Showing results by author "Blair Howard" in All Categories

Brandon Beck hanged himself, or did he? Was it suicide or cold blooded murder? On a cold dark night in February, Harry Starke runs into someone he hasn’t seen in almost 25 years. The man has a problem. He asks Harry for help. Harry turns him down, and thus becomes the last person to see Brandon Beck alive. Did Beck hang himself? Was he murdered? Either way, why? Harry Starke, now the prime suspect, vows to find out.

A secret plot to start a war. Two old enemies who must work together to foil it. Under any other circumstances, hired assassin Cassandra Wu would be trying to kill her partner. But that’ll have to wait. Right now, they need to stop a war. After escaping US custody in a deadly battle that leaves three FBI agents dead and another wounded, Wu is kidnapped by The Peacemakers, a Deep State organization dedicated to achieving peace on Earth. Unfortunately, to bring that about they must initiate WWIII and Wu must assassinate an impossible target: the Russian president.

When a farmer discovers a man’s in the passenger seat of his car, Captain Kate Gazzara is called in to lead the murder investigation. A simple carjacking gone wrong? That’s what it looks like but, as we all know, looks can be deceiving. So, Kate probes deeper and quickly discovers that her victim isn't the first, but only the latest in a string of murders going back over five years.

It was a bad day all round for Tommy Biscotti and his friends. All Tommy wanted were a few pills. What he got was a bullet in the back. Hammerhead, Tommy’s source, got two in the head. Jake Burke, Hammerhead’s sidekick, got his brains blown out. Pretty standard stuff for the low lives of the underworld. But what did it all have to do with Senator Andrew Hawke’s run for governor? Who is the assassin?

A brutal murder. An impossible crime. Why did Genevieve have to die? Who murdered her? Caught between two worlds, one where she didn’t belong, the other she couldn’t give up, Genevieve committed the ultimate deception and married into a world of wealth and privilege and it cost her her life. Kate Gazzara’s most difficult case, a mind-bending riddle. A gripping, fast-paced thriller that will keep you listening long into the night.

A vicious killer is on the loose in the small but affluent bedroom community of Lookout Mountain, Tennessee. The local police are ill-equipped to handle a murder investigation. So they call on the expert: the tenacious and dedicated Detective Kate Gazarra of the Chattanooga PD. The killer is careful, leaving no obvious evidence and no motive. Lieutenant Gazarra must pursue high-profile suspects, navigate interference by the city’s elite, and get inside the mind of the killer. All while training in a new partner and appeasing the formidable Chief Johnston.

No one could figure out exactly why Sandra McDowell had to die. What was her connection to the Raven, an aging hit man 20 years on death row with only days left to live? Clues are plentiful, but all are dead ends. The Raven is a mind-bending mystery thriller, a twister of a tale that will keep you up listening long into the night. You can’t hear just one! Join Harry Starke as he tries to unravel the nightmare world of...The Raven.

A brutal murder. An embattled cop. A cold case nobody wants. They found her lying in the mud on the banks of South Chickamauga Creek. She’d been stabbed forty-four times. The killer was never found. Twenty-three years later the case lands on Kate Gazzara’s desk. With her career in jeopardy, she finds herself plunged into a frantic race against time...and members of her own department.

An elite force of private military contractors. A ragtag band of aging war heroes and civilians. It began with a simple kidnapping. It ended in an all-out private war. In Harry Starke’s world, nothing is ever quite as it seems. His wife is lying in hospital in a coma. His best friend and business partner is not who he says he is. Once again Harry says never again, but when his intellectually disabled uncle is kidnapped and becomes a pawn in a deadly game of cat and mouse.

On a cold morning in October, 1987, Ohio State Patrol Officer Dan Walker finds an odd box on a quiet, county road. Twenty-five years later, in 2012, and more than 600 miles away, a young woman vanishes without a trace and another is found dead from what appears to be an overdose. In 2015, street-smart Lieutenant Kate Gazzara is suddenly transferred to the Cold Case Squad and assigned her first case. But as she painstakingly goes over the file she discovers a connection to all three incidents. Is there a serial killer on the loose, one who has been killing for almost three decades?

It began when an FBI informant was brutally gunned down outside a soccer stadium. A tactical nuclear weapon has gone missing somewhere in the Middle East and is thought to have been smuggled into the United States by a small group of Iranian terrorists intent on chaos and destruction. The target? Unknown, but the FBI’s local director is convinced that it’s the Sequoya nuclear plant and that the clock is ticking. Convinced that the threat is real and that his only link to the terrorists is Harry Starke’s nemesis, Shady Tree, he turns to Harry for help.

Saffron was the first. T.J. Bron found her naked body lying beside a dumpster at the rear of the Sorbonne. Four weeks later, a teenage couple looking for a quiet spot to get it together find a second victim. The bodies continue to pile up. The killer's clever. Clues are scarce. Lieutenant Kate Gazzara is baffled. What few clues there are make little sense and generate more questions than answers. Can she figure it out and stop a sadistic killer's reign of terror?

Three Days in Hell, action-packed from start to finish, is the story of Confederate General Bushrod Johnson's Chickamauga as told through the eyes and words of one of his staff officers, Major Chester Rigby. The author takes you onto the battlefield as no one has done before. He plunges you right into the center of the action, which doesn't let up until the very end. It's a story of heroism, desperate deeds, and death and destruction on a scale the likes of which had never been seen before.

On a dark day in April 1865, a band of former Confederate guerrillas slaughtered more than 40 Comanches, most of them women and children. This began a six-month reign of terror along the Santa Fe Trail as Comanche chief, White Eagle, took his revenge. The US Cavalry was assigned the task of tracking White Eagle and his warriors down. Lieutenant Colonel Ignatius O'Sullivan's orders were to either bring them in or kill them.

Isla Tansy Mortenson Wallace was a noted local neurosurgeon, wife of local veterinarian Jim Wallace, and one of Chattanooga’s movers and shakers. That is until she was found dead on her own property. Did she fall off her horse? Was she thrown? Was she murdered? And if she was killed, by whom, and how, and why? Why does Lt. Kate Gazzara not want Harry Starke anywhere near the case? Lots of questions and no answers.

It was late Friday evening when they discovered the body. The girl had been in the concrete pipe for more than a week. The daytime temperatures were hitting 120 degrees. It was the stench that drew the kids to her. Who was she? Who put her there? Who...killed her? It’s Kate Gazzara's first case, a mind-bending riddle, and as if that wasn’t enough, she has a new partner to cope with.

Maggie Hart, a student at UTC, was abducted on Labor Day. Her body was found five days later on the RiverPark. She'd been strangled. She wasn't the first, nor would she be the last. Harry Starke, recovering from a near-death experience, is dragged reluctantly into an investigation that quickly turns into a cat and mouse game between Harry and a very clever killer, Harry being the mouse. Emoji is an action-packed, lightning-paced story, with an explosive finale you'll not see coming.

During the last few days of the Civil War, a company of Confederate raiders rode into the small Kansas town of Elbow. There they raped, pillaged and murdered among the local populace, thus triggering a chain of events and a chase that extended for more than 1,000 miles across the grasslands and mountains of Kansas and the deserts of New Mexico.

On a balmy day in April 1863, Union Colonel Abel D. Streight, at the head of a brigade of federal infantry, set out on a 220-mile ride to destroy the Western and Atlantic railroad at Rome, Georgia. The most fascinating thing about the raid is that Streight's brigade of four infantry regiments, almost 1,800 soldiers, was mounted on mules, a huge problem in itself; few of his men had ever ridden a horse, let alone a mule.

The hills of horse country, Shenandoah Valley, the Blue Ridge Mountains and numerous wineries are among the state's offerings. Here's a guide to the national and state parks, the cities, towns and villages and everything in between. Places to stay and eat, along with recommended fall foliage tours.