Showing results by author "C. Line" in All Categories

It's August, 1929. Fresh and rested from his case in The Daedàlus Conspiracy in July, which took him to the Daedàlus Grove in Northern California to foil an assassination attempt, Cyrus Skeen hires a new secretary, the promisingly capable Clara Reyes. Soon after that, he's approached by a man, Bruce Willowman, who wishes him to try to find the murderer of his younger brother, Beauregard, in San Francisco five years before.

It is June 1929. The Roaring Twenties are still roaring, but the period is doomed. San Francisco's celebrated Cyrus Skeen, private detective and scion of Eastern wealth, is secure in his solvency; he has never bought stock on margin. He is as finicky about what stocks to invest in as he is in the kind of client he is willing to accept and work for. He is approached by Susan Harker, wife of Hosanna Harker, a noted local novelist accused of murdering his publisher, Marc Pearson.

In this episode of Skeen's cases he is invited by a new political party to stand for the office of public defender in next month's city election, a city office established to provide legal representation to the poor and indigent. He declines the invitation, but strange things keep happening, such as the curious death of the current public defender and the odd behavior of the principals of the new party.

The time of The Circles of Odin is early September, 1929, after Skeen's case of the Daedàlus Society in July and before he discovers in November a Nazi Bund in Palo Alto, south of San Francisco, Skeen's main venue of his adventures.

A Hollywood producer visits Skeen's office and promises him the moon if he would agree to allow his persona and cases be used for some new movies, possibly starring William Powell or Ronald Colman. Skeen expresses no interest and asks the man to leave. next day a friend brings him a news clipping about a major Hollywood studio negotiating with him over the rights to his past cases to produce a series of detective films - all talkies.

The Sparrowhawk Companion has become an indispensable reference book for readers of the Sparrowhawk series, containing, in addition to essays by the author and other contributors about the series and period in which it is set , a chronology of Acts of Parliament from 1650 onward up until the conclusion of the American Revolution, a glossary of 18th century terms encountered in the series, a handy list of the 375 characters that appear in the story, a list of all the naval and merchant vessels, and a selective bibliography of some of the author's sources.

Jack Frake and Hugh Kenrick resign themselves to the likelihood of war with the Crown. Hugh returns to England on urgent personal business, while Jack prepares for the coming conflict. In the meantime, Jared Turley, an agent of Earl Basil Kenrick, posing as a Customs official, sets his sights on Hugh Kenrick to punish in the name of his employer. He allies himself with the detested new royal governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, and confiscates the Sparrowhawk.

As the British Crown plans to exact its Stamp Tax on the North American colonies, Hugh Kenrick, Jack Frake, and their friends in Caxton, Virginia, plot to foil the arrival of the hated stamps in the colony. Edgar Cullis and George Mercer, also Virginians, however, scheme to switch sides. Reverdy Brune returns to Hugh's life, and Etáin, Jack's wife, acquires a new friend.

Merritt Fury is the unconquerable American entrepreneur who, in Whisper the Guns, foiled a Red Chinese conspiracy in Hong Kong and in We Three Kings gave a Saudi sheik his just desserts. Now, in Run from Judgment, he finds himself the target of a mysterious assassin who is eliminating, one by one, the financial enablers of the world's terrorists. He is also the object of another entrepreneur's malice and finally the subject of a captivating portrait painter.

British friends of colonial rights fight to defeat the Stamp Act in Parliament in 1765, led by Dogmael Jones. In the meantime Patrick Henry takes the floor, advocates the rights of the colonies to self-governance without interference from the Crown, and denounces the Stamp Act. Hugh Kenrick, now a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses, helps Henry voice the opposition.

It is fall,1759. The saga of Jack Frake and Hugh Kenrick moves to Caxton, a small trading town on the York River in Virginia, some miles up the wide river from Yorktown. Jack Frake, after having served his eight-year indenture, is a successful tobacco planter, having inherited his property from his former master, with whom he formed a close father-son relationship. He married the master's daughter, but she and her son died in childbirth.

Book Two introduces the second young hero, Hugh Kenrick, a member of the British aristocracy. While he has all the advantages that his rank bestows on him – family, wealth, prestige, and an assured future – his quest to preserve his self identity, his liberty, and his independence clashes violently with the demands of his station.

The American Revolution did not just happen. It was the culmination of two centuries of Enlightenment ideas that entered men's minds and were refined and honed until they expressed themselves in an unprecedented rejection of tyranny in the name of individual rights and political freedom from the whims of arrogant monarchs and conniving, power-lusting politicians.

Cyrus Skeen is hired by Edgar Freund, the defense attorney of Enoch Paige, a notorious lecturer charged with the savage murder of his ex-wife, to find evidence that will exonerate his client of the crime. Skeen soon finds himself at odds with Freund, as well as with Detective Sergeant Robert Hoile of the San Francisco police, who is determined to send Paige to the electric chair, and with Reverend Oswald Hoxley, the pastor of a popular church. More murders are committed.

After having some breathing room from his last case, which brought him up against Islamic operatives in San Francisco in The Black Stone, Cyrus Skeen and his wife take a short vacation on a luxury bus, the Pickwick Stage. But the bus is held up by gangsters. Skeen goes into action and foils the hijacking. But his heroism engenders even more problems and perils.

Islam's Reign of Terror chronicles the war waged against the U.S. and the West, resulting in over 24,000 acts of terror and tens of thousands of deaths in a campaign to force the world to submit unconditionally to Islam and Sharia Law. It also discusses the West's anemic, evasive response to the war declared against it, and how that insipid response only encourages terrorists and states that sponsor terrorism and other Islam-dominated nations to continue to attack the West.

Rational Scrutiny: Paradoxes and Contradictions in Detective Fiction discusses why Chess Hanrahan and Cyrus Skeen, the author's premier heroes and the chief subjects of this volume, are not only extraordinary men of action, but “intellectuals” of the first rank, as well. As Cline writes in the Preface, detective fiction, as a rule, employs both "intellectuals" and "doers".

In Part One, Cyrus Skeen, private detective in 1929 San Francisco, is asked by Charles Gilchrest, chairman of The Daedàlus Society, an exclusive men-only club, to go to the The Daedàlus Grove, a private enclave north of the city, to determine the nature of some trouble he has been warned about in a cryptic note written by an anonymous member. The note alludes to a controversial Senator from Nebraska and a tariff bill in Congress. It may the overture to a prank or it may be a serious threat to the man's life.

A woman working undercover for the FBI is dead as Russian agents make a grab for a seemingly obscure computer company. Hanrahan, who believes no observable phenomenon is beyond rational scrutiny, plays a high-stakes game with a cabal of social scientists who want to reshape public thought - knowing that ideas can kill.

In this new case, Skeen confronts a new kind of nemesis that has been gestating in the Middle East for centuries and is now being enabled by oil companies and careless foreign policies: Islam. While investigating three murders whose savagery is unprecedented in the annals of San Francisco crime, he begins to understand that nemesis and the threat it holds.