Crime City

Aaron Iturra was just 18 years old when he was found dead in his bedroom in Eugene, Oregon. Soon, the quiet community would be rocked and shocked by who was behind the killing: Mary Louise Thompson, also known as Gang Mom. An anti-gang activist, she was a modern day deadly Fagin, running her own gang of juveniles who preyed on the unsuspecting city.

This book does fall into the same universe as my other series of books I call the Noir series. In those books you can hear about the gritty world of detectives, reporters, and gangsters. Well, that world exists here as well except here you have men and women who are willing to work outside of the law on both sides to get a job done. Whereas the other books focus on the aforementioned detectives, private and otherwise, here the focus is more on the ones that hide who they are.

Herb Bean watches a lot of television, mostly cop shows and Forensic Files. Now his wife has disappeared without a trace. Herb knows the husband is always the prime suspect. Where do you turn when you are afraid to turn to the police?

Almost a hundred years ago, a major terrestrial event reshaped the Earth’s coastlines. Goodbye entire cities. Goodbye entire states. Goodbye entire countries. And when the authorities outlawed salvaging from these sunken sites, why, say hello to a new breed of criminal: underwater reclamation specialists. Even a hundred years later, there’s still a whole lot of loot for the reclaiming.

Erma Johnson lives in a rough part of Baltimore. Gangs are a fact of life. She lost her daughter and grandson to their violence. She's convinced, however, that her grandson wasn't in a gang. Hacker turned private investigator C.T. Ferguson takes her case. The more he looks around, the more he thinks she's right.

Walt is a new detective assigned to one of the most dangerous precincts in 1950's New York. Spanish Harlem was a cauldron of poverty, crime, and racial tension. These true stories trace the beginning of Walt's career, before the Second World War and span the turbulent years of New York City's slow decline. Walt encountered everything from horrific murders and domestic violence, to systemic corruption and even an unexpected brush with the paranormal.

Jamie Gabriel gets on his bike before dawn to deliver newspapers in his suburban Indianapolis neighborhood. He is 12 years old. Somewhere en route, he vanishes without a trace. Crushed by frustrating dead ends and exhausted by a police force that cannot (or will not) find their son, the Gabriels finally stumble upon a name - an elusive private investigator who may represent their last chance for answers.

Willie Bledsoe, once an idealistic young black activist, is now a burnt-out case. After leaving a snug berth at Tuskegee Institute to join the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, he has become bitterly disillusioned with the civil rights movement and its leaders. He returns home to Alabama to try to write a memoir about his time in the cultural whirlwind, but the words fail to come. The surprise return of his Vietnam veteran brother in the spring of 1967 gives Willie a chance to drive a load of smuggled guns to the Motor City....

Serryan White has dreams of being the king of New York for a day. Serryan recruits a “network” of professional Black women who are specialists in various fields to pull off a multimillion-dollar heist in the Big Apple. He takes aim at his target by going after a stock brokerage and securities firm called Empire Capital. The intricate plot is to take money from the target by using an inside man to leave the fall guy holding the bag. Only the inside man is not a man; it is a woman.

Heat-filled lights brighten the city of Winchester for our protagonist, Jack Williams. Will the light blind him to the killer, or will the light guide him? Jack is an ex-inspector looking for his loved lost possession. Will he ever find what his heart desires?

You may think being a superhero is all about dodging bullets, fancy armor, secret identities, and thwarting supervillains - but not in Spire City. Here, you have to deal with crazy shamanic visions, and Nazi butchers brought to USA after World War II. Need we mention the malevolent thought forms and gangs of freakish mutants? Modern city life is tough enough, but in Spire City even the superheroes are stretched to the breaking point when the villains have better lawyers.

Mandy Stevenson left home for college even as her family was being torn apart by the loss of her brother, an Indianapolis police officer. But now, four years later, time to return and face the grief and hardships she left behind. As summer fades, Mandy finds herself in a nightmare when her mother vanishes without a trace. Faced with her father skepticism, Mandy turns to her godfather, head of the police department Missing Persons Unit, for help. The police investigation quickly uncovers her mother's secret, nefarious lifestyle.

Family. The job. The thrill of discovery. No one gets out alive...What's a little sin between the sheets, and a little blood between lovers? What's a little death to be discovered, waiting for you under that white sheet? I'm digging a desert grave just for you, underneath the burning sun. You won't be found...not even by the vultures circling in the sky. You, my dear, are the reason why I was always easily influenced.

It's 1935 in Detroit. The city is in the midst of a heat wave when a beautiful white woman is brutally raped and murdered, setting off a powder keg. The chief suspect is a recently paroled black man. Fearing for his life, he goes into hiding only to discover that the victim's father, a rich retired judge, has put a bounty on his head: one million dollars for his apprehension, dead.

A mysterious hanging in Helena takes Nick on a historical journey. A cowboy game in Bismarck turned deadly. Family gone wrong led to parricide in Pierre. The carnage of an unsolved mystery in Cheyenne leads to a shocking solution. He witnessed defenestration in Denver, and his photos held a critical clue.

In the gritty streets of Baltimore, Detective Malik Ford navigates a city teetering between law and chaos. Born into a family of cops and haunted by his father's tragic legacy, Malik is determined to counter the surge of drugs and violence. However, his straightforward mission is complicated by Bill Simms, a reformer with radical methods, and Yazmin, an enigmatic detective whose methods challenge Malik's views on justice. As Malik delves deeper into the city's underbelly through undercover operations and street-level tactics, he confronts not only criminal forces but also personal demons.

A year after the death of her husband, Emerald Vasquez runs into his mistress Akira when leaving the cemetery. The sight of the woman he impregnated and left his fortune to reignites the flames of fury within her, sending Emerald down a path of Revenge.

Husband and wife Jonathan and Faye Kellerman, both internationally best-selling authors, team up for a powerful one-two punch with Capital Crimes, a pair of original thrillers set in two cities rich in atmosphere: Berkeley and Nashville.

Spine-Chilling Murders in the Quad-Cities is a collection of true-life stories - most of them rescued from old newspaper accounts published over 100 years ago.

There's a new medical examiner in town. Working girls and lonely hearts are catching a tough break in Champion City. An unknown killer, a quiet man of malevolent intention, is carousing in low places. A young patrolman catches a bullet when he interrupts the killer in the act. A stack of unsolved possibly related homicides point to a cover up. The previous medical examiner and a parish priest are sharing space in the morgue. The new ME appoints Thurman Dicke as a Special Investigator.