Showing results by publisher "Crossroad Press" in Crime Thrillers

Kearny and Donny MacGregor are famous hoaxers whose lineage can be traced to a long line of conmen and tricksters. Hours before the brothers perform a successful crop circle hoax, they are approached about creating an Earth light hoax for the mayor of Stony Creek, the Bigfoot capital of northern California. Earth light is a general term used to describe unknown lights in the sky, and the mayor of Stony Creek believes that this second "phenomenon" will help pull the town from its revenue slump.

After the loss of his wife and child in a plane crash, former NYC firefighter Sebastian Martin is nearing alcoholic oblivion when his brother offers him a last-chance job opportunity as an insurance fraud investigator. Despite his reservations, he soon discovers he has an instinct for the job. A move to Dallas, where he learns it's okay to be alive, proves to be his salvation. Investigating fraudulent claims for a dead child and another for a missing husband, in Honduras, leads him to murders, international car thieves, and torture at the hands of a former KGB agent.

Since the night he made an ill-advised decision to commit a pair of revenge killings, Nick has made his living as a professional murderer. Early on, he dispensed with guilt or emotion. But after a routine hit gets messy, Nick gets sick, and the conscience he thought he’d killed comes creeping back into his brain. Now, Nick’s profession and life are on the line, and he has begun stalking a perfectly innocent couple to see if he can snuff them out without the slightest hint of remorse...or if the humanity he worked so hard to suppress is making up for lost time.

A murderer is stalking the Windy City, carving out the eyes of his victims as grisly souvenirs. When shy Ellen Gordon finds a diary left behind in a coffee shop, she can't keep from reading it. And when she meets the author in person, he's just as charming as his writing. Only when she reads further does she find clues to the identity of Chicago's terrifying serial killer. Could it be the author, himself? Ellen will have to uncover the truth about her new boyfriend quickly if she doesn't want to become the killer's next victim.

“I was to make myself a killer.” In 1865, a man calling himself Septimus Whitehall slashed, shot, and burned his way from New York to California in a frenzy of violence. This is his own story, told in his own words. Seven names were on the doctor’s list. Seven men and women scattered all over the United States and its western territories. Seven souls judged guilty by a mysterious man with no past apart from the loss for which his enemies are blamed. The War Between the States is over, but Septimus Whitehall intends to wage a bloody war of his own and he is willing to cut down almost anyone who stands in his way.

Serial killer Frank Haid, dubbed the Painkiller by Chicago police and media, murders 18 people - all paralytics. Commanded by an unseen presence that he calls ''Father'' and that speaks in the voice of an uncle whose rotting corpse he keeps in the living room, Haid destroys his victims (what's left of them) and evidence in a way that puzzles police. Hardest hit are residents of Marclinn, a home for the handicapped, where survivors decide they must track down the madman themselves.

Rafe Carmichael has a good life. As assistant manager of a ski lodge in the mountains of Utah, he's living the dream - until the dream turns sour. When one of his employees dies of an accidental drug overdose, he's naturally saddened, but not surprised. But when he finds a kilo of heroin stashed in the dead man's ski locker, and learns some troubling information from the man's ex-girlfriend, he begins to wonder if it really was an accident after all.

Elena Lacosta, a paranoid, take-no-prisoners drug trafficker turned FBI fugitive, marries a cop and fights her inner demons. Her new life depends on it. When Elena's oldest brother Gabriel is killed, she listens to what seems like endless accolades about him at his memorial service, held in a packed church with standing room only, and before the dirt on his grave can settle, she is scheming to reinvent herself in her dead brother's image to launch her new life.

In his sixth adventure, Rhodes is confronted with what seems at first to be a suicide: the body of a man newly arrived in the county is found hanged in the dilapidated building he has taken over for his business. Simon Graham was a rare-book dealer. If it seems unlikely to find such an arcane entrepreneur in this extremely rural and sparsely populated part of Texas, it becomes less strange when it turns out that Graham was more con man than bibliophile.

To his martial arts students, Vance Palladian is more than just a teacher; he is the Paladin, a man of warrior virtue. Now a widower, and with his finances in disarray, Vance feels disillusioned with his once noble life. After thwarting a seemingly random robbery, and the kidnapping attempt of a wealthy future heiress, Vance finds himself employed as her bodyguard by the young woman’s father, a mysterious businessman who holds the lineage of the last remaining esoteric school of ancient Japanese fighting arts.