Showing results by publisher "Blackstone Audio, Inc." in Modern Detectives

It's everyday business when Wattles, the San Fernando Valley's top "executive crook", sets up a hit. He establishes a chain of criminals to pass along the instructions and the money, thereby ensuring that the hitter doesn't know who hired him. Then one day Wattles finds his office safe open and a single item missing: the piece of paper listing the crooks in the chain. When people associated with the chain begin to pop up dead, the only person Wattles can turn to for help is Junior Bender, professional burglar and begrudging private eye for crooks.

His Fifth Precinct cases have taken him to West Coast Chinatowns and back, and along the way NYPD detective Jack Yu has processed a dozen dead bodies, been beaten by Triad thugs, been mauled by a pit bull, and been shot twice.

He's also killed two men. He is en route to an appointment with the department shrink when an Asian body turns up in the Harlem River. Quickly assigned to the case, Jack finds a corpse with no identification and faces questions as to how - and why - the dead man wound up in the water.

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.

Crissa Stone is a career criminal. A complete pro, she never works too close to her New York City home, rarely signs on with the same crew, and never rushes a job. These are the rules that have kept her from getting caught, from doing time. They're the rules her mentor and lover taught her, rules he didn't follow as closely as he should have. Now he's up for parole, and Crissa needs to come up with some real money real fast to help grease the wheels.

While at a reading of a Kurt Vonnegut biography, private investigator Jim Wolf senses someone watching him. He catches sight of a young woman, maybe mid-twenties, who is short and has straight, straw-colored blond hair, granny glasses, and freckles. Her figure is more boyish than that of a grown woman. She wears jeans and a man's white dress shirt, and a cheap necklace of amber-colored beads with silver disks circles her neck. Her name is Emily.

Natasha Doroshenko, a Ukrainian woman who has been arrested for murdering her Danish fiancé, escapes police custody on her way to an interrogation in Copenhagen's police headquarters. It isn't the first time Natasha has lost a partner to violent ends: her first husband was also murdered three years earlier, in Kiev, and in the same manner, his hands broken. At the same time, someone tries to abduct Natasha's eight-year-old daughter from the Red Cross center that has been caring for her while her mother, an illegal immigrant, was in jail.

A shape bends over a drink at the end of the bar in Big Emma's on Oakland's Jack London Square, looking like a bundle of black clothes someone has left on the barstool. Full red lips that match brightly dyed hair are the only source of color, as if an artist had begun to colorize her just before she walked out of frame in a '40s noir movie. Her name is Susan, and she is there to hire PI Jim Wolf to find her husband's killer - and to protect her from a man called Red. Wolf takes her case, but Susan is soon murdered. Then an attempt is made on Wolf's life … and the hunter becomes the hunted.

A long-lost Modigliani portrait, a grieving brother’s blood vendetta, a Soviet secret that's been buried for eighty years - Parisian private investigator Aimée Leduc's current case is her most exciting one yet. When Aimée’s long-term partner and best friend Rene leaves their detective agency for a new job in Silicon Valley, Aimée knows she can handle the extra workload. At least, that what she tells herself...repeatedly. But all bets are off when Yuri Volodya, a mysterious old Russian man, hires Aimée to protect a painting.

Clients never tell the whole story. Harry Stoner had taken a snowy drive to Cincinnati psychiatrist Phil Pearson’s mansion to hear the tale of daughter Kirsten - emotionally disturbed and missing. But the doctor left out the parts about his first wife’s suicide and his second wife’s bedroom eyes that were already chasing the winter cold from Stoner’s blood. That’s why Stoner suspected the search for Kirsten could take a kinky turn.

Lew Griffin is a survivor, a black man in New Orleans, a detective, a teacher, a writer. Having spent years finding others, he has lost his son - and himself - in the process. Now, a derelict has appeared in a New Orleans hospital claiming to be Lewis Griffin and displaying a copy of one of Lew's novels. It is the beginning of a quest that will take Griffin into his own past while he tries to deal in the present with a search for three missing young men.

Mason Greenleaf - good teacher, good friend, fond lover - vanishes from his Mount Adams home one hot summer afternoon, leaving a haunting mystery behind him. For his fellow teachers, former students, and friends, his disappearance is inexplicable and tragic. For his lover, Cindy Dorn, it is a cruel blow that shakes the very foundations of her world. She calls Harry Stoner for help. Soon after, Greenleaf turns up dead in a sleazy hotel. The police call it a suicide - Stoner believes there's more to the story. As Stoner delves into the apparent suicide, disturbing questions surface about Greenleaf's past, questions about his sexual life.

Stoner is a private eye in the classic tradition: A loner with a history of failed relationships with women and all-too-successful relationships with bottles of scotch, he's unable to look away from the world's corruption, and unable to avoid trying futilely to do something about it. His latest hopeless cause is Cindy Ann, a teenage hooker. She's not very pretty or bright or engaging. She doesn’t have much to offer at all, in fact, and somehow that makes her disappearance all the more disturbing for Stoner.

Life hasn't been easy for Eugene "Huge" Smalls. Sure, his IQ is off the charts, but that doesn't help much when you're growing up in the 1980s in a dreary New Jersey town where your bad reputation precedes you, the public school system's written you off as a lost cause, and even your own family seems out to get you. But it's not all bad.

Cincinnati homicide detective Will Borders now walks with a cane and lives alone in constant discomfort. He’s lucky to be alive. He’s lucky to have his job as public information officer for the department. But when a star cop is brutally murdered, Borders is assigned to find her killer. The crime bears a chilling similarity to killings on the once peaceful college campus nearby, where his friend Cheryl Beth Wilson teaches nursing. The two young victims were her students. Most homicides are routine, the suspects readily apparent. But there are no obvious suspects in this new case.

In this feverishly anticipated follow-up to 2011’s critically acclaimed The Boy in the Suitcase, Danish Red Cross nurse Nina Borg doesn’t realize she is putting life and family on the line when she tries to treat a group of sick Hungarian gypsies who are living illegally in a Copenhagen garage. Nina has unwittingly thrown herself into a deadly nest of the unscrupulous and the desperate, and what is at stake is much more terrifying than anyone had realized.

A hippie commune has invaded Black River Falls. While the majority of the townspeople believe that the bohemians have the right to stay - despite how bizarre some of their ways can seem - as always, there is a minority that constantly accuses them of everything from criminal activities to Satanism. As usual, lawyer and private investigator Sam McCain finds himself in the middle of the controversy, especially when the teenage daughter of Paul Mainwaring, is found murdered in the commune’s barn.

Greg Samuelson, an unassuming bookkeeper, hired Joe Kozmarski to dig up dirt on his wife and her lover, Eric Stone. But now Samuelson has taken matters into his own hands. It looks like he’s torched Stone’s Mercedes, killed his boss, and then shot himself, all in the space of an hour. The police think they know how to put together this ugly puzzle. But as Kozmarski discovers, nothing’s ever simple.

On an urban battleground dangerously divided along racial lines, probation officer Steve Baum is desperately struggling to hold on to the last remaining shreds of his idealism, until Darryl King invades his world. A deranged young sociopath, one of the most bloodthirsty creations of a diseased society, Darryl has come to drag Baum along with him into an inescapable morass of terror and corruption.

In 1926, musician Tom Hickey reads in a broadside about a lynching that the Los Angeles newspapers failed to report and discovers that the Negro victim was an old friend. When his neighbor, an LAPD detective, confirms that, officially, the lynching didn’t occur, Hickey decides to investigate the murder, earning himself beatings, gunfire meant to dissuade him, and warnings from a Klansman that he’s made some formidable enemies.

Longtime character actor Clive Rosengren ( Cheers, Seinfeld, Ed Wood) pens a sprightly tale of Hollywood sex and homicide in Murder Unscripted. No one is going to mistake part-time actor, part-time Hollywood sleuth Eddie Collins for a movie star. While shooting a television commercial for Chubby’s Chicken, Eddie is almost relieved when he gets a call from a motion-picture bonding company on the hook for an uncompleted film whose female lead has died. That would be bad enough, but things get worse when Eddie finds out that the dead actress is his ex-wife - and her death looks like murder.