Showing results by author "Graham Masterton" in All Categories

One cold spring morning in County Cork, two fishermen find a bundle of rags floating in the Blackwater River. It is the bloated body of Father Heaney. His hands and feet are bound, and his neck bears the marks of garrotting wire. Worse still, he has been castrated. When a second priest is found murdered, his body bruised and beaten and the same savage wound hidden beneath his soutane, Detective Inspector Katie Maguire finds evidence of a sinister cover-up at St Joseph's Orphanage.

St Philomena's military hospital has been abandoned for over three years. Now Lilian Chesterfield, who works for one of the most successful building companies in England, is in charge of developing it into a luxury housing complex. But as soon as she and her colleagues start work in the Jacobean-style mansion, their dream turns into a nightmare. They hear screaming from wards full of empty beds. They hear doors slamming and find cutlery scattered over the kitchen floor. Then they see faces peering at them from the mullioned windows.

DS Katie Maguire is one of Ireland's best detectives. There's no mystery she can't crack with her killer instinct and hunger for justice. Until now...

On an isolated farm in southern Ireland, a decades-old grave houses the dismembered bones of 11 women. Detective Superintendent Katie Maguire of the Irish Gardai is used to bloodshed, but these white bones speak of unimaginable butchery. Not far away, a young American tourist is at the mercy of a sadistic killer. His tools are a boning knife, twine, and a doll fashioned from rags, nails, and fish-hooks. The murder of his victims is secondary only to his pleasure at their pain.

In a grimy flat in the city of Cork, a man lies dead. His face is unrecognisable: seven gunshots have shattered cartilage and bone. Yet DS Katie Maguire, of the Irish Garda, knows exactly who he is. Amir Xaaji Maxamed, an evil man who trafficked young girls to be sold for sex. When a second pimp is killed, Katie must decide. Are these vigilante murders justified? And can she stop them spiralling out of control?

Kieran O'Regan was responsible for hunting down killers. Now he's become one of the dead: his decapitated body has been found in a graveyard, a tin whistle stuffed into his throat. O'Regan was due to give evidence at a trial for police corruption. His gruesome murder sends a clear message to whistleblowers: only silence is safe. DCI Katie Maguire is determined to uncover the truth. But corruption in the Garda stretches back decades. As more officers are horrifically silenced, Katie must decide whom she can trust....

In a city wreathed in fog, a satanic killer stalks the streets. Enter Lieutenant Foggia who, assisted by a spiritualist medium, must discover the reason for the slayings. But the truth he unearths is beyond anything he's encountered in the real world. For the killings are paving the way for a force so powerful that the lives of a few innocents will appear unimportant in comparison.

It started with the judge. He was about to sentence five of Cork's most notorious criminals. But his body has just turned up, beaten and broken, on an isolated road in his burned-out car. Now four members of a rival gang have been shot, and in retaliation three civilians have been blown up. To Katie's horror, Cork is becoming a gang battleground like Dublin. Can Katie save the city? Can she save herself?

A young girl has been found in a deserted cemetery. She speaks a foreign language, and she cries for her mother. But nobody claims her. Nobody knows who she is. On the streets of Cork, beggars are being horrifically murdered. But why would anyone want to kill the city's homeless? It's up to DS Katie Maguire to find out. Katie's fiancé is fighting his own battle: against illegal puppy farming, a lucrative black market run by Ireland's most fearsome gangs. When the investigations collide, who will Katie save first?

The severed head of Micky Crounan, local baker, is grinning gruesomely up from the bottom tier of his own cake. Katie Maguire of the Irish Garda is baffled--until another local businessman goes missing in horrific circumstances. Soon Katie is on the trail of a debt-collecting gang calling themselves the Kings of Erin. But these are very dangerous men. And they will stop at nothing to throw Katie off the trail...

In Blarney, Cork, an old millworker's cottage guards its secrets. In 1921 a mother, father and their two young children disappeared from this house. And now, 95 years later, their mummified bodies have been discovered under the floorboards. As DS Katie Maguire investigates, the flames of old family rivalries flare up once more...and Katie is caught in the crossfire.

In a nursing home on the outskirts of Cork, an elderly nun lies dead. She has been suffocated. It looks like a mercy killing - until another sister from the same convent is found viciously murdered, floating in the Glashaboy river. Why would anyone want to kill them? As she investigates, DS Katie Maguire discovers a 50-year-old secret that just might lead her to the killer...if the killer doesn't find her first.

Beatrice Scarlet is the apothecary's daughter. She can mix medicines to save lives - but she can't save the lives of her parents. An orphan at just sixteen, Beatrice marries and emigrates to America. New Hampshire, 1756: In the farming community where Beatrice now lives, pigs are found dead with slices of looking-glass embedded in their mouths. According to scripture this is the work of Satan, but Beatrice suspects the hands of men. She must act quickly to unmask the killer - or become the next victim herself....

A young woman is rushed to the hospital with stabbing pains. The chief surgeon performs a C-section and delivers a catastrophically malformed foetus that is somehow alive.... Sewage engineer Gemma is plunged into a ghostly darkness in the tunnel where she works. She escapes, but her boss goes missing in the chaos. He is later found alive...but his legs have been severed and his eyes pulled out.

Last year, DS Katie Maguire and her team destroyed the biggest drug trafficker in Cork. So how is the city's drug trade at an all-time high? Meanwhile, a spate of violent attacks which leave victims severely disabled has brought confidence in the Garda to an all-time low. As Katie investigates, she realises that the two cases might be connected. Someone is using brain-damaged victims to smuggle drugs into the country. And the only way to find out more is to go in undercover....

The girl had been staring into her mirror all morning before she picked up the small bottle of sulphuric acid and poured it over her forehead. Samira was a young woman with her whole life ahead of her. What could have brought her to this? DC Jerry Pardoe and DS Jamila Patel of Tooting Police suspect it's suicide. But then a meek husband kills his wife, and the headteacher of the local school throws her pupils out of a window. It's no longer a random outbreak of horrific crimes. It's a deadly virus. And it's spreading.

Henry was the first to reach the girl, found sleeping on the beach, with his friends Gil and Susan. When they learn what has happened to her, they are thrown into a mystery that nightmares are made of. The young girl has been forced to host a hideous malevolence that insinuates itself into the bodies and minds of thousands of unsuspecting people. The only hope of saving them is to become Night Warriors, an ancient Order with the power to infiltrate the dream world, and destroy the original source.

At first the rules were simple: quarantine the city and let the plague die. So men and women closed their doors and lived in lockdown, fighting for survival against a disease as contagious and destructive as the Black Death. A disease for which there was no known cure. But the plague did not die. And so, at lunchtime on a Friday afternoon, the president announces the new rules. Every American should take up arms to protect the disease-free zones. Anyone attempting to leave the plague-zone must be shot.

One cold spring morning in County Cork, two fishermen find a bundle of rags floating in the Blackwater River. It is the mutilated corpse of a retired music teacher. His hands and feet are bound, and his neck bears the mark of a garrotting wire. The Garda want to wrap this case up before the press get hold of it. But when a second man is found murdered, the body bearing all the same marks as the first, it looks like the hallmark of a serial killer...

In the middle of Cork, in the middle of the day, a fire crackles in a local dance studio. Thirteen women, all promising stars of Irish folk, die in the blaze, their young lives cut short by a tragic accident. But where others see tragedy, DCI Katie Maguire sees murder. This is not the first fire to sweep through Cork. And in one previous case, the victims were dead before the fire was started. As Katie Maguire investigates the strange, obsessive world of competitive Irish folk dancing, she must face her most chilling killer yet.