Showing results by author "Mark de Castrique" in All Categories

Sam Blackman is an angry man. A chief warrant officer in the criminal investigation detachment of the US military, he lost a leg in Iraq and has been outspoken in his criticism of his medical treatment. Then, ex-marine and fellow amputee Tikima Robertson walks into his hospital room, hinting...

Badass seventy-five-year-old retired FBI agent Ethel Fiona Crestwater is back―stalking mobsters, dodging bullets, and pulling off Bond-worthy moves as she tracks down missing state secrets in this fun and pacy new installment in the Secret Lives mystery series. "Ethel's adventures will appeal...

At seventy-five-years-old, Ethel Fiona Crestwater is used to being underestimated. She looks like someone's grandma, although she's never married or had children; petite and a bit frail, she's not a threat to anyone. Or is she...?  Ethel runs a boarding house for government agents, and when someone murders one of her boarders, she springs into action—much to the surprise of her distant cousin Jesse, who has recently come to stay with her while he attends university. 

Former chief warrant officer and amputee Sam Blackman and his partner, Nakayla Robertson, are opening a detective agency. They have high hopes that the thriving mountain region will provide a steady stream of cases. Their first client, a quirky elderly woman in a retirement community, makes a...

At first it appears a mugging gone horribly wrong: one man dead and a woman left in a coma one Friday night in Washington, D.C. The woman is Arlington police detective Frank Mancini's niece and lives in the boarding house run by retired FBI-agent-turned-landlady Ethel Fiona Crestwater. Ethel and Frank are old friends, and so she volunteers to investigate the crime on Frank's behalf, as his hands are tied by jurisdictional issues. But what appears at first a random robbery soon proves more diabolical.

It was only a simple, routine assignment for private investigator Sam Blackman and his partner, Nakayla Robertson: follow a history professor, who is suing a spinal surgeon for malpractice, and catch her in physical activities that undercut her claim. When the professor, Janice Wainwright...

You want to borrow a casket? Funeral director and part-time sheriff Barry Clayton finds United States Junior Chamber (Jaycee) member Archie Donovan’s request absurd until he learns the casket will be the centerpiece of the Jaycees’ haunted house, a charity event with all proceeds going to...

The Singularity - the looming point of no return when Artificial Intelligence surpasses human cognitive abilities, with consequences no one can foresee, and only a handful of people understand. Rusty Mullins, ex-Secret Service, has never heard of the Singularity. He only knows that after the deadly challenges of his last job for security firm Prime Protection, he swore he'd stop risking his life on assignments. Then his good friend Ted Lewison, head of Prime Protection, asks him back for a routine mission guarding scientist Dr. Lisa Li and her seven-year-old nephew, Peter.

When private detective Sam Blackman agrees to help his partner and lover, Nakayla Robertson, conduct a fundraiser for orphaned twins, he does so to ease his conscience. The boys’ parents were killed in a courtroom shootout where Sam was the key witness against the twins’ father. The charity...

In Asheville, North Carolina, the Blackman & Robertson Detective Agency faces a disturbing reality: no clients. Sam Blackman finds inactivity intolerable, so when partner Nakayla Robertson suggests a mushroom hunt on the site of a historic freed-slave commune called the Kingdom of the Happy Land...

Scientist Jonathan Singer stands on the verge of achieving his two greatest dreams: marriage to his soul mate Sally DeMille and the successful launch of The American Super Collider, the culmination of his cutting-edge research. But when an elderly man shows up at his apartment with irrefutable proof that he is also Dr. Jonathan Singer, Jonathan's ordered life spins wildly out of control. The old man claims to have traveled back from 40 years in the future. He makes a desperate plea - "To thine own self be true". But this self is telling him to destroy everything he's worked for.

A river gives up its dead, but not its secrets . . . Sam Blackman and Nakayla Robertson, private investigators in Asheville, North Carolina, are hired when a local environmentalist dies while monitoring water quality in the nearby Pigeon River. With no soil or water samples found near the body...

In this unusual spin on the classic spy novel, murder strikes from our wartime pasts . . . Iraq War veteran Sam Blackman with his prosthetic leg and his no-nonsense private eye partner Nakayla Robertson love their investigations―and they love each other. An interracial couple in the new South...

When private eyes Sam Blackman and Nakayla Robertson are asked by an eighty-year-old client to investigate the death of her brother, they warn her there is little chance of success. Paul Weaver died nearly seventy years earlier. The only documentation she has is the sole surviving copy of a...

MEET ETHEL FIONA CRESTWATER—RETIRED FBI AGENT-TURNED-LANDLADY. STILL DANGEROUS AT SEVENTY-FIVE. Ethel is almost getting too old for a secret FBI mission—almost! Her expert investigation skills are needed again when her elderly neighbor and close friend Sarah Phelps is found dead in her own...

When Cherokee burial remains are unearthed on the site of a local cemetery's expansion, Barry Clayton, part-time deputy and full-time undertaker, finds his dual occupations colliding. Then, during the interment of the wife of one of Gainesboro's most prominent citizens, Cherokee activist Jimmy...

Russell Mullins has left intelligence work. When his wife died of cancer, Rusty quit the Secret Service to repurpose his life. He joins a private protection company in Washington, DC, and is assigned to guard Paul Luguire, a Federal Reserve executive and chief liaison with the US Treasury...

When Barry Clayton’s father developed Alzheimer’s disease, Barry gave up his career in law enforcement to run the family’s funeral home in the North Carolina mountain town of Gainesboro, where he is known as Buryin’ Barry. But even a small town in the Appalachians is not immune to crime...

He knows the secret, she knows the truth… “The list. You’re on the list. God’s chosen Gene.” When children’s hospital volunteer and high school student Gene Adamson hears the words of the dying man, the gunman who used him as a shield after murdering a prominent geneticist, Gene...

A locked-room young adult whodunit in the classic tradition of Sherlock Holmes June 1860. A new locomotive christened A Southern Breeze steams across the Carolina countryside carrying seventeen-year-old Jeb Bennett and his twin sister, Rachel Leigh, to the exhilarating promise of a summer in...