Showing results by author "Elizabeth Hilleren" in All Categories

At night, Government Road in Key West is dark and lonely as it runs through the swamp of salt marshes and mangrove trees along the edge of the airport. The crushed coral rock adds to the road a sense of foreboding. Into this setting come a young man and woman in a heated discussion,

The girl floating in the water at the end of Duval Street had a life full of secrets, one of which caused someone to kill her. Dead women can't talk. But to vacationing professor of forensic psychology Rex Jamison, it's just a matter of figuring out how the dead are going to tell you what they want you to know. Newly promoted to detective, David Sharkey entices Rex to team up with him to solve his first murder case. Secrets, lies, jealously, and greed will soon take center stage, and everyone becomes a suspect.

Damien was dead. Bleeding out in the wild salt marshes of Key West surrounding the airport is not the normal place for a rich money manager with friends. There was a mistress with an engagement ring and a rap sheet, a wife with a private investigator, an ex-wife with a grudge, and an estranged son with a history of bad decisions who was holding a check big enough to make his dreams come true.

In the hours after midnight, an unusually beautiful young woman is killed on Sharkey’s dock in a manner both brutal and bloody. No one can figure out why the woman, so happy to have a stable relationship with a rising young lawyer in the District Attorney’s office, should show up hysterical and afraid, to make a huge scene in the DA’s office demanding marriage to save her or send her back to hell.

A handsome young man comes to Napa from France with a mystery. The recent death of his father left him with a fortune and a key to a safety deposit box in faraway California. Bundled in the safety deposit box is only a packet of old photos tied up with a lacy red ribbon.

Key West Detective David Sharkey just returned from Disneyland vacation with the kids and Burt Harris wrapping up the slowest week in a long time is notified of skeletal remains found in the Gulf waters off Key West. But before the bones are even delivered, they get a cryptic call from Florida State Law Enforcement to stand down because the state has jurisdiction over events in Florida State waters and they are sending a detective to Key West to lead the investigation.

When Officer Cruz Rosario’s free-wheeling half-brother shows up in Key West unable, or unwilling, to keep a low profile, it alerts old enemies with a big grudge that the illusive Cruz now resides in Key West. Cruz and Jenny Springfield are running point chasing dangerous creatures loose in Key West stalking its dark alleys. Deadly muggers, the kind that kill you before they take your stuff are loose in the city. New reporter Robin Vanderbilt’s investigations of a suspicious murder put a target on her with a crime boss looking for his stolen funds.

In this sequel to Nine Hours to Kill (Book 13), Attorney R. Sloan is fighting to keep his client sane and sober as the police investigate the murder of her brother artist Steve Spaulding. The police believe she did it. She is the sole beneficiary of his multimillion-dollar estate. It gets worse. The police find that she has an ex-felon fiancé who they suspect may be her accomplice.

A young woman is found laid out on top of a coral sarcophagus in the Key West Cemetery, her nude body wrapped carefully in a white silk sheet tied at the waist with a wide red ribbon and a diamond ring in her mouth. Key West detectives David Sharkey and Doug Webber are baffled by the bazaar staging of the body. As they start their investigation, Titus Steel, a young private investigator from Miami, offers to help with valuable information that this has happened twice before.

The stable, grounded, Medical Examiner, Isabella Lancaster, has a secret history that suddenly erupts as unexpected and erratic changes. Jerry and Chichi challenge their assumptions about what they really know about her. They quickly find that her history is complicated and that everyone has been deceived about her past. A rough fugitive recovery agent shows up in town looking for a man who skipped out on his bail bond and headed for Key West. Detective Sharkey soon discovers that what is more dangerous than an unstable person are the shadows that he drags along behind him.

Key West Detectives Sharkey and Webber find themselves walking a fine line between political protocol and their job of solving the murder of Assistant DA Jim Turner. Sharkey and Webber need to find out whom among Jims "friends and lovers" decided to kill him. As the investigation goes on, the possible suspects seem to multiply. The medical examiner describes the murder as an "extraordinary case". As the case unfolds, they find that the ME’s statement might be an understatement. To complicate matters, Detective Doug Webber is trying to get over the death of his love, Isabella.

Reporter Mckenzie Jones gets involved with a handsome, mysterious, and romantic man with a dangerous secret that could lead to her demise. Detective Sharkey is looking for a hit man who could turn state’s evidence with witness protection if they can keep him alive till dawn and find him before he leaves town. Chichi Ramirez returns from her business trip to look for Jerry Jamison who appears to have gotten involved with a blonde who is wearing Chichi’s new clothes.

The fires burn so hot, there is nothing left. There is no body. No bones. Nothing is left to prove he was ever there. Of the car and driver, only a scorched hole in the concrete remains in the street. Detective Sharkey works with Mike Logan, a fire inspector, who had seen this type of fire before, but now, memories that he had tried to repress are rekindled.

It’s three days before the start of the Annual Hemingway look-alike Festival in Key West, Florida, and Dr. Noland Redford, a long time Papa Hemingway look-alike contestant and his gang the Hemingway seven, have arrange a private pre-contest party for about 40 people at the Hemingway House. Everyone who knew the Doctor thought he was the most lovable and interesting man that they had ever met, but just an hour after arriving at the party, Dr. Redford is found among the lush ferns at the far end of the gardens with a screwdriver in his back.

Detective David Sharkey of the Key West Police Department has a Jane Doe skull with no teeth, found in shallow water entangled in the roots of a mangrove tree. The medical examiner’s desire to find the family of the young lady’s skull drives her to try a facial reconstruction. This leads them into a case that involves scared strippers, missing tourists, and a waitress nobody forgets.

Detective David Sharkey of the Key West Police Department has a day that starts with hearing about the daring escape of convict Diano Castellanos, who has sworn to avenge his arrest. The next news he gets is that Professor Rex Jamison’s adopted son, Ricky, is missing and presumed kidnapped. As the morning progresses, another body is found near the boy’s school. Sharkey suspects that there is a connection between Castellanos' escape and the taking of Ricky.

A stabbing in a local Key West bar turns up the tropical heat for Detective David Sharkey of the KWPD. Add hijacked pharmaceutical trucks in Miami, the dead body of a young woman, a young reporter named Lexie Resnikova (Tristan), and the appearance of a suspicious Cuban Miami club owner unexpectedly in town. These are just some of the ingredients that make up a tropical concoction of murder, lies, and betrayal in paradise that will lead Sharkey and his friends into what looks like a deadly ending.

The last time Eddie was in Key West, she was sent to retrieve some politically sensitive photos. She left five bodies, four of them dead, in the little city. Now, her handler has put her on ice until she can prove she is not out of control. With no clues and the elections over, the politicians want to declare August’s shooting at Detective Sharkey’s engagement party a cold case and file it away. However, the KWPD Chief is having no part of filing away a case that left a uniformed officer dead.

Key West Attorney R. Sloan, still reeling from seeing his office firebombed with two Molotov cocktails, answers his cell phone and hears a soft female voice say, "Mr. Sloan, I think I need a lawyer. It's a matter of life and death." Sloan starts to feel for the first time very human and very vulnerable as he tries to figure out who wants him dead. Someone is very intent on killing him any way they can and just won't stop. What he doesn't need is a client with the same problem.

Jerry Jamison, the sexy, motorcycle riding private investigator, and cousin of Key West resident Rex Jamison, is in town to do some mundane PI work for an old friend who has been sidelined by an auto accident, when he finds that routine and mundane have a whole new meaning.