Showing results for "Benjamin" in Mystery

Kendyl Jordan is a beautiful woman who drives an eye-catching classic car—until the car goes missing, possibly with something of great value hidden inside it. Can Roy Ballard help her find it? Despite Ballard’s budding reputation, Kendyl learns he’s not even a private investigator, he’s a legal videographer with very little experience. Still, he seems to have a knack for the job, and it doesn’t take him long to ID a couple of dangerous suspects. That’s when the case takes more twists and turns than a winding Texas Hill Country road.

Meet Roy Ballard, freelance videographer with a knack for catching insurance cheats. He's working a routine case, complete with hours of tedious surveillance, when he sees something that shakes him to the core. There, with the subject, is a little blond girl wearing a pink top and denim shorts - the same outfit worn by Tracy Turner, a six-year-old abducted the day before. When the police are skeptical of Ballard's report - and with his history, who can blame them? - it's the beginning of the most important case of his life.

Jeremy Sawyer was having a great time on a party barge on Lake Travis, and then he was suddenly nowhere to be found. Had he jumped? Fallen off? Been pushed? Roy Ballard - an expert in catching insurance cheats - intends to find out. After all, Jeremy Sawyer was the nephew of one of his biggest clients, and she can't shake the suspicion that it wasn't an accident. It isn't long before Roy and his partner Mia Madison begin to draw the same conclusion.

When Blanco County rancher Phil Colby encounters a beautiful trespasser bathing in his creek, he has plenty of questions, but she isn’t offering any answers. Before long, Colby realizes she’s on the run. But from what? Over time, he earns her trust, and she begins to share her story.

An unidentified wild creature is on the loose in Blanco County, and, over the protests of game warden John Marlin, the locals have convinced themselves they're dealing with a mythical vampirish beast called a chupacabra. It doesn't help Marlin's cause when a dead body turns up with a fang-like wound in its neck.

In A Conspiracy of Paper, Weaver investigates a crime of the most personal sort: the mysterious death of his estranged father, a notorious stockjobber. To find the answers, Weaver must contend with a desperate prostitute who knows too much about his past, relatives who remind him of his alienation from the Jewish faith, and a cabal of powerful men in the world of British finance who have hidden their business dealings behind an intricate web of deception and violence. Relying on brains and brawn, Weaver uncovers the beginnings of a strange new economic order.

When televangelist Peter Boothe decides to build a megachurch on the banks of the Pedernales River, he thinks his biggest problem will be a few unhappy neighbors. However, when backhoe operator Hollis Farley unearths a rare fossil on the construction site - a discovery that could lead to plenty of embarrassing Darwinian publicity - the cover-up begins.

After a high-school football star dies in a late-night motorcycle collision with a wild pig, the boy's wealthy father comes up with a creative scheme to rid Blanco County of the feral pests: He tattoos the ear of one particular pig, then offers a $50,000 reward for anyone who shoots it. Game warden John Marlin is not pleased-chiefly because the bounty is likely to bring a wave of poachers and trespassers to the area. The tension rises even higher when the death of the local boy turns out to be more complicated than it originally appeared.

When a Blanco County hog hunter goes missing after a fight with his girlfriend, it's not a laughing matter - even when one of today's hottest blue-collar comedians is a suspect. Game warden John Marlin joins forces with the sheriff's department once again to root through the clues and discover the truth. Meanwhile, two of the county's most notorious poachers - Red O'Brien and Billy Don Craddock - decide to launch an investigation of their own, and the cops are not amused.

Sean Hudson thought nothing of hopping a fence to dig illegally for Native American arrowheads, spear points, and other artifacts. Did his thieving, trespassing ways get him killed? How else to explain the small pickaxe that was found sunk deep into his skull? Blanco County game warden John Marlin has dealt with these kinds of looters before, so it's no surprise when the sheriff asks him to assist with the investigation. Marlin quickly learns that this case - like the soil at a dig site - has many layers.

After a young woman and a bull are found dead in a dark pasture, Blanco County game warden John Marlin is asked to assist with the investigation. Was it a case of rustling gone wrong? Or maybe a prank turned deadly? Marlin hopes the woman's boyfriend can shed some light on the situation, but he's nowhere to be found. Is he on the run or did the woman's violent brother take matters into his own hands?

Red O’Brien and Billy Don Craddock are finishing a construction project for one of their regular customers when he makes an unexpected request - help him regain custody of his beloved beagle, Teddy. The way they go about it is a howl.

This lush and haunting novel tells of a city steeped in decadent pleasures and of a man, proud and defiant, caught in a web of murder and betrayal. It is 1833. In the midst of Mardi Gras, Benjamin January, a Creole physician and music teacher, is playing piano at the Salle d'Orleans when the evening's festivities are interrupted - by murder. The ravishing Angelique Crozat, a notorious octoroon who travels in the city's finest company, has been strangled to death.

On Dr. Benjamin Bones’s first night in the quaint Cornish village of Birdswing, a shocking hit-and-run leaves him seriously injured and his unfaithful wife dead. As he recuperates, Lady Juliet, a fiery aristocrat who won’t take no for an answer, pulls him into a sleuthing partnership destined to change both their lives. Suspecting that Ben’s late wife was murdered, he and Juliet dive headfirst into the investigation, questioning Birdswing's most eccentric and suspicious residents.

In the quaint village of Birdswing, the winter of 1939 is bitterly cold. Still haunted by his ex-wife’s murder and eager to contact the Fenton House ghost, Ben enlists Lady Juliet in an amateur séance. But the surprise return of Juliet’s rogue husband, Ethan, upends her life, setting tongues wagging. While she fights to make him sign divorce papers, a bloodless, naked corpse confronts Ben. The murdered man, handsome but uneducated and known to make passes at all things female, is discovered in an oh-so-proper estate.

A famous Hollywood director arrives in Bologna to remake a cult film and the city's renown cinema archive decides to mark the occasion with a screening of the original, only to discover it has disappeared. After English detective Daniel Leicester follows the trail of Love Upon a Razorblade to an apparent murder-suicide, he begins to suspect there may be more at stake than missing negatives—could the film contain a clue to one of the city's most enduring mysteries? 

The summer of 1833 has been one of brazen heat and brutal pestilence, as the city is stalked by Bronze John - the popular name for the deadly yellow fever epidemic that tests the healing skills of doctor and voodoo alike. Even as Benjamin January tends the dying at Charity Hospital during the steaming nights, he continues his work as a music teacher during the day. When he is asked to pass a message from a runaway slave to the servant of one of his students, January finds himself swept into a tempest of lies, greed, and murder that rivals the storms battering New Orleans.

New Orleans, 1836. When free Black musician and surgeon Benjamin January attends the funeral of a friend, an accident tips the dead man out of his coffin - only to reveal an unexpected inhabitant. Just one person recognizes the corpse of the White man: Hannibal Sefton, fiddle-player and one of January’s closest friends. But he seems unwilling to talk about his connection to the dead man....

All his life, Matthew yearned to be somebody—anyone but the forgettable face in the crowd. Then came the day the sleek red car pulled up, and Mr. Lee offered him the world. It was everything Matthew ever wanted. Until it became everything he feared.

Nineteenth-century New Orleans is a blazing hotbed of scorching politics and personal vendettas. And it’s into this fire that Benjamin January falls when he is hired to follow Oliver Weems, a bank official who has absconded with $100,000 in gold and securities. But it’s more than just a job for January. The missing money is vital to the survival of the school for freed slaves that he and his wife, Rose, have founded.