Bøger af Donald Steven Collins

When Mookie Thompson's body was discovered on the edge of a marshland on the last road out of Queens, two pages of coded messages were found in his pocket. Deciphering the code became as much of a challenge for precinct detectives as finding his killer. Most people who knew the illiterate 36-year-old petty thief said Mookie didn't have a mean bone in his body, but when the investigation was turned over to the Cold Case Squad five years later, Detectives Danski and Litchfield discovered there was a different side of Mookie.

Kenny Maquette's heavy drinking caused him to lose his job as a top detective with the Ashford Police Department in California, He was quickly hired as a uniformed security officer with Grafton-Keating, a local defense plant. On his third midnight shift, he finds an open door and a broken lock at the plant's "think tank." He goes inside unarmed to investigate and is shot and seriously wounded. While convalescing, he joins forces with a California private investigator, and together they find the kidnapped daughter of a local defense attorney. Six months later, Kenny relocated in the big apple where he was thrust into an investigation to find the man who murdered a socialite, a woman who led a crusade against the vicious men who breed dogs to fight to their death. With two successful investigations behind him, Kenny got his New York private investigator's license. From a window-seat in a Queens coffee shop he saw three men abduct two teenage girls - one a judge's granddaughter. He intervened but was unable to save the girls or prevent a uniformed police officer from being guned down. As a key witness to the abduction, he worked tirelessly to help NYPD Major Case Squad Detective Brenda Farrell recover the girls and bring the abductors to justice.

"The Police have given up," Susan Whitlock complained five years after her four-year-old-son was kidnapped from her Upper East Side apartment while she slept soundly in her own bedroom fifteen feet away. "Nobody's looking for Jake, anymore," she told friends and anyone who would listen. She begged Cold Case Detective Steve Danski to investigate, calling him the best detective in the city. She held up a six-month old newspaper and slapped her hand against a byline at the top of the page. "You did it once; you can do it again." Danski didn't need to read the story. He knew she was talking about the Barbara Weinstein case.

After being fired for drinking on duty, former California detective Kenny Marquette takes a job as a uniformed security guard at Grafton-Keating, a local defense plant. His life is suddenly turned upside-down when he finds a broken lock while making his rounds. Shot and nearly killed after going inside to investigate, he later learns that the man who broke into the plant's "think-tank" was after the blueprints for a laser device designed for the U.S. military and capable of tracking movement in the mountains of Afghanistan as well as deeply underground. In the hospital, after vowing to find the man who shot him, he meets Albert Livingston, a private investigator who was hired to find the kidnapped daughter of high-powered California attorney Malcolm Smoake. The pair take on the Mexican mafia and the Al Qaeda when Livingston convinces Kenny they are after the same man.

"Stolen Ashes" is the fifth book in a series featuring Tom Newberry and Barry Noonan, former detectives with NYPD's Fugitive Warrant Squad. After catching the madman who killed four Craigslist prostitutes and dumped their bodies on a beach on Long Island's south shore, Tom was appointed chief of the town's twelve-man police department. After four months and one solved murder he gives up the post and returns to the detective agency he opened four years ago. He quickly picks a missing husband case that takes him and Barry to Hudson, NY, a small town thirty miles from the state capital where they learn the man they're after has good reason to hide. Meanwhile Tom's new bride Cynthia returns to Manhattan South Homicide Squad and before she can peel the lid from her tea container she's assigned a cop-murder to investigate on Manhattan's West side.

Alison Crosby is a passenger on the number seven train on the elevated IRT subway line. As she stares vacantly out the window she spots a tall, muscular man holding a knife to a slim, dark-haired woman. The man lunges at the woman as the train goes into a bend. "Did you see that?" Alison asked the other passengers. But they deny seeing the man and the woman. Alison got off at the next stop and called the police. "I just saw someone get murdered!" she told the 911 operator. But when officers from the local precinct arrived Alison wasn't able to tell them where the murder took place, only that it happened in a third floor window in one of the many apartment buildings along Roosevelt Avenue. Later when precinct detectives try to blow her off she calls her uncle, retired NYPD Detective Tom Newberry who runs a private detective agency with his former NYPD partner Barry Noonan.

Don Collins is the author of "Old Watchdogs," an aclaimed first novel where he introduces Tom Newberry and Barry Noonan, two hardnosed former detectives from NYPD's Fugitive Warrant Squad. When Newberry retired he opened a detective agency just to have something to do. But when a serial killer terrorized unsuspecting women in northern Queens he picked up the scent and he and Noonan joined the chase. Newberry's relentless, unconventional, and often maddening style brought criticism from high ranking police brass. But he had done his homework and, in time, his detractors had to admit Newberry was onto something. In "Diamond Dogs" the hunt is personal. When Noonan's nephew, Jack McGuire, a Manhattan attorney and former star pitcher for St. John's University goes missing, Newberry and Noonan do what they do best, and soon the chase is on.

Prominent Queens defense attorney Sid Weinstein sat watching television on a quiet summer evening, sharing a bowl of popcorn with his daughter Barbara the night before her thirteenth birthday when two masked gunmen stormed into his home, pistol-whipped him, and dragged Barbara outside to a waiting van never to be seen or heard from again.Information was scarce except for a vague description of the gunmen. Were they disgruntled clients or sexual deviates who'd had their eyes of Barbara for a very long time?Despite a $50,000 reward and a relentless police investigation, the case remained unsolved and was eventually buried in the files of the Cold Case Squad. Seven years later, Queens Robbery Squad Detectives Steve Danski and Gregory Litchfield arrested Roger Shuster, a drug-addled stickup man who claimed he knew who kidnapped Barbara and where she was being held captive. He was willing to tell the detectives what he knew in exchange for his freedom.The detectives were anxious, but skeptical. Shuster had been lying to them all day. Could they trust him now?

Former Detective Tom Newberry was finding retirement a difficult adjustment. His old NYPD partner Barry Noonan scoffed when Newberry told him he was getting closer to identifying the madman who had gunned down six unsuspecting women on the streets of Northern Queens. "Give it up," Noonan pleaded. "Our job is done. Let the new breed figure this one out. Our days of solving crimes are behind us, now. We're not the city's watchdogs anymore."Newberry soon clashed with Sergeant Ray Wheeler, the man Chief of Detectives Frank Armstrong appointed to spearhead the special task force he set up to catch the killer. Wheeler called Newberry a nuisance and threatened to arrest the former sleuth for interfering with an official police investigation. But, in time, Wheeler realized Newberry was onto something...

Detectives had no answers when the naked bodies of three Craigs List escorts were found on the dunes of Fleming Beach, a small coastal village on Long Island's South Shore. When pressed by reporters, they couldn't say if they were connected to the decomposed bodies of eight female sex workers that were discovered twelve miles away wrapped in burlap sacks and left to rot in the thickets along Ocean Parkway, the dumping grounds of the Gilgo Beach Killer.Was one person responsible for all eleven deaths, or was there a second killer out there, or possibly a cabal?There was no way of knowing. County detectives said they had their eyes on three suspects. Fleming Beach detectives said they had one person of interest and he wasn't one of the county detectives' suspects." . . . a thrilling and fascinating book filled with suspense."-Tim Toby, Online Book Club

After getting an early morning call from Queens attorney Angelo Manetti, Tom Newberry and his former NYPD partner Barry Noonan head to Riker's Island to question Curtis Moore, an Army veteran of the Vietnam War who is accused of committing a savage murder in Far Rockaway Queens on Christmas Eve. Meanwhile, twelve thousand miles away in Westmeath, Ireland, Brendan McCabe, a man who earned his stripes with the IRA, leaves home on his twenty-first birthday to find a new life in Londonderry, but finds he can't escape his IRA past.

Queens defense attorney Angelo Manetti receives a middle-of-the-night phone call when a botched burglary results in the death of four men. When Manetti hangs up he calls Tom Newberry. Meanwhile Manhattan South Homicide detectives Cynthia Newberry and David Alvarez pursue a crazed gunman who shoots down American soldiers as they stand in front of war memorials and pay honor to men lost in combat.

On a cold Monday morning the naked body of a young blond waitress is found at the base of a railway bridge in Queens. When NYPD isn't able to name a suspect, the victim's father calls the Newberry Agency. Ace detectives Tom Newberry and Barry Noonan meet up with a gritty radio-car team in Astoria and a pair of female cops in the Bronx that provide some of the answers.

Two months after being ambushed in his own living room and losing his fiancé, and two close detective friends in a shootout with the brother of Mexican Mafia kingpin Miguel Placido, Kenny Marquette was released from Ashford General Hospital. Going back to the house he had called home for the past dozen years was not an option. The place held too many bad memories. When he told his former boss, Peter Grafton, that he was thinking of relocating in New York, Grafton gave him the keys to his spacious Upper East Side condo and told him to stay as long as he wanted. Shortly after arriving in the Big Apple Kenny is drawn into an investigation to find the man who killed Grafton's wife.