What do you do when your job causes the death of your wife and child? How do you go on?

Tell Lyon left the Border Patrol to start over as head of the police in New Austin, Ohio. Hoping that the problems of the past never reappear, heading a small law enforcement force might just be what he needs.

One of his first duties is to meet with the sheriffs of the two neighboring areas, Sheriff Able Hawk from Horton County and Walt Pierce from Vale County. He quickly realizes that there will be territorial and overlapping boundaries between these close-in proximity areas. Also, he quickly concludes that both have a completely opposite approach to law enforcement.

The problem of immigration, both legal and illegal, is the focus point for each of these three law enforcement leaders. How the three of them approach this realistic problem is visibly apparent in El Gavilan.

El Gavilan, which means hawk in Spanish in the nickname given to the highly opinionated Sheriff Hawk. This man assists the legal immigrants in numerous ways within the community but has no patience for the illegals. With introducing Tell into the community, he discovers a kindred spirit which assists in developing their respect and mutual friendship.

Tell quickly reestablishes his life and begins to develop a personal relationship with Patricia as she is ending her interest in Shawn O’Hara, the editor of the local newspaper. When Shawn is beaten, his resentment is focused on Tell.

The story centers on the brutal rape and murder of Thalia. Her surviving family includes her mother and daughter. Shawn O’Hara, the editor, had been with Thalia the night before her death. He slunk off from her early the next morning without a word to her. He was the last one, except the murderer, to see her alive.

The story revolves around the Thalia’s case now and Tell’s past, giving insight into the motivations of the characters. The action is non-stop. This investigation is fast-paced and somewhat predictable. You just don’t know how it will be proven and how the personal problems can be resolved.

Craig McDonald is a writer, journalist, and editor who has been nominated for numerous awards for both his short stories and books.

El Gavilan is graphic both sexually and violently. The story is fast-paced, enthralling, and one novel that you will not quickly, if ever forget.

Detective McLusky is a disgruntled DI in Bristol, England. He is single, doesn’t eat right, smokes, etc. The police station he works at is rather small and so is his office. He really is not the happiest of men.

There is a murder of an individual who is found in Leigh Woods. The victim is partly buried and stoned to death. The murder victim is a drug addict and so we are being lead to believe this is a deal gone bad.

Within days, there are many drug-related deaths that are not as easily explained. It seems as if the addicts died by ingesting heroin that has been laced with anthrax.

After this, the death toll keeps going up with victims being drugged to death and then others that are found in the woods having been brutally killed with stones.

The story is well written, but there were so many characters we don’t really get to know. It seems they were just thrown in the story to fill the pages. The ending was really rather clipped. It was a little too easily tied up with those characters that we didn’t really get to know.

Jon Land and Robert Fitzpatrick have combined to bring to paper the greatest “nonfiction novel” I have had the honor to read. The story of how the FBI protected and sheltered one of the most vicious and deranged killers in history is beyond what any fiction writer could scarcely imagine as a storyline and what Truman Capote had in mind when he coined the phrase in the wake of In Cold Blood. The story begins when Robert Fitzpatrick was transferred to the Boston Office of the FBI to do what he had done his whole career: close. And he was transferred to Boston to fix a broken office and reign in the problems there, just as he had done in Miami office with the ABSCAM investigation on top of his roles in the Martin Luther King Jr. assassination and civil rights murders and bombings in the 60s in Mississippi.

This book is such a page burner that I had to stop and see if the sun was still up. I simply could not put it down. It grabs you from page one and leads you on the ride of your life, and on that ride you will be brought to your knees in fear as to how corrupt the Justice Department and FBI were in this case. Officials in both simply sat back and allowed an Irish Boston gangster named Whitey Bulger to do whatever he wanted as long as they thought he was giving them info on New England’s Italian mob. And Bulger played them to the very end.

This will go down as one of the blackest eyes the FBI has ever received, Through his tireless work, Robert Fitzpatrick tried to make everyone up to the assistant director and head of the Organized Crime unit in Washington understand that they were being conned by one of the greatest con men in history. †The FBI was so sure that Whitey Bulger was giving them what they needed they did everything they could to stop Agent Fitzpatrick from doing his job to the point that he finally had to leave the only life he had known and loved and respected and honored his whole career.

The recent capture of Bulger in June did not at all close one of the darkest chapters in the storied history of the FBI. Soon he will go on trial for at least nineteen murders, most of which were committed while working for the FBI and at least a dozen after Fitzpatrick recommended his tenure as an informant be ended. The Bureau did serve up one of Whitey’s handlers, John Connolly, who was convicted and sent to prison for accepting bribes and, more recently, accessory to the murder of one Fitzpatrick’s own informants who could have given Bulger up once and for all.

This book is a huge read, providing an inside look as to how bad things can get and how many people’s lives are thrown away toward what is believed to be the greater good. Some reports link Bulger to over forty murders in total—think about the national manhunts that have been authorized for far, far less than that.†The great part is that after reading the book you’ll be primed to follow the next chapter in this true story in what promises to be one of the highest profile murder trials in Massachusetts history when Whitey’s day of reckoning finally comes in April.

I had the great honor of speaking to Robert Fitzpatrick for about thirty minutes on the phone and learned even more of the inside story and also the fact that for quite awhile after leaving the FBI he was in constant fear for his life. The fact that this novel-like tale is real, that it actually happened, makes it in my mind one the best thrillers ever written along with one of the most disturbing books, as it confronts us with the overriding question of how could this happen? Fitzpatrick supplies no easy answers; sometimes just posing the question is enough.

When author Bazell’s Beat the Reaper hit the stores a couple of years ago, critics and readers alike were unsure what to think. Some instantly loved his style, others were put off by it. But as word of mouth spread, more and more people jumped on the band wagon and before you know it, even book clubs were discussing the book.

Bazell is back with his next installment of the life trials of Dr. Pietro Brnwa, former hitman for the mob who is now in the Federal Witness Protection Program (code name Ismael). After testifying against his former bosses in the mob, our protagonist had been put through medical school and in Reaper was working in a New York hospital’s ER until the mob found him and sent him on the run again. As Wild Thing opens, the doctor has had a crash course in dentistry and is working on a cruise ship-a job he is more than eager to leave behind. So when his handler Marmoset, calls with an offer of relocation he’s ready to go in a flash.

Brwna, who is now going by the name Dr. Lionel Azimuth, is sent to Portland, Oregon to meet with a reclusive billionaire who is obsessed with the possibility that there really are sea monsters. He has been given the opportunity to travel to see just such a creature in a lake in Minnesota. Wisely, the recluse has decided to send his personal paleontologist to check it out first and wants to hire Azimuth to go along to protect her.

Although this is a totally different type of story than the first book in the series, some of the hallmarks of Bazell’s writing are present. The author, who has both a medical degree from Columbia and a BA in writing from Brown, has quite a broad background of knowledge. He manages to weave some of the most interesting facts into his novels without it seeming like an information dump. He also has included the little “asides” in the form of footnotes at the bottom of nearly every page.

Wild Thing is a rapid paced adventure teetering on the absurd while being laugh out loud funny. Having read the first book is in no way necessary to enjoy this book as the stories are independent of each other. Readers had best set aside a long stretch of reading time as they will not want to set this book aside until the end.

O’Connell has brought her star protagonist, Kathy Mallory back for her eleventh appearance in The Chalk Girl. While through the book readers will see some cracks in the icy cold persona of Mallory, the book in some ways is the most disturbing of the series-especially if the reader is squeamish about rats.

As The Chalk Girl opens, an effort to rid one area of Central Park of rats has backfired and the normally nocturnal, people-shy creatures are out in force in the daylight and amped up on chemicals that were meant to kill them. The chemicals have also made the rats both vicious and supercharged so that they are now actively attacking people and climbing trees. When a camp director from New Jersey suffers a heart attack at the sight of all the rats, her campers scatter. A cleaning lady making her way across the park has been watching the group as well as a small elflike redheaded child playing nearby. When the police are sent to round up the children, she insists they need to look for the little girl as well.

That little girl, who turns out to be somewhat of an expert on rats, is also found to be a kidnap victim from Chicago. It is through this small girl that readers see a side of Mallory not seen before. The child suffers from Williams Disease, a condition which leaves her vulnerable to all sorts of danger as she seeks affection for people. The person she has latched onto is Mallory. Mallory’s friend Charles Butler takes a special interest in the little girl and having known Mallory for years, is concerned about the child’s need for contact with Mallory. Because the child may have witnessed a horrible crime, Mallory is afraid that she is possibly in danger from the killer. Both Mallory and Charles set out to protect her at any cost but they each question the other’s reasons.

Tied to the crime the child has witnessed is a long ago closed case of a young boy’s death, ruled of natural causes. He too was a witness to a crime and he too was vulnerable, only there was no Mallory or Charles to protect him.

This case, which is really multiple cases tied together, spans several years and takes readers into the darkness of mental illness, drug abuse and corruption at the highest levels in both the police department and the medical examiners’ office. It is also a book that will haunt readers for a long time after the last page is turned.

In vitro fertilization is a common occurrence now but in 1975, the subject was very controversial. Dr. Colin Sanford, an obstetrician in Emerald, Washington, is determined to be the first doctor to produce a baby by this method. He has recruited Dr. Giselle Hearn, a laboratory geneticist-embryologist to work with him. Because of Hearn’s department chair, their work must remain a secret. Joyce Kennett, a patient of Dr. Sanford, is determined to have a baby. With the help of Sanford and Hearn, Kennett gives birth to a healthy baby boy.

Dr. Sanford has assured Kennett that when he is in a position to make a public announcement about the baby’s birth, there will be no end to the publicity and Kennett will gain financially through the publicity.

However, before any announcement can be made, James Kennett, Joyce’s husband and the baby’s father, goes on a shooting spree, kills Dr. Hearn, and then kills himself. This is where Detective Ernie Baumgartner steps in and determines to discover what motivated James Kennett to murder a doctor and then commit suicide.

The reader hears the story from the viewpoint of Dr. Colin Sanford as well as from the viewpoint of Detective Baumgartner. Detective Baumgartner’s superiors keep pressing him to close the case since they feel it is obvious that James Kennett is simply a man who suffered a mental breakdown but the Baumgarnter is sure there is much, much more to the story. Not only risking the wrath of his superiors Baumgarnter neglects his wife to the point where she leaves him and he has to beg a place to sleep from an old acquaintance.

Larry Karp, in my opinion, has written an outstanding and intriguing book. A Perilous Conception is a mystery I am very glad I read and would recommend the book as an exciting read. The conclusion is a surprising and satisfying end to this excellent book.

Ella Clah mystery fans, rejoice! The 17th novel in writing duo Aimee and David Thurlo’s series featuring Tribal Police Investigator Ella Clah, Black Thunder, is now available in your local brick & mortar bookstores and through this web site. I loved reading the 16th book, Never-Ending-Snake, the first one I’d read in the series, and Black Thunder is also an excellent, page-turning and suspenseful read.

Life on the Rez (as the authors term the New Mexico Navajo Indian Reservation where the Ella Clah series is set) is different, with its own atmosphere and its own political and religious rules. There are the views of the Traditionalists, the New Traditionalists, and the Modernists, and the authors show great sensitivity and respect to each of these groups and their diverse beliefs in their novels. Their intimate knowledge of the ways of life, culture, and mores of the Navajos shows in their writing, and makes their mystery series a unique reading experience.

When a construction crew worker hits something solid with his shovel and digs a bit deeper, he is shocked to discover a human hand, connected to the body of a murdered man. The man has been shot twice in the back of his head, execution style. Ella Clah and her partner Justine Goodluck secure the crime scene and lead the investigation under the hot summer sun, discovering eventually the graves of two more men and one woman. As in some of the other Ella Clah novels, who has jurisdiction comes into play as a part of the plot, as one of the bodies is found just across the border of the Rez, making that homicide fall under the jurisdiction of the Sheriff’s Department of San Juan County.

Ella, Justine, and San Juan Detectective Dan Nez, and FBI agent Dwayne Blalock work together to solve who committed the murders. By clues such as the growth of native plant species, which Ella learns about through consulting with her mother, Rose (who is an expert on native plants, being one of her tribe’s revered “Plant People”), they are able to determine the approximate time when the victims were murdered. Each was murdered in the spring, and with another spring rapidly approaching, Ella and her team must discover who the killer is before he strikes yet again.

Besides solving the case, which looks more and more like the handiwork of a serial killer or killers, Ella has her plate full dealing with personal issues, like her teen daughter Dawn’s skipping school, and her mother’s new obsession with cooking. Ella believes that Rose is trying to hide something that is deeply bothering her, but she can’t get her mother to talk to her about it. Including these views into Ella’s personal life, to me, adds a three-dimensionality to her character and makes you care for what happens to her and her family, drawing you deeper into the plots of the Clah novels.

Also, Ella has to contend with members of the tribe who call themselves the “Fierce Ones.” They demand that justice be done, while hypocritically threatening Ella and Justine. As if dealing with the Fierce Ones and their demands for a vigilante style of justice isn’t enough, Ella has yet a further complication in her life: her boyfriend, the Reverend Ford Tome, is being transferred and he wants Ellah and Dawn to come with him. Ella has a decision to make: should she follow the part of her heart that loves Tome and move to be with him; or, should she listen and obey the part of her heart that tells her to stay on the Rez, and remain a Tribal Police Investigator?

Black Thunder, the seventeenth novel in the Ella Clah mystery series, is a page-turner of the first order. It can be read as a stand-alone, though I highly recommend you also check out the entire series. Black Thunder is a Must Read for fans of the Ella Clah mysteries, and is a novel anyone who loves great mysteries will enjoy reading.

Faye Kellerman is one of my favorite authors and Gun Games is such an amazing book. It is definitely a must read book. Just a warning, you will stay up all night to finish it.

The story starts with 15-year-old Gabe Whitman sitting in a coffee shop minding his own business when a group of kids come into Starbucks looking for trouble. One of the boys tells Gabe that he is going to sit his seat and he better move now and then he shows Gabe the gun tucked in his waist band. Gabe handles it with such finesse and turns to try to be friendly with the thug. In doing so he disarms him mentally. Gabe is a very talented pianist and is home schooled so he doesn’t know whom these kids are. He is living with his father’s friend detective Peter Decker and his wife Rina Lazarus. Children in the school that these thugs attend are committing suicide and no one can understand why. It takes a while to connect the dots and figure out what is really happening.

This is a great read and has everything I want in a book including mystery, suspense, a puzzle, romance and a bit of humor.

Cora and Sherry are back in $10,000 in Small, Unmarked Puzzles, the thirteenth book in the Puzzle Lady series, though in this installment of the popular series, readers don’t see much of Sherry since she spends most of the book in the hospital giving birth to her first child.

Cora however is called away from the hospital by Sherry and Cora’s attorney friend Becky Baldwin. It seems that one of Becky’s clients needs to have blackmail ransom delivered and it needs to be Cora who does the drop. Because this is Cora (and because it’s a murder mystery) it should come as no surprise to readers that when Cora shows up at the drop site, the only person there is a dead body-with a Sudoku puzzle on him. As faithful readers know, this is good news for Cora because, in spite of her puzzle column in the paper, she can’t solve crosswords but she is a whiz at Sudoku. Unfortunately for Cora, a crossword puzzle shows up shortly in connection with the case. With Sherry, the real crossword guru otherwise occupied in the hospital, Cora finds herself in a tight spot.

Cora has grown over the course of this series. In the early books she was portrayed as a drunk. Fortunately, author Hall has allowed Cora to get her drinking under control and although she still manages to get herself into a number of scrapes, at least she’s aware of her choices, poor as they may be. Sometimes her past still comes back to haunt her. In this book her no good, lowlife ex-husband Melvin appears on the scene.

Fans of Puzzle Lady will be happy with this entry in the series. For those readers who have not yet enjoyed this comical series, it would not be impossible to enjoy this book as a first, but I would strongly urge that they read a couple of the very early books to understand the premise behind Sherry, Cora and the puzzles.

As with all of the books in the series, there are puzzles galore for the reader to solve-or not as the solutions appear a page or two later.

Quite a combination of assorted characters, plots, twists, and other necessaries to building a good novel. The author’s basic idea is certainly one of today’s world as he builds on a monumental Ponzi scheme. Without a doubt there are many investors interested in recovering at least some part of their contribution to the 60 billion dollars that Abe Cushman has stolen from them.

After Cushman took his own life by jumping from his condo tower’s window to the pavement below, Wall Street and the world felt even more anger. Not only was their money gone but also now the investors would not see the culprit stand trial and eventually go to prison.

There were those however who had thought they would get away with at least a part of the treasure. Many believe that much of the money has been hidden away by some of Cushman’s associates. Little do they know what all is involved in some of the billions that were in fact given to Gerry Collins, the closest associate.

Collins realizes that the money that he has hidden in various accounts as far away as Singapore are now definitely on the “hot seat”. Not only are the investors anxious to find their money but the government is also very interested in the monies but for other reasons.

Many different individuals then get involved in the hunt and many of them have some very different backgrounds. They also have different reasons for hunting for the money.

There is a former mob assassin who had weaseled on the mob to such a degree that he was given the choice of prison or an identity change. He took the identity change for his wife and two children but he continued working while dealing with certain death from cancer.

As the government gets more involved in the search they choose that assassin’s son who is now working in banking to become an undercover worker for them. While working on the case for the government in Singapore he becomes very close with a girl there in the bank who it turns out was laundering the deposits from Collins.

The twists and turns continue at a rapid pace when a former top level banker who went to work in a top Treasury Department for the government goes back to work for the bank that took the biggest hit in the Ponzi scheme. Supposedly his job is to now find the money with assistance from the government.

However there is much more to just finding the money as government involvement becomes more and more pronounced and for a totally different reason.

Quite a book as I mentioned in the beginning. Interesting but definitely involved. It takes a reader’s full concentration to names and details to keep on track as the turns in the road keep coming. But well worth the ride!