Showing results by narrator "D.E. Ring" in All Categories

Jack is seconded to the tiny British Intelligence Department, little more than a map room in 1880. He’s assigned to the Balkans, Turkey, and Africa Desk – a hodgepodge of low priority. Jack’s got nearly nothing to do, but he wants to learn. He works on his Arabic and he seeks out experts on Islam and the complicated politics of the Ottoman Empire. When trouble erupts in Egypt, his friends offer to pay his way to Cairo. Perhaps Jack can help free the Egyptians from the control of Constantinople.

A pleasant middle-aged woman dies on the Barrachois army base. The army insists it was an accident, but the woman was working on a project no one will discuss. When a second middle-aged woman from the base is murdered, husband and wife Jimmy and Notepad Urquhart are summoned to investigate a situation with dire international implications.

Barrachois overlooks the cold, watery edge of the world. It’s a small city crooked by necessity, but an oddly safe place–joyous, even. Until two little kids witness the death of the limping man. With an unerring eye for period atmosphere, crime fiction writer D.E. Ring builds a layered, mesmeric portrait of a town thriving in the years after WW2. It's pragmatic and unconcerned about its crooked tendencies. It's a smuggler's paradise, and the Mafia has long been involved.

It’s a sunny, lazy day in autumn. A new bronze plaque, with the names of Barrachois’ Second World War dead, is being mounted on the side of the city cenotaph. A chain gives way; the heavy plaque swings wildly and strikes the cenotaph, piercing its stone wall. Standing inside the monument is a mummified corpse, dressed in a lawyer’s gown. Inside the pockets of the victim are newspaper clippings, clues the murderer has left twenty years earlier. Why?

Jack rescues a very public figure, and he’s drawn into a gilded world with few rules and heady stakes. It’s 1880: The world is small; the players have perilous ambitions. Espionage has always been a polite game, but now the stakes are changing.

Newlyweds Jimmy Urquhart and Sandy (Notepad) MacDonald head to New York for a Manhattan honeymoon. The new Mrs. Urquhart knows the city very well, perhaps too well. Her surprising friendships with some notable people re-awakens some of Jimmy's concern about her past, but Notepad makes it clear she will not talk about it.