The only way he can return to his drug lord duties with a clear mind: kill her—and Ulyana the Ukrainian stripper. Lester knows she didn’t pick up a rock at the trailer fire. F.B.I. special agent Joe Smith stands to lose his reputation as a goody two shoes, his career in the agency, and his freedom, if his superiors ever learn about his role in the sex-torture death of El Jay Toungate. Joe Smith doesn’t merely have a Shirley Lyle problem. He has a Shirley and Ulyana problem, and he’s been recalled to Phoenix. The solution? Murder both women. Now. Russian mob boss Vanko Demyan, convinced Shirley, Ulyana, and Lester are in cahoots against him, assigns his best assassin a simple task: Execute all three, and do it in the daylight. Make a splash. Three men... three murder missions... converge on a house in the woods. Newly freed from the root cellar, Ulyana wants to spend her days meditating in sunshine and doing yoga. Shirley wants a salad and a tall glass of rum—but not this day. Today is for bullets, and they fly in Chapter One. “I know you’re excited,” Shirley says, adjusting her cape. “C’mon. One at a time, Boys.” Prepare yourself for a battle of good and evil unlike any you've seen. With rave reviews from Publishers Weekly (starred review and best of the week), IndieNext List, Kirkus, BlueInk Review, Foreword Reviews, San Francisco Book Review, Seattle Book Review, Manhattan Book Review, Indie Reader and more, if you haven't read Clayton Lindemuth's unique brand of literary noir, what are you waiting for?

    But to add further angst to the growing list of gruesome killings is his boss’ decision to re-open the cold case involving the disappearance of a school boy in what has become an annual test of endurance… The Ten Tors Race. Unsure why a twenty year old case has suddenly come to the top of his in tray, his suspicions are aroused further when the murder victims all appear to have been school friends of the missing boy. Adamant that coincidences don’t exist in police work Riley sets about trying to find the link between Sam Haldane’s disappearance and the recent killings, other than the obvious connection of friendship. Added to his troubles, is the presence in the area of a fugitive, who has his own ideas about revenge and justice and an unscrupulous developer, who wants to buy the land surrounding his farm and turn it into a theme park, with scant regard for the history or the people who were thrown off their land prior to D Day. With the disappearance of the schoolboy and the final showdown all set around the infamous Fox Tor Mire, which was allegedly the inspiration for Arthur Conan Doyle’s Grimpen Mire in the Hound of the Baskervilles, the murderer is finally revealed but not without one final twist of the plot. But in all the blackness and soul searching there is one ray of brightness for Riley, and its one that will bring him a little closer to his brother and shows a different side to the curmudgeonly detective.