Showing results by author "Blake Banner" in All Categories

Books eight through 10 in the USA Today best-selling Dead Cold series from two-million best-selling author Blake Banner.

When a leading international financier is murdered in his Beverly Hills mansion, at first it looks like just another daemon at work in the City of Angels. But when the ritual nature of the killing emerges, the FBI take an interest. And then the international connections start to emerge: the European Commission, high ranking officials in Hong Kong…and Iran. That’s when the file gets passed to ODIN, and Alex Mason.

USA Today and Amazon two million copy best-selling author Blake Banner is at his best in this mystifying crime series! And so is the Castle Hill Ripper. His MO hasn’t changed. He still stalks pregnant women like a hunter.

Saul Epstein was used to trouble. When you’re the world’s most successful investigative journalist, and you devote your life to exposing the crimes of the great and the powerful, you learn to expect trouble. That’s why Saul was a recluse, that’s why he had no intimate circle, no close friends… So one question facing Alex Mason and Captain Aila Gallin was, who was it who entered Saul’s apartment like an old friend and shot him in the face at pointblank range without flinching – just like a pro?

When Silvie Martin moves to New York from Texas with her husband, Simon, and their one year-old daughter, Mary, she is filled with the joy and hope she derives from their shared faith. But no sooner have they moved into their new home, which backs on to their church, than her husband is brutally murdered before her very eyes. The only trouble is, the shock has completely erased her memory. Now, 18 years later, Detectives Stone and Dehan have to piece together a crime where their prime witness remembers nothing, and the suspects are as bizarre as they are unlikely

It was November in New York. Raining and cold, and the trees all looked like skeleton’s hands. And Detective John Stone was having a problem with habeas corpus, because all there was of the body were two bare arms. Two bare arms that somebody, 12 years ago, had put in a lock up in the East Bronx. What they had done with the rest of the woman, nobody knew. But as Stone and Dehan start to investigate, two things become clear: Whoever killed the woman, wanted her arms to be found, as a boast, as a challenge. And that meant they were dealing with a psychopath—a serial killer.

Chaos is creeping in on Lacklan’s life like an infection into an open wound. And that chaos all seems to come from one place, Omega: Omega the ruthless, shadowy government within a government, Omega that he had sworn to destroy, Omega whose leaders he had sworn to kill, in order to protect his family, his wife and her children. But it seems that however many members of Omega he kills, more keep swarming up, like rats out of a sewer. And now it looks like even the ones he’s killed are coming back. Chaos is turning into a nightmare.

Harry Bauer is a professional assassin. He is employed by Cobra, a shadow agency that provides certain, select Western governments with total deniability, while taking out the trash. Bauer is very good at what he does. In fact, he’s the best. So when the brigadier, his overall boss, tells Bauer to go to Canada, pick up a woman and escort her to DC, he is understandably pissed: He eliminates bad guys, he’s not a nursemaid.

Hurricane Sarah, the largest in recorded history, is howling in off the Atlantic, straight toward New Orleans—and Lacklan Walker is headed for the eye of the storm. His father’s dying wish was that he keep Marni safe, but Marni has sworn to bring down Omega, the government-within-the government, and that is anything but safe.

Sue Benedict wasn’t giving out treats, so she got the trick. It was a hell of a trick. She was raped and murdered in her apartment after attending a Halloween party with a bunch of art students. The killer did not use a condom or gloves, the CSI team got a perfect DNA profile and two perfect thumbprints from her throat, a witness saw her admit the killer to her apartment at 2:30 AM that night.

Kicked out of the SAS, Harry Bauer is sent home and told to be like everyone else...but he's not like everyone else... What do you do when the only skill you ever learned was how to kill, when you’re among the best of the best, but they tell you you can’t do that anymore? What do you do when they send you home from Afghanistan and tell you to get a job, like everybody else? But you’re not like everybody else.

Why was Dr. Robert Magnusson murdered? More to the point, why was he murdered 500 miles from anywhere, in the frozen wilderness of Greenland? And then there is the question of what he was doing 70 miles north of the UCLA base camp, where he should have been—and what were the instruments he had secretly set up and housed in the shack out there?

It should have been a simple drive, from San Francisco International Airport, to Boulder, Wyoming, despite the snow. Was it because Lacklan was tired? Was it because he was thinking about the woman he loved, or the international crisis he had recently caused? Or was it the crazy blizzard that came out of nowhere and blinded him? Whatever it was, it made him turn the wrong way, it made him turn onto Bloody Creek Road, to the ghost town of Independence, population twenty-five.

ODIN is an organization which is above top secret. It coordinates intelligence from the so-called Five Eyes The United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand—and it acts on that intelligence. For that reason it’s level of security is the highest on the planet.

Saul Epstein was used to trouble. When you’re the world’s most successful investigative journalist, and you devote your life to exposing the crimes of the great and the powerful, you learn to expect trouble. That’s why Saul was a recluse, that’s why he had no intimate circle, no close friends….

When your only training is as a first class killer, it can be hard to find a job on Main Street. Unless you work for Cobra, the secret agency that takes out the worst of the world’s trash. So when Harry Bauer left the Regiment, the toughest special ops outfit on the planet, Cobra offered him a job, taking out the trash. Bauer had grown up fighting for survival on the streets of the Bronx. He knew everything there was to know about hard reality, and he didn’t buy into fantasies or conspiracy theories. Until, that is, one came knocking on his door...

It started with a dream. A dream where the hunter was hunted by a baying pack lusting for blood and power. And when he awoke from that dream, Lacklan Walker, ten year veteran of the SAS, knew his days of killing were not over yet. They would never be over until the pack was dead. This would be a mission like none other. Now he would answer to nobody but himself. He could have no allies, no support, no back up, because what he was going to do was nothing less than assassination.

When the body of a tramp was found in a dumpster on Lafayette and Bryant in the Bronx, with no papers and no ID, the case was filed as unsolved–another victim nobody cared about, shot by some punk nobody cared about. That was 12 years ago. Then Detective Stone notices that the "tramp" had a $100 haircut and manicured nails. That makes him curious. He wants to know, who dresses a murder victim up as a tramp, then leaves them in full view in a dumpster? But the answers he gets are not the ones he expects.

Nobody has ever heard of ODIN. ODIN is about as secret as a government agency can get. Because within ODIN there is General Operations, which speaks for itself; ODIN 5i, which deals with intelligence gathering; and then there is ODIN 1i, which deals in operations so sensitive not even the CIA can touch them. All three are run with an iron first by The Chief, a giant with a gigantic IQ. His top agent is Alex Mason. But when an ODIN 5i agent based at the US Embassy in Manila goes missing and his encrypted laptop disappears with him, the whole ODIN structure is put in peril.

Colonel Kostas Marcović was one of the butchers of the Vukovar Hospital massacre. He was a mark like any other. Except that Marcović was hiding on St George Island in the Caribbean, where the Colombian cartel Bloque Meta was trying to open up a new path to Florida. And Harry had a big problem with drug cartels, a problem that threatened to pull the whole mission of track.