Showing results by author "Collin Wilcox" in All Categories

It starts as an everyday fender bender: Two cars collide in heavy evening traffic. But when the police arrive to take statements, the occupants of one car take off running. They leave another man behind, slumped in the backseat, dead of a single stab wound to the chest. Lieutenant Frank Hastings abandons a family dinner to take charge of the scene, which rapidly devolves into chaos. The police corner one of the runners in an abandoned building, capturing him after a standoff.

The killer is long gone from the crime scene when he realizes his mistake. It went perfectly, right until the end. He lured Lisa to the oceanfront park, entered her car on the passenger side, shot her twice, and escaped without being stained by her blood. He took the gun with him, as planned - but he forgot her purse, the crucial detail meant to make the crime look like a robbery. It was a simple mistake, but it could cost him everything.

By the time Haney and the woman get to her apartment, they are so drunk they can hardly get through the door. They undress and begin to fool around, but before they make it to the bedroom, they have an argument. Haney is about to leave when the woman starts to laugh at him. He spins around and slugs her as hard as he can. His head is beginning to clear by the time he makes it home. He's just sober enough to notice the glint of a dagger before it's buried in his gut.

A pair of murders leaves Hastings torn between following his orders and listening to his gut. After nearly a decade as a San Francisco cop, Frank Hastings is becoming something of a stranger to kindness. He feels perfectly at home in the Draper household - a rundown Victorian not far from the streets on which he grew up - where a social worker has been beaten to death by a man hiding in the bushes.

Diane Cutler is half drunk and half stoned when she sees her stepfather carrying the body out of the house. She and her boyfriend look on, horrified, as real estate tycoon Preston Daniels loads his dead mistress into the car. Unable to resist their curiosity, they follow him and watch as he dumps the poor woman's body in the rocks and sand of the Cape Cod landfill.

A dying art collector asks Bernhardt to revisit him in his darkest hour. The first time Betty Giles went missing, her employers wanted her dead. They hired Alan Bernhardt, theater director and sometimes PI, to find her, but when he discovered their scheme, he drew a sawed-off shotgun to save her life. Now Betty's missing again, hiding somewhere in Europe, and her old bosses want her found. Will Bernhardt deliver her to the man who once tried to have her killed?

When Frank Hastings knew Meredith Powell, she was a gawky 10-year-old without a care in the world. More than two decades later, she has grown into a stunning beauty - but the gleam in her eye is gone. Over lunch, Meredith confesses that she lives in terror of her emotionally abusive boyfriend, a possessive, rage-filled man named Charles. Hastings, a homicide lieutenant with the San Francisco police department, offers to help her escape.

Austin Holloway came to Los Angeles in the 1930s with nothing but a briefcase, a few hundred dollars, and a letter of introduction to a local radio station. The son of a revival tent preacher, Holloway wanted to bring the good word to the airwaves, first radio and then television. He had no idea he was starting an empire.