Showing results by author "Mark McNease" in All Categories

It’s been over a year since Marshall James first became intimately familiar with murder. He’s six months sober now and happily living with the love of his life, LAPD Detective Mac McElroy. Despite the coming storm of AIDS and its devastating toll on the world Marshall knows, his dark days seem to be behind him. Then one night he says the wrong thing, storms out in anger, and walks straight into a nightmare. Someone is setting him up to take the fall for a beautiful corpse. But who would do something so evil, and so planned?

Maggie Dahl returns in Open Secrets. It’s been six months since the media circus surrounding the last murder Maggie solved and a year since her beloved husband David died. The dust seems to have finally settled. Then, one morning, a customer walks in and asks Maggie to do her a favor.

In Black Cat White Paws, recently widowed Maggie Dahl finds herself faced with challenges on all fronts: life alone in a new town, running a business she and her husband had dreamed of and started together, and now pursuing a killer. Her sister, Gerri, moves from Philadelphia to Lambertville, New Jersey, to support her sister and start a new life of her own. Together, the women search for a murderer, helped in critical ways by their neighbor’s cat. A black cat with white paws. A cat whose independence sets it all in motion and sees it through to the end.

Time waits for no one, including Marshall James. Now 58 and living in New York City, Marshall has outlived the expiration date he was given with a cancer diagnosis three years ago. He beat the odds, but he knows he may not beat the clock. So he’s decided to tell a story or three about some murders he was involved in back in the day. The year was 1983. The bar was the Paisley Parrot in Hollywood, a gay, mob-run dive where people came to drink and few of them remembered the night before. Marshall loves his job as a bartender there. But one night, among the regulars, a killer arrives.

This is the first in a gay mystery series, the Kyle Callahan Mysteries. Who killed Teddy the handyman - if anyone killed him at all? Kyle and his life partner Danny Durban live in New York City, where murder never seems to be more than a subway stop away. In this first story, they head to Pride Lodge, their favorite getaway from the City, over what they expect to be a festive Halloween weekend. What they find instead is a web of murder, deceit, and revenge served cold as a knife blade

Laurel and Jeremy Calloway have longed for a new life away from the chaos and confusion of New York City. Driving along a country road in New Jersey with a young real estate agent in the back seat, they almost miss it: a small house in the woods for sale. Laurel immediately thinks this could be the house for them - the house of their dreams, where a simpler life awaits. Laurel can finish her debut novel. Jeremy can look for a job in Philadelphia, just an hour away.

Retired homicide detective Linda Sikorsky and her wife Kirsten McClellan head to Maine from their home in the New Jersey woods for a weekend of rest, relaxation and rewrites as Kirsten finishes drafting her first novel. Bad weather alters their plans, forcing them to stop for the night at the Cliff's Edge, a roadside motel known for secrecy and indiscretion. Something murderous goes bump in the night, sending the women on a search for justice when a young reporter's body is found violated and dumped on a back road.

The Katherine Pride Gallery is the center of high art and low death in Pride and Perilous, book two of the Pride Trilogy and the second of the Kyle Callahan Mysteries. Kyle, an amateur photographer, is about to have his first exhibit at the gallery, located in Manhattan's Meatpacking District. As time ticks away, bodies begin to fall, and Kyle realizes somebody wants this gallery closed forever.

Stalking the party is the most successful serial killer the city has ever seen. He claims his victims in threes and has just begun his newest spree. Detective Linda Sikorsky comes to town to visit Kyle Callahan and his husband Danny Durban. It's her first Pride Parade and may well be her last. Harmless fun turns to terror in a frantic effort to stop the killer once the first body floats to the river's edge. This time it's personal, and this time one of them might not make it out alive.

Julius is an almost accidental warlock, born into a family of witches. He meets the beautiful Charlotte one day at a country fair, and proceeds to dedicate his life to marrying her. Keeping his witching ways a secret, he becomes the night to her day, the guilt to her innocence, as he rushes to solve a mystery that has her family in danger and their futures in doubt. Good confronts evil several times over in this epic battle to save or sacrifice the world, set to the backdrop of a love story for the ages.

Now in one volume! A House in the Woods, and its sequel, A House in the Woods 2, bring the story of Laurel and Jeremy Calloway full circle. The couple decide to trade their life in New York City for something much quieter, calmer, and ultimately terrifying. In A House in the Woods, they happen upon a small, charming house on a New Jersey back road, almost hidden by the trees. They think it could be the house of their dreams, only to discover that it’s the house of their nightmares instead. Who is the old woman who takes care of the house? What happened to the owners? And who are these ...

It's been six months since the Pride Gallery murders in Manhattan. Kyle Callahan and his partner Danny Durban head to rural New Jersey for a relaxing week with their dear friend, Detective Linda Sikorsky, recently retired and newly in love. Driving back from dinner with Linda and her fiancée Kirsten, they discover the body of Abigail Creek, run off the road on a bicycle wearing only her nightgown and slippers. Kyle and Linda quickly find themselves learning more than they want to know about the Creek family and the home they call CrossCreek Farm.

It’s been several years since Kyle Callahan sought the help of a New York City therapist to overcome the trauma of his encounter with a serial killer, and just as long since his investigation into a teenage girl’s murder brought down the Manhattan district attorney. He and his husband, Danny Durban, have decided to move away, to start a new life in the idyllic river city of Lambertville, New Jersey. They have friends there. They’ll have peace and quiet. They can leave the hustle and bustle and stresses of America’s biggest metropolis behind.

The year is 1977. Three teenagers drive along an Indiana back road, heading home away from the highway, away from prying eyes and traffic cops. One behind the driver's wheel, two in the back seat sampling the merchandise that could get them all jailed. And then, as the car careens beneath a black sky lit only by a million stars, they see it. Something in the sky, something large and close and beckoning with its strangeness.

Together for the first time in one book, all three Kyle Callahan Mysteries making up the Pride Trilogy: Murder at Pride Lodge, Pride and Perilous, and the concluding Death by Pride. In Murder at Pride Lodge we meet Kyle Callahan and his partner Danny Durban for the first time, spending an idyllic Halloween weekend at Pride Lodge that soon turns murderous. Enter Detective Linda Sikorsky of the New Hope, PA, Police Force. Together they race to stop the killer – or is it killers? – before the next body falls. In Pride and Perilous the pair join forces again, this time in New York City ...

A podcast about all things writing. Interviews with authors, journal writers, workshop facilitators and more. Every life is a story, and each of us is the storyteller.

Dreamshaping with Mark McNease is a podcast offering practical ways to create our lives and shape the dreams we live. No magic, no secrets, just everyday ways to make our lives extraordinary every day.

One Thing or Another is a podcast devoted to interviews and conversations about life, aging, and the absurdities of it all! Host Mark McNease speaks with artists, activists, writers, painters, pet lovers, book store owners, and just every day people living their best third acts.

The Twist Podcast features co-hosts Mark McNease and Rick Rose taking a look at current events, trends, headlines, and their own twisted perspective on the world we live in.

Mark McNease Mysteries is a podcast showcasing the author's fiction, along with commentary and observation. The author, as well as other narrators, read from his mysteries, as well as from his selected fiction and writing.