Showing results by author "Blake Banner" in All Categories

October, 2010, Sally Jones had been stabbed in the heart in her apartment on Commonwealth Avenue, in the Bronx. Her coat was on the back of her chair. Her shoes were beside her bed, her clothes were neatly folded, and she was dead under the sheets.

There is a time bomb ticking down toward a global extinction event. The bomb has a name, and everybody knows where it is. In fact, people pay to go and see it, and have picnics around it. It’s called the Yellowstone Caldera, and when it next blows it will probably take out mankind.

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.

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.

A leak at GCHQ–the UK’s version of the NSA–means that sensitive Allied and Israeli intelligence is being fed to Iran and Israel’s wider enemies. ODIN, the Five Eyes’ ultra-secret Special Operations Office, has teamed up their best operative, Alex Mason, with the Mossad’s Captain Aila Gallin to investigate and plug the leak.

Colonel Kostas Marcović was one of the butchers of the Vukovar Hospital massacre. He was a mark like any other. Except that Marcović was hiding on St George Island in the Caribbean, where the Colombian cartel Bloque Meta was trying to open up a new path to Florida. And Harry had a big problem with drug cartels, a problem that threatened to pull the whole mission of track.

It should have been a simple drive, from San Francisco International Airport, to Boulder, Wyoming, despite the snow. Was it because Lacklan was tired? Was it because he was thinking about the woman he loved, or the international crisis he had recently caused? Or was it the crazy blizzard that came out of nowhere and blinded him? Whatever it was, it made him turn the wrong way, it made him turn onto Bloody Creek Road, to the ghost town of Independence, population twenty-five.

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.

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.

In a world where anarchy and crime are surging, the man who calls himself Rogue begins his search for the truth – about who he is, what he’s done, and above all else, why? Friend and foe draw near. Offering aid. To find answers. To seek truth. But who can be trusted? And who secretly plots to destroy him? LA private detective Dave Martial seems genuine, but who is the man really? Then there is Special Agent Elroy Jones, and the enigmatic Dr. Elizabeth Grant who seems to know more about him than he knows of himself. Are their motives pure? Or is there more than lies beneath the surface?

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.

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.

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.

Rogue is a man with total amnesia. A man searching for himself. But all he finds is a brutal killer with a deep hatred for narcos. Then somebody tells him: find Kristos. Kristos, the elusive figure who might hold the key to his forgotten past. The hunt takes him to a desolate town in North Dakota in deep winter, then goes cold. Very cold. With a brutal snowstorm moving south from Canada and the disappearance of a mother and daughter from a local ranch, Rogue can't ignore the family’s cry for help.

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.

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.

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.

At forty-something, Bob Walklet was about to make a fortune with his IT company. But he'd made the mistake of falling in love with his assistant, twenty-something Sorka Williams. They were crazy about each other, and Bob had told his wife, Sheila - a thirty-something, ex-cop insurance consultant. He wanted a divorce. And there was a prenup. When he was found in his bedroom, stabbed in the heart, her DNA was literally all over him, her prints were on the knife and a neighbor had seen her hurrying from the house at the time of death.

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....

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.