First Mystery

Aus dem Todestrakt des ADX Bundesgefängnis in Florence, Colorado, werden verurteilte Killer entführt. In der Grenzregion der USA und Mexikos verschwinden Flüchtlinge, Schleuser und Gangster, die für ein ­Drogenkartell arbeiten, spurlos. Unheimliche, schwarz vermummte Gestalten verschleppen nachts Obdachlose aus dem Central Park in New York City. Wer ist für die Entführungen verantwortlich? In einem Schlafsaal, an einem unbekannten Ort, finden sich die Entführten wieder. Seltsamerweise ist der Raum unbewacht, was die verschleppten Männer zuerst verunsichert.

Ex-cop Clayton Conway has made some mistakes. He's trying to work hard with a repo company, hooking cars and boats. Raise his daughter and stay friendly with his ex-wife. Make enough money to pay the rent on his tiny apartment over a bar in Jacksonville Beach. But when one of the Orenato Cartel's speedboats gets repossessed, they come looking for it. Putting Clayton, his family, and his friends in danger. Can he protect them, or will the cartel get what they came for? And will his own weaknesses get the best of him...again?

Struggling writer and nearly bankrupt Sean O'Shea is searching for the blockbuster story from which he can create a best seller. The goal is to regain his financial independence and self-esteem. When he learns of a horrific 1936 UFO crash in Germany's Black Forest, he chases the story to its origin. The discovery of insidious Nazi involvement peaks his interest and when he unearths secret assassinations of previous investigators, he is hooked. As his probe continues, witnesses are murdered and he becomes the target of deadly agents sent by the most powerful man in the Vatican.

A brilliant young novelist wins a literary award and disappears. Detective Chess Hanrahan turns up more than murder in this sharp-edged, provocative tale by the author of the popular Sparrowhawk novels. With a new preface by the author.

In the second book of the Jocelyn O’Roarke series, New York’s most hated theater critic has been poisoned. Now the question is: Who isn't a suspect? A lot of people have good reason to despise Jason Saylin. He has earned a reputation as New York’s most scathing - and powerful - theater critic. After-parties at his penthouse apartment are the most exclusive in the city. But Jason has one weakness: an illness that he is desperate to hide. His illness is revealed in grandiose fashion when Jason staggers into a room during a party and falls dead on the floor.

The year is 2038. Earth's biosphere is on the brink of destruction from the effects of global warming and pollution. The World Energy Council has awarded a lucrative contract to a major US corporation to mine a precious ore discovered by the first manned mission to land on Mars. When two people die in a mining accident on Mars, the World Energy Council sends Commander Logan Marchant and a crack team of astronaut specialists to investigate.

When Charity witnesses a gruesome car accident, she becomes determined to uncover the truth behind the driver’s suspicious death. But as she delves into the case, she uncovers a dark and dangerous underworld of gangs and human trafficking.

Nathan K - he can hold two souls in his body. If he dies, he loses one yet lives on with the other. As long as he replenishes his second soul, he cannot be killed. Nathan K is immortal. Against an Immortal Army. After learning how some immortal groups use mortals as slaves and worse, Nathan can no longer sit by. Yet stopping them means war. To take on the Immortals is no easy task. Especially when they have had endless time to study strategy and tactics. Especially because they are willing to let a war stretch out across the shadows year after year for centuries.

Sloane Osborne is a paranormal real estate agent in the business of selling haunted houses, but, in truth, she’s only searching for one ghost. And her time is running out. It’s the 366th day after her fiancé’s death. Michael used to like putting things off for “a year and a day” - so tonight’s the night. Sloane will do anything to make contact with him before the clock strikes midnight.

This novel is set in the very center of the time of most difficult combat experienced by a United States Marine Corps rifle company. A second lieutenant, only days from training back in the States, is ordered, under fire, to assume command of a company of cast-off marines, all out in the brutal, bloody jungle because of either the worst of luck or the most minor of offenses or infringement.

Former SEAL Chris Paladin leaves SEAL Team Six to become a pastor, but CIA spook Hannah Andrade pulls him back into Special Operations Group, the ultra-secret unit that SEAL Team Six operators and others served under to eliminate bin Laden. Chris and Hannah are joined by Delta Force’s Sonny Cohen to stop a new terrorist threat from launching a deadly cyber-terror against the United States.

When Gina Temple decides to go Christmas shopping for her girlfriend, Detective Sergeant Kate Brannon, in the Norfolk town of King's Lynn, it seems like an easy enough task. If only life were that simple. A split-second event, months in the planning, tips their safe world upside down.

Earl Sommers is in hot water. An agent with the Speer Galleries, he's been caught cheating with Speer's wife as well as stealing from the gallery. So when an old friend turns up in a suicidal mood, Earl agrees to find him a gun in return for one last favor....

A boy with a rifle walks into a middle school, intent on carrying out Western-style vigilante justice. A wife and mother of four kisses her twelve-year-old student and forever changes our definition of student-teacher conferences. The world's most famous serial killers put Washington on the map. A bathtub, a handgun, a meat grinder, and a burn barrel play a role in the murder of the captain of a freighter.

As a child, Jane Redmon heard the name Gleason in hushed whispers around her upstate New York home but never knew why. Now, as a fearless Washington Post reporter digging into a corruption case, she discovers the truth: Twenty years ago, before he became a senator, a young Michael Gleason ruined the career and life of her father, Tom, a public prosecutor on the rise.

"You shall have no other gods before me." Does the First Commandment serve any purpose for Christians today? What if the first commandment was meant to serve against a much bigger danger to Christianity than just the gods of Egypt and Rome? What if it was considered paramount because of a very specific threat that still torments the Christian faith today? Sorrow of the Godmakers proposes that superstition—specifically human conjecture about the nature of God—has always presented the greater peril. What God put simply, humans would complicate.

256 BC: When a patrol boat of butchered Legionaries washes up on a beach, Lance Corporal Alerio Sisera volunteers to be the scout for the Legion's response. But, he runs into complications and is forced to exceed his assignment. Suddenly, he finds himself in a blood feud with a powerful enemy, posted at a besieged harbor garrison, and fighting for his life against overwhelming odds. Reinforcements are not coming. Surrounded by enemies, it's up to Alerio to battle with his gladius while standing in bloody water.

Criminal defense investigator Cecil Younger spends his days coaching would-be felons on how to avoid incriminating themselves. When Sherrie, a returning client with a good heart but a penchant for bad boys, asks him to track down some evidence that will help with her case, Cecil agrees. Cecil treks out to the shady apartment complex she mentioned, only to find his teenage daughter, Blossom, inside. He manages to get both the box Sherrie wanted and his daughter safely home, and later discovers the "evidence" is a large pile of cash - fifty thousand dollars, to be exact.

Half a million dollars in drug proceeds, guarded by three men with automatic weapons - for professional thief Crissa Stone and her team, stealing it was the easy part. But when the split goes awry in a blaze of gunfire, Crissa finds herself on the run with a duffel bag full of stolen cash, bound by a promise to deliver part of the take to the needy family of one of her slain partners.

Here, for your approval, are the first 15 Matt Cooper, P.I. stories in the collection of 420 stories. These 15 take place in the mid-to-late 1940s, and show the beginnings of Cooper Investigations.