Showing results by author "Blake Banner" in All Categories

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.

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?

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.

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.

There are a lot of things you really don’t want to find when you’re a homicide detective in the Bronx. High on the list is a new serial killer. Serial killers are real bad news because they kill without motive, so they are hard to trace and they can take years to catch. But even worse than a new serial killer, is a new kind of serial killer: one who murders with a motive, but a motive so unfathomable nobody can understand it; a motive that makes his choice of victims incomprehensible and unpredictable, a motive that leads to each victim being killed in a particularly cruel and unusual way.

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.

There are a lot of things you really don’t want to find when you’re a homicide detective in the Bronx. High on the list is a new serial killer. Serial killers are real bad news because they kill without motive, so they are hard to trace and they can take years to catch. But even worse than a new serial killer, is a new kind of serial killer: one who murders with a motive, but a motive so unfathomable nobody can understand it; a motive that makes his choice of victims incomprehensible and unpredictable, a motive that leads to each victim being killed in a particularly cruel and unusual way.

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.

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.

It wasn’t just the 20 years since Danny Brown’s death that made it the hardest case of their careers: it was that the manner of his death was, quite simply, impossible. His body was reduced to ash from his neck to his ankles, in the middle of Soundview Park. Detective Stone keeps an open mind, but his partner, Detective Dehan, is convinced there is a logical terrestrial explanation for the gruesome murder. The X-Files, after all, exist only in fiction, don’t they?

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.

Ten years in the British SAS have turned Lacklan Walker into a supreme killing machine. That, and his twisted, dysfunctional family. His father, a Boston Brahmin Billionaire, taught him how to hate. His English Aristocrat mother taught him he didn’t belong. And when his only friend and childhood sweetheart, Marni, wanted to teach him how to love, he walked away from her, knowing all he would ever be good at was killing, and war.

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

Detective John Stone of the NYPD heads up the 43rd’s cold case unit, in the Bronx. In a place like the Bronx you get a lot of cold cases. So Stone has one golden rule for investigating a case: It must have some remote chance of being solved. So what made him choose the Al Chester case, the 60-year-old schizophrenic murdered on his birthday, 12 years earlier, alone in his apartment—a case where there was zero forensic evidence?

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.

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.

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 Wayne Harris contacts Detectives Stone and Dehan, of the 43rd Precinct’s cold case unit, and tells them he has information relating to the Westchester Angel murder two years earlier, they agree to go and see him–at Rikers Island.

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.

An 18-year-old girl sets out one November night to walk five blocks down Gleason Avenue to her boyfriend’s house. He calls her and she tells him she’s on her way. It’s a walk that should take ten minutes, but she never arrives. When she does turn up, it’s five days later, washed up on the banks of the River Bronx, in Soundview Park, strangled to death.