limps, scarred and crippled, from the battlefields of Kherson, Donetsk, and Kharkiv, Colonel Alexandrina Vitsin swears to drag the USA into an American Ukraine.

Sebastian Acosta has been gunned down at three a.m. on a Saturday morning, sitting behind the wheel of a beaten-up Toyota. The passenger door is open, and a few paces away, his pal Luis Irizarry lies with his life ebbing away through two gunshot wounds in his chest. It should be a red-hot case, except that 15 years earlier, Rosario Rojas was raped and strangled in that same house, the house Luis was crawling toward, the house that belonged to Angela Rojas, Rosario’s daughter. Rosario, who was like a sister to Marta Flores, Detective Dehan’s mother.

USA Today and Amazon two million copy best-selling author Blake Banner is at his best in this mystifying crime series! And so is the Castle Hill Ripper. His MO hasn’t changed. He still stalks pregnant women like a hunter.

When the body of a tramp was found in a dumpster on Lafayette and Bryant in the Bronx, with no papers and no ID, the case was filed as unsolved–another victim nobody cared about, shot by some punk nobody cared about. That was 12 years ago. Then Detective Stone notices that the "tramp" had a $100 haircut and manicured nails. That makes him curious. He wants to know, who dresses a murder victim up as a tramp, then leaves them in full view in a dumpster? But the answers he gets are not the ones he expects.

It seemed to be a cold case like any other. So much so that Stone and Dehan hadn’t even considered reviewing it—until private investigator Karl Baxter requested a copy of the police file. Then Stone got curious. Why did a second-rate PI in the Bronx want to look into the case of a low-life petty criminal found tied to a chair in his apartment, beaten and shot through the heart? And that question led to other questions, like, whose was second pool of blood on the floor? If there was a second victim, where was the body?

When a leading international financier is murdered in his Beverly Hills mansion, at first it looks like just another daemon at work in the City of Angels. But when the ritual nature of the killing emerges, the FBI takes an interest. And then the international connections start to emerge: the European Commission, high-ranking officials in Hong Kong...and Iran. That’s when the file gets passed to ODIN and Alex Mason.

It seems to be a kiss and tell season thanks to black ops whistleblowers and journalists willing to come out and tell their stories, lured by the promise of fortunes to be made from book sales and media celebrity. But this time, it’s a little different.

Helen Troy is in the race to become the first Female President of the United States. She is pretty, feminine, assertive and a guy’s guy kind of girl, who smokes cigars and drinks whisky with the best of’em. Everybody loves her; but nobody has heard of her till now and she has an uphill fight against some experienced heavy hitters. But that’s not her biggest problem.

Dave Thorndike, an investigative reporter on the New York Telegraph, is in the habit of disappearing for weeks at a time. So when he vanishes in the winter of 2008, investigating the story of his life, nobody worries—until he shows up shot in the head with his own 9mm—no laptop and no story. It wasn’t much to go on in 2008, but when Stone and Dehan pick it up 10 years later, the case is as cold as the icy winds blowing off the East River. Both his wife and his mistress had motive, but the killing has all the hallmarks of an execution.

There is nothing unusual about a young Catholic girl from the Bronx winding up raped, beaten, strangled, and decapitated—unless she winds up that way in Lefthand Canyon, in the Colorado Rockies, where there hasn’t been a murder since 1922. Then it’s unusual enough to become a problem for the sheriff of Lee County. And when he finds no blood at the scene and no physical evidence, it becomes more than a problem. It becomes a headache—for five long years. That’s when he bats it back to the Bronx, to the 43rd precinct, and right onto Detectives Stone and Dehan’s desk.

When Silvie Martin moves to New York from Texas with her husband, Simon, and their one year-old daughter, Mary, she is filled with the joy and hope she derives from their shared faith. But no sooner have they moved into their new home, which backs on to their church, than her husband is brutally murdered before her very eyes. The only trouble is, the shock has completely erased her memory. Now, 18 years later, Detectives Stone and Dehan have to piece together a crime where their prime witness remembers nothing, and the suspects are as bizarre as they are unlikely

The neighbor called it in because the house next door, normally empty and silent, at two AM was a blaze of light, with people shouting and car doors slamming, like gunshots in the night. Until he heard two reports that echoed down the dark, silent street and spoke of death, two reports that were not slamming doors, but gunshots.

When SAS vet. Lacklan Walker buries his father at the family graveyard in New England, the last person he expects to see at the funeral is his childhood friend and sweetheart, Marni — the woman who’d killed his father. To make things more complicated, his father’s dying wish was that Lacklan should look after her and protect her. Because Marni is on a mission, a mission to bring down the shadowy organization called Omega, the government within a government, a mission that might just save Mankind.