Showing results by narrator "Steve Marvel" in All Categories

Mapleton police chief Gordon Hepler and the mayor can’t agree about what being a cop means. To Gordon, it’s keeping his citizens safe. To the mayor, it’s generating revenue by issuing speeding and parking tickets. When two runaway dogs waylay Gordon on the way to what he hopes will be an uneventful afternoon at a backyard barbeque, more than his afternoon is interrupted. As dogs will do, these have uncovered a bone.

When a member of the film crew is found dead, everything goes sideways. The mayor pushes Gordon to adopt a business as usual mentality, and let the film company handle the investigation. But a murder on Mapleton soil makes it Gordon's jurisdiction, and nothing the mayor says can make him halt his investigation. When other members of the cast and crew haven't reported in, Gordon wonders if he's looking for more suspects or more victims. Will Gordon listen to the mayor, or risk his job to find the truth?

Jaxon Jennings. Cop. Homicide detective. Partner. He always had your back and rarely made mistakes. Until the death of his son. Until the night he couldn't save him. Until everything he held dear was taken away from him. Now, a shell of a man, his reckless actions mark him as a burn-out. A Loner. A dangerous man whom many in the Fairfax County Police Department cannot trust.

Matt Kile, ex-cop and ex-con, current smart-aleck, and a neighbor of Mr. and Mrs. Talmadge has built himself a comfortable career writing mysteries. Garson Talmadge sold weapons to Saddam Hussein, then moved out of France, came to America, and married Clarice, a woman half his age. When Clarice is arrested for murdering her husband, Matt becomes the investigator for her defense attorney, and quickly learns there is a line of suspects stretching from the US into Europe and the Middle East.

Space may be the final frontier, but no frontier has ever captured the American imagination like the Wild West, which still evokes images of dusty cowboys, outlaws, gunfights, gamblers, and barroom brawls over 100 years after the West was settled. A constant fixture in American pop culture, the 19th-century American West continues to be vividly and colorful portrayed not just as a place but as a state of mind.

When Derek Secrest was suddenly pulled out of Naval flight officer school to take part in a top secret government project involving telepathy - because tests showed that he had a strong latent talent for psi powers - he thought things couldn't get weirder. He was wrong. Soon, he was contacted by a mysterious woman who could open portals at will through spacetime. Her powers seemed godlike - and they were. Millennia ago, extra-dimensional beings with great powers had come to Earth and taken on human form, remembered in legends as gods and goddesses.

In 1948, American polls rated Bing Crosby "the most admired man alive", and it's no surprise given how popular he was across every major form of entertainment during the decade. With a string of major hits, Crosby was the most popular singer in the country during that era, with classic songs like "White Christmas" helping pave the way for other singers as varied as Bob Hope, Dean Martin, and Frank Sinatra. In fact, young Sinatra modeled his clothing and style after Crosby, who was his idol growing up.

Someone is playing a game with Mapleton’s Chief of Police...and it’s deadly. For Mapleton Police Chief Gordon Hepler, life has become predictably boring - despite being a newlywed. Being a husband is great. Dealing with nothing but parking violations, speeders, and the occasional disorderly complaint is monotonous. Gordon wonders if he’s been so busy dealing with “Chief Stuff” that he’s lost his edge as a street cop. Especially when his biggest challenges are handling the penny-pinching mayor and deciding what goes into the station’s vending machines.

Life is a balancing act. When you’re a cop, the choices can be deadly. Ed Solomon, long-time police officer in the small town of Mapleton, Colorado, has been ribbed for thinking there’s a ring of assassins out killing deadbeat dads. However, he’s convinced these killers exist and they’re doing their dirty work from behind an innocuous-looking travel blog. Proving the ring exists has been a sideline investigation for him, but it’s shoved further onto the back burner when Ed is forced to assume the duties of Chief.

The essence of being street smart is the ability to take advantage of lucky breaks. And everyone—at least once in their lifetime—gets a lucky break. What they do with that lucky break varies tremendously from individual to individual. Street smart people don't just sit around waiting for something to happen and fall into their laps—they create their lucky breaks. It's certainly not taught in school and formal education!

Sensei Parker finds himself in Key West with his childhood friends, Willy and Sandra. They called for help and, of course, Parker came. Something is wrong in paradise, and they need their friend's help before it's too late. Synchronicity rears its quirky head as Opie Taylor hunts down their long-time nemesis, Luiz Crusado, and wants Parker to come help capture him. It just so happens that he's also in Key West.

The Soviet Union delivers an ultimatum to the president of the United States: Surrender unconditionally within 72 hours, or a secret weapon of unprecedented capabilities will take millions of American lives. President William Mellon Stark ran on a campaign of peace and kept his promises, slashing the military budget and pouring millions into domestic programs. Now the nation is years behind in the technology of mass destruction.

This was not the first-time that rookie cop Michael Chambers had found himself stuck in this broken-down police vehicle while the rain bucketed down outside. In fact, this kind of "bad luck" had happened almost every time he’d been assigned car 291. Usually, he’d get a flat, or the locks would jam, or the damned on-board computer would freeze. 291, though, had a bloody and tragic history, which might explain why this piece of metallic crap seemed so intent on driving him crazy - excuse the pun.

Aikido Au Revoir is the fifth novel of the Aikido Mystery Series with Sensei Parker. He is in France on the Cote d'Azur teaching a pair of aikido seminars. It's tough work, but someone has to do it, right? Why not Parker? He is a master of the art, after all, and although he has his own school back in Orlando, Florida, it isn't doing as well as it was before the economy tanked. He is taking a break from his day job with this trip to France. He has had to resort to being a Private Detective to make ends meet, and this is going to be a vacation as well as a teaching job. Or is it?

Fate was working against little Brian Mauretti. The food that was meant to nourish him was poisoning him instead, and the doctors said the damage was devastating and absolute. Fate had written off Brian. But fate didn’t count on a woman as determined as Brian’s grandmother, Angela DiMartino - who everyone knew as Mama. Loving her grandson with everything she had, Mama endeavored to battle fate. Fate had no idea what it was in for.

During the Soviet-Afghan War an elite team of operatives were trained in the mountains of Afghanistan. Loyal to the Provisional Irish Republican Army, they were known only by their codename, Black Shuck. In the years that followed - betrayed from within by the internal power struggles of the IRA - the team members were hunted down.

Skip tracer Henry Swann cares little about anything but money, so when a beautiful Upper East Side woman shows up in his office and hires him to find her missing husband, he smiles and takes the cash. But when this seemingly simple missing-person case turns into homicide, Swann finds himself trapped in a complex web of connections and multiple identities that takes him out of New York City and across two continents.

All Mapleton Police Chief Gordon Hepler wants is to enjoy a rare quiet moment and have a peaceful lunch. Before he can finish his sandwich, Angie, his wife, calls to say her business partner is going to be arrested at a wedding reception they’re catering. Seems her partner stumbled upon the body of one of the guests - the mother of the groom. Was it a natural death? Suicide? Homicide?

Jacob Alexander has spent more than a decade perfecting his off-the-grid lifestyle in remote northwestern Wisconsin. But nothing prepares him for the Sovereign Resistance, a white nationalist paramilitary group. The Resistance's activities include kidnapping, torture, and murder. And Jacob's about to battle them face to face to rescue their victims. Jacob knows the terrain. The Resistance doesn't. But he's outgunned and outmanned. And his deer rifle might not be enough to make it out of this standoff alive.

A friendly poker game leads Henry Swann out to Hollywood where he tries to find the man, Rusty Jacobs, responsible for embezzling $1,000,000 from his client, and then bring back the dough. Swann finds Jacobs, but the mercurial wannabe film producer is involved in a "surefire" movie project aimed at the growing Christian market. And the money? Well, it seems to have vanished into thin air.