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.

There hadn’t been a crime in Dexter, upstate New York, since 1865. It was a long time coming, but when it came, on September 21st, 2012, it was ugly. It was murder.

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?

The weather was freezing, but the case wasn’t cold, it was too hot. It looked open and shut: Dr Agnes Shine had shot Dr Jose Robles eight times with a Sig Sauer Tacops p226, while they were drinking Californian wine in her living room; then she’d disappeared. But Assistant DA Costas Varufakis didn’t like it and he was leaning on Deputy Inspector John Newman of the 43rd Precinct to have somebody look a bit deeper. That somebody was Detectives John Stone, and his partner Carmen Dehan.

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.

It was a real Jack in the box. Only this box was a UPS delivery to crime novelist Helena Magnusson, and the Jack was Jack Connors–her husband; or at least his head. The rest of him was probably in the East River somewhere.

Saul Epstein was used to trouble. When you’re the world’s most successful investigative journalist, and you devote your life to exposing the crimes of the great and the powerful, you learn to expect trouble. That’s why Saul was a recluse, that’s why he had no intimate circle, no close friends….

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.

Detective John Stone had a marriage made in heaven. His wife was young, beautiful and smart, and she was his partner in the Cold Cases unit at the 43rd. They were tight, close, and practically telepathic. At least, that was what he’d always thought - until she got an interest outside their marriage, and that interest became a passion.

Cherise Brown, her small daughter Shevron, her husband Earl. The only survivor, eight year-old Leroy who witnessed the whole thing. His story, that his father broke his sister’s neck, his mother stabbed his father in the back and his dad, before dying, in a kind of berserker rage, took the knife and killed his mother. Four years later Leroy Brown is murdered along with his adoptive sister, Lea. He is stabbed in the back, while his sister’s throat is cut, in a tool shed in the back yard of his adoptive family.

The call came on a Sunday morning in March, in Independence: Go to Seattle, meet a man, he will give you instructions. But those instructions send Lacklan on a journey he could not have suspected, protecting a senator who might be the last best hope of mankind, fleeing before the storm, hunted by killers and law enforcement alike. And when he finally reaches his destination, he discovers his ordeal has only just begun… But Lacklan, after ten years in the SAS, after a life of killing, has had enough.

It should have been a simple drive, from San Francisco International Airport, to Boulder, Wyoming, despite the snow. Was it because Lacklan was tired? Was it because he was thinking about the woman he loved, or the international crisis he had recently caused? Or was it the crazy blizzard that came out of nowhere and blinded him? Whatever it was, it made him turn the wrong way, it made him turn onto Bloody Creek Road, to the ghost town of Independence, population twenty-five.

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.

At forty-something, Bob Walklet was about to make a fortune with his IT company. But he'd made the mistake of falling in love with his assistant, twenty-something Sorka Williams. They were crazy about each other, and Bob had told his wife, Sheila - a thirty-something, ex-cop insurance consultant. He wanted a divorce. And there was a prenup. When he was found in his bedroom, stabbed in the heart, her DNA was literally all over him, her prints were on the knife and a neighbor had seen her hurrying from the house at the time of death.