Chapter 1 The Western Front, near the village of Viéville-sur-Trey, northwest France Mid-July 1918 They came for Reinhardt as he was sleeping, the door crashing open on a confusion of men and voices that snapped him awake. A shadow loomed over him and he lunged for the Mauser atop the chest by his bed, only…
1. Death sucks. But it’s probably a whole lot better than waking up in an Oklahoma hospital room, plugged into a dozen beeping machines, while a red-cheeked FBI agent screams in your face. Insult to my (serious) injury, it felt like a sadist of a nurse had shoved something very wide and long up my…
CHAPTER 4 Taylor Farr liked a lot of things about being a police officer in Cambridge, but the headquarters building on Sixth Street was not one of them. The six-story brick building was distinguished by a new façade with large LED lighting fixtures on the roof tied directly to the emergency dispatch computer. Electronic cues…
We only go a few more yards before we find the place Jake must have been talking about. It’s like the lagoon where the boats are anchored, but much smaller, a cove surrounded on three sides by sand, and we don’t even pause before diving into the water. When I break back through the surface,…
Chapter One JUNE 2019 Week One: THURSDAY It took him four minutes to circle the block. He drove slowly, looking for a parking space on Jenna’s street while keeping one eye out for surveillance cameras. He’d read somewhere that Midtown had more security cameras per block than any other neighborhood in the city. It made…
PROLOGUE WHEN I WAS twenty-two years old, I left home for the first time and departed for New York City along with a meager cache of savings and the dream of being an actor. Traveling by train from Houston to Chicago to Buffalo and then down into Manhattan, I arrived on New Year’s Eve 1972…
Jay Desmarteaux raised a whole lot of hell in New Jersey after he was released from prison after 25 years for the murder of a rapist bully at his school. Now he’s on the run in his home state of Louisiana, where he traces his roots to an evil family tree that’s grown large and…
My angel, I’ve written you dozens of letters and, now more than ever, regret never having sent a single one of them. I ought to have done. Definitely. You’ve every right to find out what really happened back then. To find out from me, in my own words, words I always believed to be…
Curtain Raiser As the Turkish police began to dig up the remains, Holmes and I gratefully sniffed the morning desert air. It was chilly at this hour but the heat would soon become insupportable. “Remember Nietzsche’s dictum,” the detective remarked, lighting his pipe. “Nothing not written in blood is worth reading.” “Or writing, in this…
Chapter 1 Most of the media had already made up their minds. They were calling Wyatt Butler the worst serial killer in decades. Depraved. Evil. A twisted, calculated madman who had preyed on innocent children. News vans and angry members of the public packed Foley Square outside the New York County Courthouse on this,…
