Showing results by author "Vincent Zandri" in All Categories

Orchard Grove is a town like any other, with quiet neighborhoods and apple groves...though Ethan, the depressed screenplay writer, and his secretive wife, Susan, would tell you differently. So would the seductive serial killer living next door. The apple trees are fertilized with evil, and the backyard fences aren't enough to stop the manipulative mind games and dangerous lies. The lines between good and evil are blurred and then erased as Ethan does what it takes to survive.

When Reece Johnston was a boy, a fire destroyed his home, killing his mother and brothers while leaving him scarred for life. It also kindled something dark inside him: an irresistible attraction to flames in all their terrifying, tantalizing power. But after two failed arson attempts - and two trips to the mental ward - he was finally able to put down the matches and pick up the pieces.

"True Stories" is one of Vincent Zandri's most anthologized short stories. Based on the true story of Zandri having tackled and apprehended a car thief who was rampaging through his upstate New York neighborhood, this literary thriller begins with a 'seed of truth' around which grow invented circumstances - the result being a clever mesh of truth and creation.

A young U.S. Army officer who's served in Afghanistan finds himself suffering from intermittent bouts of "hysterical" temporary blindness due to impossible and deadly orders he was forced to obey by high command in the field. When he's reunited with his fiancée in a military hospital in Germany after being separated for more than year, the couple are encouraged by doctors to travel to Venice, Italy together.

At 38, Ava “Spike” Harrison has been a major player in the local construction industry. She’s also had to rebuild her family business from the bottom up thanks to bad luck and bad fines. So it’s easy to see why OSHA, breathing down her neck on her latest job at Albany’s PS 20, has the contractor on edge. She’s used to putting out fires, but this is about to be a full-on explosion - 300 students at risk for exposure to deadly asbestos, and the asbestos removal contractor, Jimmy Farrell, is nowhere to be found.

The serial killer takes on many guises. But what happens when you unknowingly take him as your most trusted and loyal husband? Pathological is proof that even though you think you know your spouse inside and out, you might not really know him at all. This is the first of many Digital Shorts from Vincent Zandri.

What’s a nice, proper dame like Joan Parker doing in a place like Dick Moonlight’s office? The scar running down her face - from the business end of an axe - has something to do with it. Shortly after the attack that killed her husband and left her for dead, she pointed the finger at her son, Christopher, who now sits in jail. But the woman insists the police have it all wrong - Christopher didn’t do it - and she just needs the private eye to prove it. Moonlight knows mothers will say anything to protect their kids. He also knows how the police can take a mistake and run with it.

PI Dick Moonlight wakes up to find himself on a plummeting plane and handcuffed to an FBI agent. As if his life wasn’t already turbulent enough - his bar burned down; his ex, Lola, left him for another man; and Jack Daniels is his new best friend - the FBI informs him that he’s got unfinished business. His last case, the one with Russian mobsters after a top secret flash drive, isn’t exactly closed.

A gang of Obama-masked thugs in a downtown Albany alley gave Dick Moonlight a one-way ticket to the Pearly Gates. But when his hovering spirit slips back into his bruised body, the real trouble starts. A private detective with a short-term memory problem, Moonlight knows he’s still in danger. He’s got plenty of enemies to keep him guessing why — even the latest love of his life, Lola, can’t be trusted. But the goons who snuffed him want something else: Moonlight’s latest client, a handicapped nuclear engineer, had a top-secret box the gang believes is in Moonlight’s possession. Moonlight can’t remember any box — but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have it. He just better figure out where it is before he winds up dead for the last time.

Jude Parish is afraid. The former violent crimes cop turned best-selling true crime author has a fear-filled demon lodged inside of him. A demon so real he can only imagine a slimy reptilian beast with scaly skin, black eyes, and razor-sharp fangs having taken up residence inside the place where his once confident and fearless soul resided.

Richard 'Dick' Moonlight is back!

In the best-selling Moonlight Falls (RJBuckley, 2009), he barely survived his own suicide attempt, not to mention numerous attempts on his life from a gang of Russian thugs operating an illegal organ harvesting operation out of a Saratoga Springs restaurant. Now the former Albany Police Department detective is forced to go through life (or in some cases, near-death) with a piece of .22 caliber bullet lodged in his brain.

Ike Singer is a demolitions expert, or master blaster. He is second to none at his craft, knows every type of explosive known to man, and is the one everyone turns to when they need a safe, controlled explosion. Despite being at the very top of his profession, a personal mistake that led to catastrophe nearly brought Ike's life to ruin. He has spent every day since atoning for that sin and trying to piece his family back together. And after a great deal of work and soul-searching, Ike believes he has finally moved on.

When ex-con and novelist JA Kingsley loses everything he's ever cared about, including his wife and teenage daughter, he abandons his home in order to start anew, write a new book, and, most of all, restart his fractured life. Traveling to the Adirondack Mountains, he checks himself into The Loon Lake Inn, a peaceful lake-side resort. For a brief moment, he feels at peace with himself and a world that has seemingly turned its back on him. But what he doesn’t expect is the lurid attraction that ignites between him and the wife of the owner of the Loon Lake Inn.

When a defeated looking man shows up at Moonlight’s riverfront loft in the middle of the night seeking the P.I.’s services, he does something quite unexpected. He kills himself with a gunshot to the head. After the APD Chief Homicide Detective Nick Miller arrives on the scene, it’s discovered the now dead man was married to a cheating woman who goes by the unlikely name of Virginia Gamble.

It's been thirty years since the terrifying abduction of twin sisters Rebecca and Molly Underhill by a deranged man. Fearful of retribution against their family, the girls kept the incident secret. Rebecca, alone since Molly died of cancer, suddenly begins getting strange and anonymous text messages—the first with just her name. Is Molly trying to communicate with her? And it couldn't be their attacker from so many years ago. Surely, he'd still be in jail or dead by now—wouldn't he?

They call him Keeper, but lately Jack Marconi has specialized in losing things. Last year, he lost his wife in a mysterious traffic accident, and ever since, he's felt like he's losing his mind. As the warden of the maximum security Green Haven Prison, home to 2,500 of New York's most hardened criminals, Marconi can't afford to drop focus, even for an instant. But he's been slipping up on the job, and he's tormented by flashbacks to the Attica uprising. All of which makes him ripe for the role of patsy when a convicted cop killer named Eduardo Vasquez stages a daring breakout on his watch.

When Dick Moonlight PI is instructed by Homicide Detective Nick Miller at the Albany Police Department to investigate the double homicide of a pair of married lawyers up in Saratoga Springs during the thoroughbred racing season, he finds himself in the middle of a killing spree that just might get him and his sidekick, Fat Elvis, killed too.

With Fat Elvis the perfect candidate for a starring role in their new film, Moonlight is hired by the police to go undercover and expose the snuff film operation which, it turns out, is also partly financed by Mexican drug cartel gang members. The stakes and the body count in this hard-boiled thriller are higher than a box office smash hit, and far more deadly.

When two men from very different Albany neighborhoods die identical gruesome deaths from drinking their own tap water, the APD become entirely baffled. They're also worried that they're about to have a public panic on their hands. Therefore, they call in PI Steve Jobz to handle the deadly situation, both under the radar and as fast as he can.

P.I. Jack "Keeper" Marconi understands the criminal mind. And he knows what it takes to break a man. His own life came apart the day a black Buick broadsided his car—and his wife died horrifically in the seat beside him. Years later, on the eve of his second marriage, Marconi catches a split-second glimpse of the driver who killed his wife. Suddenly hurtled back into the past, he is determined to take one last shot at hunting him down. That is, until he is offered a job he can't refuse: to bust a beautiful woman out of a hellish Mexican prison.