A forcibly retired marine investigates the disappearance of a young girl. Lieutenant-Colonel Jack Steele is too honest for Washington. If any other Marine Corps investigator had noticed a congressman's corruption, he might have kept his mouth shut. But Steele knows his ultimate duty and blows the whistle on a treasonous lawmaker, earning himself a pat on the back and a swift kick out the door. Steele returns to his hometown of San Diego, hoping for a quiet retirement. Instead he finds a chilling mystery that will make him question everything about the country he spent so long trying to protect. While helping a friend search for his missing granddaughter, Steele makes his way to...

Jurisdictional disputes, competing agents - the F.B.I., the Bureau of Land Management, and Indian police - and the usual distrust of the citizens of small towns when it comes to dealing with folks from the "big city" combine to make Denver police detective Gabe Wager's life more complex than he'd like. Add to an already volatile mix the fact that the murder he's asked to help investigate took place on the Squaw Point reservation, and what he faces is a ticking bomb, just waiting for an inappropriate moment to explode. After Waco and Ruby Ridge, the F.B.I. is taking as much of a hands-off policy as possible when it comes to matters that might be handled by local authorities. But in La Sal...

Homicide Detective Gabe Wager is faced with a murder that leads him from Denver to southwest Colorado and into the tangled and secretive relationships of polygamist cults. This novel was the basis of the Charles Bronson movie, "Messenger of Death."

When a sailor dies under unusual circumstances, Raiford goes undercover on the high seas. The Rossi family received only a handful of letters after their son shipped out on the supertanker Aurora Victorious. The first dispatches were from Harold himself, describing the blend of tedium and excitement that defined life onboard the ship. The last communication came from the ship's owners: four brief sentences informing them that their son had died and been buried at sea. Desperate to know more, the Rossis turn to James and Julie Raiford, the father-daughter detective team behind the Touchstone Agency. As the Raifords soon learn, work on the open sea is dangerous--and asking questions can...

The first in the "Devlin Kirk" private eye series finds 28 year-old Devlin Kirk investigating industrial sabotage that leads to death. Criss-crossing the Denver of guarded estates, hospital wards, and melting spring snow, Kirk desperately wants to solve his first case and, more importantly, to solve something about himself.

Devlin investigates a missing Salvadoran's gruesome fate Devlin Kirk and his partner Bunchcroft are Denver's finest industrial security experts, even if Denver doesn't see it that way. Their last big case got them out of debt, but since then the well has been dry. Their firm is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy when Nestor Calamaro, a young illegal immigrant whose family is close to Bunch, disappears. Kirk can't afford any pro bono work, but Bunch talks him into the good deed. Missing persons cases are usually simple. This one is not. Nestor's trail leads Kirk and Bunch to two more missing immigrants, all of whom are connected to Antibodies Research, a biotech start-up whose work...

Devlin Kirk and his partner, Homer Bunchcroft, become entangled in a mix of cases that involve-among other things-industrial crimes and Japanese Yakuza criminals. Asked to be a body guard for the wife of a wealthy businessman, Bunch discovers that the warrior code of "bushido" has come to mean "ambushido."

When a stripper is murdered, Gabe Wager turns the red-light district inside out. More than any other establishment on Denver's red-light strip, the Cinnamon Club has taken advantage of the new law allowing all-nude dancing. What was once confined to back rooms now takes center stage, and the activities in the club's private section grow ever more depraved. Annette Sheldon is the Cinnamon Club's rising star until her body is found dumped in an alley, eyes pecked out by scavenging magpies. Homicide detective Gabe Wager and his partner pull Annette's husband in for questioning, and though they don't think he killed her, they do think he's lying about something. When a second dancer is...

A botched coke bust forces Wager to go undercover for the first time in years. For six months, the Denver narcotics team and the DEA have built a case against a cocaine-dealing heavy named Farnsworth. When Detective Reitman makes the final buy, he runs a field test to make sure the package of powder he's just purchased is really cocaine. The test is positive, and the bust goes down. Afterwards, the DEA's lab says that Reitman was wrong - he'd just bought two and a half pounds of harmless, legal lactose. The case is thrown out, Reitman is busted down to uniform work, and Gabe Wager has to pick up the pieces. The department asks Detective Wager to go undercover and build a new case...