At a snowed-in retreat, a corporate takeover turns deadlyA remote mansion, a blizzard, and lack of phone service: It's an opportunity a killer can't pass up. Matt Cobb, the in-house troubleshooter for a television conglomerate, is summoned to an executive meeting at the Adirondack home of billionaire G. B. Dost. Dost plans to acquire the TV network, and the shareholders are anxious about the rich man's intentions. One of the bigwigs might even prefer murder to a takeover.  Sure enough, the morning before negotiations would start, Dost is discovered dead outside his lodge—surrounded by forty feet of smooth, unbroken snow—and Cobb is faced with the task of interrogating guests. And matters are only complicated by Dost's psychic wife, his off-kilter son, and a haunting message somehow relayed on a television found to be unplugged.

Matt Cobb deals with love and murder on the rinkIn the last installment of the popular Matt Cobb series, the TV network's expert troubleshooter, faces a literal case of cold-blooded murder. At two in the morning, he stands in a Manhattan ice rink, over the grisly body of Dr. Paul Dinkover. The network was supposed to be taping a figure-skating special, and this discovery can't be a coincidence. The victim is a psychologist, one so thoroughly disagreeable that any number of people could be considered suspects—including beautiful Wendy Ichimi, the show's celebrity skater. But while Cobb's men are mysteriously attacked, he can't stop thinking about the way Dinkover died gripping an American flag, a symbol or clue he can't unravel. And as the leads and tension mount, it will take all of Cobb's strength to keep his cool and remain on his two feet.

In the Old West, Lobo Blacke and Quinn Booker confront a killer potion, and a fugitive bent on paybackIn the Wyoming Territory town of Le Four, Lobo Blacke used to be a legendary lawman, until the day an ambush left him confined to a wheelchair. Now he runs a newspaper with onetime New Yorker Booker Quinn, who also helped pen the great man's memoirs.  But now Le Four is shaken by rumors that Paul Muller—a bank and train robber whom Blacke helped lock up—might be headed back to town to settle old accounts. And the same week, fourteen people suddenly drop dead after sipping Ozono, a concoction sold by a traveling medicine show. The brew's casualties include the town's sheriff, and without him, Quinn and Blacke must prepare to face the fiendish Muller, and discover the connection between the elixir and the fugitive.

During a trip to England, a fog of mystery threatens Matt Cobb's vacation—and his lifeMatt Cobb is ready to quit. His job as a special projects VP at a giant television network involves intense troubleshooting and an egotistical boss, and both have taken their toll. The network president has other ideas, though, and persuades him that all he needs is a long vacation. So Cobb takes off for London, with his dog and his lovely fianc00e9e, Roxanne, by his side.  But work won't release its grip so easily, and when Cobb visits an old friend at a network affiliate, he can't resist a plea to help with their security team. And when he's directed to ignore the time-honored rule against the delivery of mysterious envelopes, Cobb becomes not only a witness to a murder, but also the prime suspect.

Master detective Niccolo Benedetti hunts down a killer in the French AlpsNiccolo Benedetti is many things: a professor, philosopher, painter, charmer, and a sterling, world-class detective, too. For Benedetti, a murder is not just a crime, but also a means of dissecting the nature of evil. It's a problem demanding as much art as it does science. In this second installment in the Benedetti series, the detective travels to a ski resort in the French Alps, where a conference of international scientists is rocked by a series of killings. To make matters worse the prefect of police is also targeted, endangering the whole future of the conference, and the scientists claim that the perpetrator is nothing less than an honest-to-God, full moon–intoxicated werewolf. Together with sidekicks Ron Gentry and Janet Higgins, Benedetti will have to dive headfirst into this supposedly supernatural case.

In the Edgar Award–winning first title of the Niccolo Benedetti series, the celebrated detective hunts a serial killer who is terrorizing a small townIn the upstate New York town of Sparta, six people die in three weeks. At first the incidents seem accidental: A highway sign drops onto a car full of teenage girls, an old man falls down a set of stairs, and a boy is struck by a sheet of ice that had been building on his garage. But after each case a note turns up. Someone called Hog claims responsibility for each death, and taunts the police to catch him before he strikes again. The deaths have everybody talking, and the local police department is eventually forced to share the case with famous Italian detective Niccolo Benedetti and his prot, would-be cop turned private investigator Ron Gresham. A painter, ladies' man, and rule-bending genius, Benedetti views every case as a chance to probe the nature of evil. And with his nalyze and imagine method, he'll pursue the...

A onetime baseball catcher confronts the murder of a McCarthyist politician at Yankee StadiumIn 1953 America, McCarthyism is everywhere. Congressman Rex Harwood Simmons is among the leaders who single-mindedly hunt down suspected Communists; he even claims that Communism has infiltrated America's favorite pastime. But while watching a Yankee game one afternoon, he becomes a target. As the crowd cheers for a homerun, Simmons is shot dead in his seat.           The task of solving the crime falls to onetime ballplayer and Korean War veteran Russ Garrett, who collaborates with Vicious Aloysius Murphy, a Bronx homicide detective. The investigation won't be easy, since there are plenty of people with a motive to plug Simmons. Several clues point to a blacklisted intellectual—but he was driven to suicide years ago. And as Garrett hunts for the killer, a new conspiracy comes to light: a plot to murder Yankee star Mickey Mantle.

Matt Cobb, troubleshooter extraordinaire, must track a killer when a talk-show host goes off the air permanentlyIn television production, fringe time refers to the period after the late-night news before the morning shows begin—the time when anything could happen. For Matt Cobb, a VP charged with getting The Network out of jams, fringe time is especially fraught, because it's a time when one of his charges is seriously at risk.          Cobb has had his hands full with Richard Bentyne, a volatile wee-hours talk-show host with more than one lover and many deserved enemies. And when Bentyne's dinner is laced with arsenic, there's no shortage of leads to investigate, and Cobb must do it quickly, with as little exposure to the network as possible. But while a betrayed girlfriends, jealous colleagues, or crazed fans might have the motive for murder, Cobb's gut instinct tells him that the answer lies somewhere on the fringe.

In the follow-up to Cronus, an American spy travels to London to locate a high-profile missing person, and is faced with terror from the pastIf they're going to take you, let them take you with your eyes open. That's the credo of Clifford Driscoll, the American spy at the center of Snark, the follow-up to William DeAndrea's Edgar Award–winning Cronus. Driscoll has gone by many names in his short, eventful life, and he's just borrowed another: that of Jeffrey Bellman, an agent his Russian enemies at Cronus consider dead. As the son of a formidable secret intelligence director, Driscoll/Bellman is used to all kinds of existential ducking and weaving.  The new Bellman is sent to England to find Sir Lewis Alfot, a missing former British intelligence chief. He hasn't even left the London airport, though, before assassins target him. They come courtesy of Leo Calvin, a terrorist Bellman's dealt with in the past—and Calvin has just kidnapped Alfot as bait. Can Bellman stop...

Niccolo Benedetti takes on the mysterious case of two battling industrialist twins. In Harville, Pennsylvania, two brothers are sparring. A common enough occurrence, but these ones happen to be elderly, twins, and industrialist millionaires. The two have feuded for years over all sorts of issues, including a woman they both loved. Now Henry Pembroke has built a bird sanctuary, while his twin brother, Clyde, has decided to breed Manx cats. Henry argues that Clyde's cats will kill his birds, and in an attempt for revenge, he blocks a new air-cleaning device that Clyde wants to produce. After nearly a lifetime of fighting, the brothers call on renowned Italian detective — and larger-than-life artist-philosopher — Niccolo Benedetti, together with private investigator partner Ron Gentry, to help solve their differences. But what begins as a property dispute takes a lethal turn when one of the brothers is kidnapped and a secretary is murdered. In this quiet...

Matt Cobb scrambles to save a celebrity event turned upside down by robbery and murder Matt Cobb may not be a detective by trade, but there are times when he sure feels like one. As the VP of special projects for a television conglomerate, Cobb is an expert at getting the network out of tricky situations. Now his company is celebrating its fiftieth anniversary with a weekend-long extravaganza, flying in dozens of celebrities for a prime-time party. And as the event approaches, egos flare, nerves fray, and someone sabotages the studio. First a reporter drowns in a TV star's pool. Then an actress's bowling ball—her lucky talisman—is stolen, and some important kinescopes disappear. As the body count climbs, Cobb finds himself asking if these strange events are connected, and if so, who is behind them?

An electric thriller where spies go to battle, and the free world is at stakeIn the final installment in William DeAndrea’s Clifford Driscoll series, master spy Driscoll is “going tame”—that is, recovering from a near-death accident and enjoying domestic peace. Driscoll, now known as Allan Trotter, hasn’t killed anyone in more than a year. He still works for the Agency—a super-secret intelligence unit of the US government known only to the president and its founding congressman—but he’s too full of pins and plates to be a field agent anymore. To top it off, he’s so smitten with beautiful media mogul Regina Hudson that he’s contemplating settling down.But Trotter’s new life is rudely interrupted when he learns that Soviet spies are bent on taking charge of the upcoming US presidential election. Their instrument is an influential senator, Hank Van Horn, a womanizing bad seed who— despite an upstanding reputation—once murdered one of his own staffers. And as if the election plot wasn’t perilous enough, Van Horn’s relentless son, Mark, soon gets involved in a very bloody way.

Pregnant, hunted, and alone, a young woman turns to the only man who can helpFaith has just enough time to dodge the speeding car. She leaps backwards and falls onto the sidewalk, breaking her thumb in an attempt to protect her pregnant belly. When she picks herself up off the ground, the baby is safe, but Faith is anything but.  Desperate for help from someone she can trust, she turns to her old friend Harry Ross, a frustrated writer with a dead-end job at a prestigious New York paper. He's hungry for adventure and about to get more than his fill. Faith claims that her dying husband's family wants the baby dead, to protect their inheritance. She's survived four attempts on her life over the past few days, and Harry must head off a fifth. When this week is over, Harry will have something he never expected: either a murdered girlfriend, or a family of three.

Matt Cobb goes to bat for a friend accused of murderMatt Cobb, an executive who is tasked with smoothing over sensitive situations for a major television network, is used to looking disaster in the eye. But while traveling upstate to look into rising corruption in the sale of cable broadcasting licenses, and mixing with some old college friends, he doesn't expect murder rears its ugly head.  Cobb's former roommate, Dan Morris, is still pining over his ex-girlfriend Debbie Whitten, who's about to marry another man. But on the night before her wedding, Debbie is killed with a crushing karate blow to her throat, and Dan is accused of murder. Cobb has to prove his friend's innocence—no mean feat given that Morris was a martial arts expert and publicly vowed to put a stop to the marriage—and also that a shady DA has an agenda in locking him up. Meanwhile, the cable corruption issue won't die down, and Cobb becomes the target of a goon dubbed The Organic Hit Man, who...