Crime Novels and Thrillers
Still slinging drinks fulltime at The Sandbar in Folly Beach, Jack Connor now
works a side gig as a state-licensed bounty hunter. While transporting his latest bail skip named Willis Ronson back to jail, his SUV is ambushed by a team of gunmen, killing Ronson instantly and seriously injuring Alisha Dupree, his court-appointed attorney. Connor can’t help but poke around the edges of the deadly incident and learns that Ronson was a man of many secrets, including a mysterious woman from his past who has caused him to be sucked into a domestic terrorism fringe group. Connor soon learns Ronson’s murder was ordered by the leader of an armed supremacist group known as 2AM, an acronym for the “Second Amendment Militia.” A massive tract of land located on the fringe of a remote forest has been converted to a guerilla training site, and the
doomsday preppers who live there are bracing for an all-out war against the government. When a series of violent events leads Connor to infiltrate the nihilistic group, he has no idea he’s stepping into the middle of a government undercover sting. Or that a powerful business tycoon and political facilitator named Colt Lomax is waiting in the shadows to turn his life into a living hell. [Epicenter Press/Coffeetown Press, 2023]
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On assignment to photograph the Baltoro glacier in Pakistan’s Karakoram Mountains, Monica Cross stumbles upon the wreckage of a long-lost airplane crash, as well as a deadly secret. The discovery makes her the target of a dangerous dark web outfit known as the Greenwich Global Group, which sends
out a team of hired killers to ensure that she never makes it home to New York.
Meanwhile, in the plains of the Tanzanian Serengeti, the retired assassin who crashed the plane and killed all those on board learns of the discovery of the wreckage. Long thought dead, Ronin Phythian possesses a unique and mystical skillset that for years made him the most lethal man alive, and his reawakening
conscience—also long thought dead—convinces him to do whatever he can to save her.
At the same time, freelance blogger (and former Washington Post reporter) Carter Logan gets word that the wreckage of the crash that killed his fiancé has finally been found, and vows to bring justice for all those who died—and revenge to those who killed her. Spanning ten time zones, nine countries, and four continents, Greenwich Mean Time is a tightly spun thriller that plays out against
a violent plot designed to change the course of history forever. [Epicenter Press/Coffeetown Press, 2023]
One year after his world is devastated by a powerful hurricane, Jack Connor is stitching his life back together one thread at a time. In an attempt to reinvent himself—and deal with his lingering PTSD—he now manages an open-air drinking establishment named The Sandbar across the road from the dunes in Folly Beach, a shabby-chic tourist town twenty minutes south of Charleston. One hot July evening Connor is yanked into the past when a random customer is shot on the bar’s outdoor deck. What at first appears to be a senseless homicide quickly turns more complex and sinister, as the young man suspected of the shooting is found dead in his jail cell less than 48 hours later. Ignoring the nagging voice in his head that’s telling him to leave well enough alone, Connor dives in head-first and quickly discovers a tangled mass of drugs, corruption, money laundering, and a web of double- and triple-crosses. [Epicenter Press/Coffeetown Press, 2021]
A year after almost being killed in a bloody double-cross (recounted in Carolina Heat), Jack Connor is hired by the state’s governor to find the killer of an elderly African American woman who was killed in the vestry of her church. As he searches for truth and justice—the hallmarks of his character—he encounters an increasingly menacing culture war fueled by ignorance, bigotry, and human blindness. Race and religion are powerful threads tightly woven through the state’s cultural tapestry, and Connor quickly finds himself tangled in a web of power, hate, and fear. In a region of the country where old skeletons lurk in dark family closets, he learns the hard way that uncovering the truths of the past can carry serious consequences. Hurricane Blues serves up a stark reflection of the South, a story of lingering Jim Crow prejudice and the bloody stain of racism. [Epicenter Press//Coffeetown Press, 2020]
Former star athlete Rick Devlin left Charleston in the rearview mirror just days after his father was sentenced to life in prison for killing his mother. Now—thirty years later—he returns home to care for the reviled old man, who on his death bed insists the trial was a sham and the jury convicted an innocent man. Against his better judgment, Devlin begins to investigate his mother’s death, uncovering the roots of his family’s dysfunction and revisiting some painful memories from his past. It seems everyone has something to hide, including two generations of family lawyers, a corrupt state cop, a sanctimonious televangelist, the ghosts of several redneck butchers, and the specter of a young black boy who died a most horrific death. He also unexpectedly runs into his old high school flame, an intense heat that has lingered all these years. [Suspense Publishing, 2019]
Two days after solving the murder of a young TV reporter (recounted in “Palmetto Blood,”), Iraq War vet Jack Connor and his crew are called to Myrtle Beach to clean a hotel suite where a “John Doe” has taken his life. It sounds like a typical cut-and-dry job, but when the crew arrives on-site it’s apparent there’s nothing typical about this scene. Despite the fact that the deceased jumped to his death from the balcony, there’s blood virtually everywhere in the suite, along with two suicides notes. Not to mention a half million dollars in small bills that seems to be missing. Connor is hired by his boss to track down the cold cash, but in the heat of South Carolina nothing is simple. Along the way he runs headlong into a sting operation involving a crooked DEA agent, a beautiful PI who doubles as a pool shark, degenerate heirs of prominent Southern families and, of course, the Dixie Mafia show up in Connor’s path along the way. [Epicenter Press/Coffeetown Press, 2018, 2014]
What did TV reporter Rebecca Rose do that got her brutally murdered and left in a dirty gutter in downtown Charleston? That's what Jack Connor – crime scene clean-up technician, recently discharged Iraq veteran, and the victim’s one-time lover – wants to know when he and his crew are called early one morning to sanitize her murder scene. The Charleston police are seeking answers to the same question, and when they learn of Connor’s romantic link to the victim they waste no time bringing him in for questioning as a “person of interest.” Still dealing with emotional and physical scars from the battlefield, Connor takes it upon himself to find Rebecca’s real killer, a search that leads him to start scratching the underbelly of the South Carolina lowcountry. [Epicenter Press/Coffeetown Press, 2017, 2013]
In his new life, Stuart Logan had but one rule: no requests. Then again, in his new life he didn’t have much to worry about. He didn’t play the sort of music that inspired many people to want more. Nor did he play the sort of places where folks made a whole lot of requests—or demands of any sort, for that matter. Fact was, the people he entertained seemed fairly content just to sit and sip and listen whole Logan’s fingers plucked musical memories out of the thick, heavy summer night. [Morrow/Avon, 1992]
