Phoenix, 1933: A young city with big dreams and dark cornersGreat War veteran and rising star Gene Hammons lost his job as a homicide detective when he tried to prove that a woman was wrongly convicted of murder to protect a well-connected man. Now a private investigator, Hammons makes his living looking for missing persons—a plentiful caseload during the Great Depression, when people seem to disappear all the time.But his routine is disrupted when his brother—another homicide detective, still on the force—enlists his help looking into the death of a young woman whose dismembered body is found beside the railroad tracks. The sheriff rules it an accident, but the carnage is too neat, and the staging of the body parts too ritual. Hammons suspects it's the work of a "lust murderer"—similar to the serial strangler whose killing spree he had ended a few years earlier. But who was the poor girl, dressed demurely in pink? And why was his business card...

Half a century after the unsolved murder of an FBI agent, the victim's missing badge is found on the body of a dead transient. The case seems a perfect fit for David Mapstone, history-professor-turned-Maricopa-County-deputy-sheriff. That is, if he can get past a forced partnership with rival cold-case expert Sgt. Kate Vare and the FBI's strange stonewalling about the details of the agent's killing.To complicate matters, there are the crimes making history today, like the arrest of Russian mafia members in a multi- million-dollar fraud case. David's wife, Lindsey, star of the sheriff's Cybercrimes Bureau, was on the task force that busted the case wide open. But her triumph is short-lived when a hit in Scottsdale leaves three task-force members dead. Lindsey's life in danger, Sheriff Peralta stashes Lindsey and David in a safe house. Then Sheriff Peralta inexplicably demands that David solve the cold case.The trail will take Mapstone to the most forlorn parts of Phoenix,...

In 1999 Phoenix, it's the sweet season. Christmas and the new millennium are only weeks away. But history professor David Mapstone, just hired by the Sheriff's Office, still finds trouble, chasing a robber into an abandoned warehouse and discovering a gruesome crime that is six decades old.Mapstone begins an investiga-tion into a Depression-era kidnapping that transfixed Arizona and the nation: the disappearance of a cattle baron's grandsons, their bodies never found. And although the kidnapper was caught and executed, Mapstone uncovers evidence that justice was far from done.But this is no history lesson. The cattle baron's heirs now run a Fortune 500 company and wield far more clout than a former-professor-turned-deputy. Then one of the heirs turns up dead....

A cache of diamonds is stolen in Phoenix. The prime suspect is former Maricopa County Sheriff Mike Peralta, now a private investigator. Disappearing into Arizona's mountainous High Country, Peralta leaves his business partner and longtime friend David Mapstone with a stark choice. He can cooperate with the FBI, or strike out on his own to find Peralta and what really happened.Mapstone knows he can count on his wife Lindsey, one of the top "good hackers" in law enforcement. But what if they've both been betrayed? Mapstone is tested further when the new sheriff wants him back as a deputy, putting to use his historian's expertise to solve a very special cold case. The stakes turn deadly when David and Lindsey are stalked by a trained killer whose specialty is "suiciding" her targets.In depressed, post-recession Phoenix, every certainty has become scrambled, from the short hustle of the powerful real-estate industry to the loyalties Mapstone once took for granted. Could Peralta...

A PHOENIX COLD CASE: The desert city of Phoenix, Arizona, has its secrets and its not accustomed to giving them up easily. Ex-cop Mike Peralta and cold case expert David Mapstone have left the law behind and formed a detective agency to unearth them. And it's started badly...THE NIGHT DETECTIVES: Moments after hiring them, their first client is gunned down. And the deaths don't stop there. Someone is killing their customers, killing everyone connected with their cases, and is now coming for them.Why?The answer will lead Mapstone and Peralta into the world of human trafficking, corrupt politics, and the white supremacist movement.

He's a man whose life is so intertwined with his job that we know him only as "the columnist." He writes for a newspaper in Seattle, isn't afraid to stir up trouble, and keeps his life—including his multiple lovers and his past—in safe compartments. But it's all about to be violently upended when he goes out on what seems like the most mundane of assignments, looking into a staid company that "never makes news."

A PHOENIX COLD CASE: David Mapstone has returned to Phoenix, Arizona, the desert city he left behind a lifetime ago. The ex-cop, ex-history professor is working the police dept's cold case desk, unearthing long-buried secrets. And he's good at it: as an ex-historian Mapstone knows the past is never past, as an ex-cop he knows he can't trust anybody...SOUTH PHOENIX RULES: Jax Delgado, a New York professor in Phoenix to research his next book has been tortured, murdered, his head severed and sent to his girlfriend. It shouldn't be an assignment for Mapstone, but the girlfriend in question just happens to his sister-in-law, Robin.Delgado's murder has all the hallmarks of drug cartel execution, and Mapstone fears Robin could be the next target. But is she as innocent as she claims? And why would a professor be targeted by a drug cartel? Mapstone's investigation will compel him to cross the line into South Phoenix, a world that plays by a different set of rules: South...

A PHOENIX COLD CASE: David Mapstone has returned to Phoenix, Arizona, the desert city he left behind a lifetime ago. The ex-cop, ex-history professor is working the police dept's cold case desk, unearthing long-buried secrets. And he's good at it: as an ex-historian Mapstone knows the past is never past, as an ex-cop he knows he can't trust anybody...ARIZONA DREAMS: Mapstone has received a letter confessing to a forty-year-old murder and providing directions to the body, but things are never what they seem in Phoenix. Buried beneath a mound of bowling-ball-sized rocks in the desert west of Tonopah, there's a body right where the letter said it would be - but it's only weeks old, not years.Its not the only fresh body, either. As the death count rises, the clues keep pointing back to the same remote piece of desert and a real-estate development called Arizona Dreams. But Mapstone knows something sinister is fueling this increasingly dangerous case...

When a former student turns up in David Mapstone's office, she seems to have the perfect case for this history-professor-turned-deputy: a letter left by her deceased father, confessing to a forty-year-old murder and providing directions to the body. But things are never what they seem in Phoenix, a fast-buck city of newcomers seeking fresh starts from sometimes dark pasts. Just ask David's wife, Deputy Lindsey Faith Mapstone. One morning the start of the Willo District home tour is interrupted by murder. A man lies dead with an ice pick in his brain. And Lindsey runs right into her half-sister Robin among the crowd gathering in the historic Phoenix neighborhood, the sister Lindsey hasn't seen in years. The reunion with Robin rekindles memories about their rough upbringing and the deep rift that they may, or may not, bridge. Why is Robin here now? David has his own problems. There's a body in the desert, right where the letter said it would be found. But it's weeks old, not...