Showing results by author "Blake Banner" in All Categories

This collection includes books 1-4 in the USA Today best-selling Dead Cold series from two-million copy best-selling author Blake Banner: An Ace and a Pair, Two Bare Arms, Garden of the Damned, and Let Us Prey.

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, hard and cool – he's a law unto himself.

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….

The Cold Cases team at the 43rd Precinct in the Bronx tend to focus on homicides. But now, Detective John Stone, head of the team, is curious about a two year-old rape case. A rape case where Sadie Byrne got HIV, turned out to be a rapid progressor and died of AIDS within a year. She never named her attacker.

There are a lot of things you really don’t want to find when you’re a homicide detective in the Bronx. High on the list is a new serial killer. Serial killers are real bad news because they kill without motive, so they are hard to trace and they can take years to catch. But even worse than a new serial killer, is a new kind of serial killer: one who murders with a motive, but a motive so unfathomable nobody can understand it; a motive that makes his choice of victims incomprehensible and unpredictable, a motive that leads to each victim being killed in a particularly cruel and unusual way.

The man called Rogue is driven. He is driven to hunt down, kill and destroy those who traffic death, drugs and prostitution on the streets – those who prey on the weak and the vulnerable. And he is damned good at what he does. What he does not know is why he is driven. Because he doesn’t remember who he is, or how he became the monster he has become. So the man called Rogue is on a mission to destroy the predators, and also a quest to find himself, to discover who – or what - he is.

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. Or so they thought, until top ODIN agent Mira Finn was murdered in Paris, her tortured body dragged from the Seine. A handful of people knew she was in France, fewer than that knew what her mission was.

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

When detectives John Stone and Carmen Dehan, who run the Cold Cases Department at the 43rd Precinct in the Bronx, choose their honeymoon together, there are three things they are very clear on: There must be good steak and whisky, it must be remote, and they must forget about work, cold cases, and murder for two weeks.

It wasn’t just the 20 years since Danny Brown’s death that made it the hardest case of their careers: it was that the manner of his death was, quite simply, impossible. His body was reduced to ash from his neck to his ankles, in the middle of Soundview Park. Detective Stone keeps an open mind, but his partner, Detective Dehan, is convinced there is a logical terrestrial explanation for the gruesome murder. The X-Files, after all, exist only in fiction, don’t they?

It was the first time John Stone had been back to London for 15 years. Last time had been on an exchange program between the NYPD and Scotland Yard: an exchange of skills and experience that was supposed to last six months, but went one for a year and a half.

Sue Benedict wasn’t giving out treats, so she got the trick. It was one hell of a trick. The killer, who made no effort to hide his identity, had vanished without a trace–just like the one witness who might actually have known what happened that night. And 12 years later, the case is as cold as Sue Benedict and the icy December wind coming in off the East River.

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.

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.

October, 2010, Sally Jones had been stabbed in the heart in her apartment on Commonwealth Avenue, in the Bronx. Her coat was on the back of her chair. Her shoes were beside her bed, her clothes were neatly folded, and she was dead under the sheets.

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 seemed to be a cold case like any other. So much so that Stone and Dehan hadn’t even considered reviewing it—until private investigator Karl Baxter requested a copy of the police file. Then Stone got curious. Why did a second-rate PI in the Bronx want to look into the case of a low-life petty criminal found tied to a chair in his apartment, beaten and shot through the heart? And that question led to other questions, like, whose was second pool of blood on the floor? If there was a second victim, where was the body?

When Karl and Christen Redfern were brutally murdered in their apartment in the Bronx, a lot of things were never explained. But the biggest mystery of all was where Karl and Christen’s daughter, Amy, had disappeared with her boyfriend, Charlie, on the very night of her parents’ murder.

In the wake of the Vietnam debacle, when the mighty USA was humiliated by Soviet-backed Vietcong, the CIA plotted to drag the USSR into a "Russian Vietnam" in Afghanistan. The plan was such a success it led ultimately to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Now, 40 years on, as Russia limps, scarred and crippled, from the battlefields of Kherson, Donetsk, and Kharkiv, Colonel Alexandrina Vitsin swears to drag the USA into an American Ukraine.

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?