THE DEAD COLD MYSTERY SERIES: BOOKS 5-8

Book 5: The Sins of the Father
When Silvie Martin moves to New York from Texas with her husband, Simon, and their one year-old daughter, Mary, she is filled with the joy and hope she derives from their shared faith. But no sooner have they moved into their new home, which backs on to their church, than her husband is brutally murdered before her very eyes. The only trouble is, the shock has completely erased her memory…

Now, eighteen years later, Detectives Stone and Dehan have to piece together a crime where their prime witness remembers nothing, and the suspects are as bizarre as they are unlikely: Reverend Paul Truelove, bombastic and irresistible to women, Humberto, the mysterious, shambling freak who speaks a language only he understands, El Chato, the Mexican housebreaker, and even Sylvie herself…

But Stone and Dehan know, where sex and religion mix, nothing is ever simple. And the deeper they investigate, the more convinced they are, there is something they are not seeing…

Book 6: Strange and Sinister Path
There is nothing unusual about a young Catholic girl from the Bronx winding up raped, beaten, strangled and decapitated – unless she winds up that way in Lefthand Canyon, in the Colorado Rockies, where there hasn’t been a murder since 1922. Then it’s unusual enough to become a problem for the sheriff of Lee County. And when he finds no blood at the scene and no physical evidence, it becomes more than a problem. It becomes a headache – for five long years.

That’s when he bats it back to the Bronx, to the 43rd precinct and right onto Detectives Stone and Dehan’s desk. Let them deal with it.

But Lee County is one of the remotest parts of the USA, and Stone finds his pool of suspects limited, to say the least. Was it Greg, the tough, plain-talking rancher? Was it Ingrid and Alfredo, the bitter, puritanical in-laws? Or somebody in the off-grid, dope farming community at the Shack?

Or was it somebody else, somebody completely different…?

Book 7: The Heart to Kill
Dave Thorndike, an investigative reporter on the New York Telegraph, is in the habit of disappearing for weeks at a time. So when he vanishes in the winter of 2008, investigating the story of his life, nobody worries – until he shows up shot in the head with his own 9mm - no laptop and no story.

It wasn’t much to go on in 2008, but when Stone and Dehan pick it up ten years later, the case is as cold as the icy winds blowing off the East River. Both his wife and his mistress had motive, but the killing has all the hallmarks of an execution.

Things get deep when Dehan realizes Thorndike’s investigation was into non other than Senator Carol Hennessy, head of the Hennessy Foundation and presidential candidate - a woman whose opponents tended to die young. But that’s not the only thing she notices. She also sees Shelly Pierce, the sexy new editor of the NY Telegraph, coming on to Stone. A fact to which Stone seems totally blind…

Book 8: Unnatural Murder
Sebastian Acosta has been gunned down at three AM on a Saturday morning, sitting behind the wheel of a beaten up Toyota. The passenger door is open and a few paces away his pal, Luis Irizarry, lies with his life ebbing away through two gunshot wound in his chest. It should be a red hot case, except that fifteen years earlier, Rosario Rojas was raped and strangled in that self same house, the house Luis was crawling toward, the house that belonged to Angela Rojas, Rosario’s daughter.

Rosario, who was like a sister to Marta Flores, Detective Dehan’s mother.

Things get more complicated when it emerges that Rosario had started to get involved in a set whose morals Marta had considered a little too lax, a bit too broad-minded; when it emerges that the two boys who just got shot are the sons of two of the couples that made up that set.