Marian Larch Mysteries

Kelly Ingram is a rising star who has everything going for her - great looks, a livewire personality, enough talent to get by on, a new TV series, and a new lover. She also has an agent and a producer who hate each other, but they still manage to work well enough together to keep Kelly's career moving in the right direction. But then a friend is murdered, a harmless scriptwriter who should have been no threat to anyone.

A crafty corporate raider known as the "Big Bad Wolf" plans a blackmail scheme against three shareholders, all of whom have been accused of murder.

King Sarcowicz, known to his friends and acquaintances as King Sauerkraut, means well. He even brings in his elderly neighbor's garbage cans when he happens to remember. But King is careless of people. As a partner in Keystone Robotics in Pittsburgh, King has a way of antagonizing staff and customers. He's great with machines, but give him a human being and he doesn't know where to begin. His life seems to be made up of work and consuming large quantities of beer and eggs. King is brilliant, however. Nobody would deny that. He's just dreadful with paperwork and deadlines and organization and personal relations.

Assigned to a precinct on Manhattan's Lower East Side and stuck with an incompetent partner, New York Police Sergeant Marian Larch must rely on old friends when a savage stabbing and gangland-style slayings occur on her beat.

Cooling off at another precinct when a big case leaves her hopping mad at the system, Larch comes to the aid of her Broadway actress friend when memorabilia begins disappearing, and is tempted by another firm's offer until a killer makes a move.

Struggling for answers when two murders occur - the first on a crowded city bus, and the second a busy subway - inexplicably without witnesses, police lieutenant Marian Larch uncovers a deadly murder-for-hire ring.

In the vicious battle for custody of a four-year-old boy, the stakes are much too high. When a string of coldly casual murders ups the ante still further, Lieutenant Marian Larch steps in. Then the killer starts coming after her and everything she holds dear, and all she can think about is getting back out again - alive.