Showing results by author "Blake Banner" in All Categories

Yasha Orlev has disappeared, and with him a flash drive. Only two men in the world know exactly what is on that flash drive, Orlev himself and the man called Nero, the director of the highly secretive ODIN, the organization that runs the Five Eyes. And they both know that the contents of that drive can cripple the USA and trigger World War III.

The Cold Cases team at the 43rd Precinct in the Bronx tend to focus on homicides. But now, Detective John Stone, head of the team, is curious about a two-year-old rape case. A rape case where Sadie Byrne got HIV, turned out to be a rapid progressor and died of AIDS within a year. She never named her attacker.

In the wake of the Vietnam debacle, when the mighty USA was humiliated by Soviet-backed Vietcong, the CIA plotted to drag the USSR into a "Russian Vietnam" in Afghanistan. The plan was such a success it led ultimately to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Now, 40 years on, as Russia limps, scarred and crippled, from the battlefields of Kherson, Donetsk, and Kharkiv, Colonel Alexandrina Vitsin swears to drag the USA into an American Ukraine.

The weather was freezing, but the case wasn’t cold, it was too hot. It looked open and shut: Dr Agnes Shine had shot Dr Jose Robles eight times with a Sig Sauer Tacops p226, while they were drinking Californian wine in her living room; then she’d disappeared. But Assistant DA Costas Varufakis didn’t like it and he was leaning on Deputy Inspector John Newman of the 43rd Precinct to have somebody look a bit deeper. That somebody was Detectives John Stone, and his partner Carmen Dehan.

The man called Rogue is driven. He is driven to hunt down, kill and destroy those who traffic death, drugs and prostitution on the streets – those who prey on the weak and the vulnerable. And he is damned good at what he does. What he does not know is why he is driven. Because he doesn’t remember who he is, or how he became the monster he has become. So the man called Rogue is on a mission to destroy the predators, and also a quest to find himself, to discover who – or what - he is.

Hurricane Sarah, the largest in recorded history, is howling in off the Atlantic, straight toward New Orleans—and Lacklan Walker is headed for the eye of the storm. His father’s dying wish was that he keep Marni safe, but Marni has sworn to bring down Omega, the government-within-the government, and that is anything but safe.

The call came on a Sunday morning in March, in Independence: Go to Seattle, meet a man, he will give you instructions. But those instructions send Lacklan on a journey he could not have suspected, protecting a senator who might be the last best hope of mankind, fleeing before the storm, hunted by killers and law enforcement alike. And when he finally reaches his destination, he discovers his ordeal has only just begun… But Lacklan, after ten years in the SAS, after a life of killing, has had enough.

When SAS vet. Lacklan Walker buries his father at the family graveyard in New England, the last person he expects to see at the funeral is his childhood friend and sweetheart, Marni — the woman who’d killed his father. To make things more complicated, his father’s dying wish was that Lacklan should look after her and protect her. Because Marni is on a mission, a mission to bring down the shadowy organization called Omega, the government within a government, a mission that might just save Mankind.

Detective John Stone had a marriage made in heaven. His wife was young, beautiful and smart, and she was his partner in the Cold Cases unit at the 43rd. They were tight, close, and practically telepathic. At least, that was what he’d always thought - until she got an interest outside their marriage, and that interest became a passion.

When Karl and Christen Redfern were brutally murdered in their apartment in the Bronx, a lot of things were never explained, like why he was stabbed only twice, with clinical precision, but she was stabbed 20 times in the heart, in a crazed frenzy; like what happened to their Chevy Impala, and why Christen’s sister, Ingrid, had never reported it missing. But the biggest mystery of all was perhaps where Karl and Christen’s daughter Amy had disappeared to, along with her boyfriend, Charlie, on the very night of her parents’ murder.

Mommy’s Boy had not killed for five years. Detective Alvarez of the 43rd in the Bronx had lined up his suspects, but each of them had a more or less credible alibi, and he was nowhere close to solving the case. Then, the killings had stopped, and the case went cold....

An 18-year-old girl sets out one November night to walk five blocks down Gleason Avenue to her boyfriend’s house. He calls her and she tells him she’s on her way. It’s a walk that should take ten minutes, but she never arrives. When she does turn up, it’s five days later, washed up on the banks of the River Bronx, in Soundview Park, strangled to death.

Cherise Brown, her small daughter Shevron, her husband Earl. The only survivor, eight year-old Leroy who witnessed the whole thing. His story, that his father broke his sister’s neck, his mother stabbed his father in the back and his dad, before dying, in a kind of berserker rage, took the knife and killed his mother. Four years later Leroy Brown is murdered along with his adoptive sister, Lea. He is stabbed in the back, while his sister’s throat is cut, in a tool shed in the back yard of his adoptive family.

The neighbor called it in because the house next door, normally empty and silent, at two AM was a blaze of light, with people shouting and car doors slamming, like gunshots in the night. Until he heard two reports that echoed down the dark, silent street and spoke of death, two reports that were not slamming doors, but gunshots.

Lilith Jones was a statistical anomaly. Her mother found her face down on the frozen sidewalk by the light of the single streetlamp on Pugsley Avenue, with her neighbor’s scissors stuck in her back. The scissors belonged to her neighbor, and so did all the fingerprints on them. Her neighbor, Pat Perkins, hated Lilith. She hated her because her own husband, her brother, and her daughter all loved Lilith. Lilith was charming, beautiful, smart, and adorable.

There hadn’t been a crime in Dexter, upstate New York, since 1865. It was a long time coming, but when it came, on September 21st, 2012, it was ugly. It was murder.

Detective John Stone of the NYPD heads up the 43rd’s cold case unit, in the Bronx. In a place like the Bronx you get a lot of cold cases. So Stone has one golden rule for investigating a case: It must have some remote chance of being solved. So what made him choose the Al Chester case, the 60-year-old schizophrenic murdered on his birthday, 12 years earlier, alone in his apartment—a case where there was zero forensic evidence?

It was a real Jack in the box. Only this box was a UPS delivery to crime novelist Helena Magnusson, and the Jack was Jack Connors–her husband; or at least his head. The rest of him was probably in the East River somewhere.