Targeted by thugs, a wrestling impresario reaches out to an old friendWhen Otto Lidke got a tryout in pro football, he hired a lawyer friend named Jim Raiford to handle his contract. The negotiations were bungled, forcing both men into a career change. Trying to start a pro wrestling circuit in Denver, Lidke runs afoul of the national federation, which does everything it can—legal and otherwise—to stamp out his new venture. When shady business practices escalate in...

Caught up in a low budget revolution fought in the jungles of Colombia, Cornelius Mead faces the challenges of survival in the chaos and insanity of war while clinging to his dream of turning the Guyana massacre site of Jonestown into a theme park.

To get his agency off the ground, security expert Devlin Kirk takes a dangerous caseSabotage threatens the profits of industrial giant McAllister Enterprises. Twice already, accounting errors have forced the company to drop out of $100 million deals, and both times a competing firm, the Aegis Group, swooped in to take over. The CEO suspects industrial espionage, and the obvious suspect is division director Austin Haas, who declined a job offer from Aegis six months ...

Winner of the Edgar Award: A letter tips off a Denver narcotics detective to a colossal smuggling ringOnce, Denver's small-time pushers sold nothing harder than dime bags of bad California grass. But in the last year, heroin has appeared on the streets of the Mile High City, and the police department has responded by forming a narcotics division. Detective Gabe Wager and his rookie partner spend their nights trailing dealers, making buys, and acquiring informants, ...

Two detectives take to the high seas after a sailor's death in a mystery that "succeeds in making life aboard a huge oil tanker both fascinating and scary" ( Publishers Weekly).The Rossi family received only a handful of letters after their son shipped out on the supertanker Aurora Victorious. The first dispatches were from Harold himself, describing the blend of tedium and excitement that defined life onboard the ship. The last communication came...

A forcibly retired marine investigates the disappearance of a young girlLieutenant-Colonel Jack Steele is too honest for Washington. If any other Marine Corps investigator had noticed a congressman's corruption, he might have kept his mouth shut. But Steele knows his ultimate duty and blows the whistle on a treasonous lawmaker, earning himself a pat on the back and a swift kick out the door. Steele returns to his hometown of San Diego, hoping for a quiet retirement...

Kirk watches nervously as a new employee goes undercover with a drug ringThe employees at the Advantage Company have started to steal. They are angrier than they used to be, and also clumsier—accident reports have spiked. To Devlin Kirk, these are telltale signs of on-the-job drug abuse. Hired by Advantage to smash the drug ring that's sprung up inside its factory, Kirk sends his newest employee, earnest farm boy Chris Newman, to infiltrate the company. Newman sees ...

Devlin investigates a missing Salvadoran's gruesome fateDevlin Kirk and his partner Bunchcroft are Denver's finest industrial security experts, even if Denver doesn't see it that way. Their last big case got them out of debt, but since then the well has been dry. Their firm is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy when Nestor Calamaro, a young illegal immigrant whose family is close to Bunch, disappears. Kirk can't afford any pro bono work, but Bunch talks him into th...

A botched coke bust forces Wager to go undercover for the first time in yearsFor six months, the Denver narcotics team and the DEA have built a case against a cocaine-dealing heavy named Farnsworth. When Detective Reitman makes the final buy, he runs a field test to make sure the package of powder he's just purchased is really cocaine. The test is positive, and the bust goes down. Afterwards, the DEA's lab says that Reitman was wrong—he'd just bought two and a half ...

An old cowboy asks Gabe for help with his estranged sonsWhen he was a teenager, Gabe Wager and his friends in the Denver barrio had no greater idol than Vaquero Tommy Sanchez. One of the rare Mexicans to break through into professional rodeo, Sanchez was a hero to every Hispanic boy with dreams of making it in a white man's world. By the time Sanchez's star faded, Wager was away with the Marine Corps, enduring terrors but supported by his memories of hot, ...

Wager hunts for the killer of a black councilman, as the city threatens to riotGabe's girlfriend Jo is drowning. She stares up at him, eyes wide with terror, as he fights to grab her hand. In a moment, the frothing river swallows her up, and Jo is gone.Nine months have passed since Jo's death, and Detective Wager cannot get the image out of his mind. Rather than fight the urge to blame himself, he embraces the guilt, punishing himself for it every day. Only ...

Now working homicide, Wager lands a gruesome case in the botanic gardenHomicide cops are always suspicious of the drug enforcement division, so when ex-narcotics detective Gabe Wager arrives on the murder squad, his first assignment is the graveyard shift. His new commanding officer hopes that the late shift will keep Wager out of trouble, and give him a chance to learn the byzantine regulations that govern murder investigations. But two days later, a call comes in...