Bøger af Joseph Flynn

The Last Ballot Cast is a story so big it has to be told in two parts. This is Part 2. With his son and his wife, the president of the United States, both near death, Jim McGill makes a choice that may save, or lose, both of them. As McGill makes his agonizing decision, an old nemesis, Dr. Damon Todd, escapes from CIA custody. Breaking out with Todd are two former covert operatives whose past is so bloody the Agency had to retire them. Now, all three are targeting McGill. In Patti's absence, Acting President Wyman has to find a way to bring Reverend Burke Godfrey to justice without causing a massacre. Captain Welborn Yates draws a bead on the car thief who killed his best friends and travels to the Caribbean to set up an ambush. All that is but the preface for the dirtiest, three-candidate presidential election in the country's history.When all is said and done, every big question is answered, including one that concerns us all in an election year: Does one person's vote matter?

The Last Ballot Cast is a story so big it has to be told in two parts. This is Part 1. With his son and his wife, the president of the United States, both near death, Jim McGill makes a choice that may save, or lose, both of them. As McGill makes his agonizing decision, an old nemesis, Dr. Damon Todd, escapes from CIA custody. Breaking out with Todd are two former covert operatives whose past is so bloody the Agency had to retire them. Now, all three are targeting McGill. In Patti's absence, Acting President Wyman has to find a way to bring Reverend Burke Godfrey to justice without causing a massacre. Captain Welborn Yates draws a bead on the car thief who killed his best friends and travels to the Caribbean to set up an ambush. All that is but the preface for the dirtiest, three-candidate presidential election in the country's history.When all is said and done, every big question is answered, including one that concerns us all in an election year: Does one person's vote matter?

Somebody in Washington is updating Shakespeare. The first thing he wants to do is kill all the lobbyists. Knocking off three of them in consecutive weeks, he's off to a fast start. On the lapel of each victim, the killer leaves a pin that, arguably, resembles Porky Pig. The Metro police are on the case when Putnam Shady steps forward and identifies the third victim as a friend. Authority averse, Putnam gives the cops only bare bones information - but he tells Margaret "Sweetie" Sweeney that he thinks he will be the next victim. The reason, he explains, is quite simple. There are two plans afoot to seize control of the federal government. At the center of one plan is the speaker of the House of Representatives. The group behind the other plan consisted of Putnam and his three dead colleagues. Sweetie vows to protect Putnam. She enlists Jim McGill, the president's henchman, to find out who is behind the murders. But then McGill's whole world is turned upside down. His son, Kenny, is diagnosed with leukemia. President Patricia Grant's life is only slightly less tumultuous. Her enemies force her to leave the Republican Party. Erna Godfrey implicates her husband, Reverend Burke Godfrey, in the killing of Patti's first husband, Andrew Hudson Grant. But Reverend Godfrey refuses to go down without a fight. Amidst the turmoil, Welborn Yates and Kira Fahey schedule their marriage - and inevitably have to deal with wedding crashers.

Ron Ketchum saw his share of the dark side of life as a cop in Los Angeles. Then he left L.A. to become the chief of police in the Sierra Nevada resort town of Goldstrike. One sunny morning in the mountains, though, he comes upon a crime unlike anything he's ever seen before. He finds the body of an African American man nailed to a tree. The victim is a highly respected minister, and his father is the nationally known televangelist Jimmy Thunder. Ron, on the other hand, has described himself in court as a recovering bigot. Goldstrike's mayor for life and movie icon, Clay Steadman, wants Ron to catch the killer fast. Adding to the pressure, the victim's grandmother comes to town. She tells the media mob that has descended on Goldstrike that God will curse the town until the killer is caught. That's when a rogue mountain lion begins attacking people. At first, the attacks happen on the wilderness outskirts of Goldstrike. Then the predator moves into town, leaping a fence into a family's backyard. Finally, it turns the tables on one of the hunters sent out to bring it down. Looking for a killer, hunting a lion and defending his own integrity - makes being a cop in L.A. seem like the good old days.

Gasoline, Texas - Laddy Johnson may or may not be the unacknowledged love child of the late President Lyndon Baines Johnson. But one thing's for sure: After fifteen years of being a Hollywood stuntman, Laddy's back to run for mayor of his hometown of Gasoline, Texas. His opponent is the incumbent, Edwin "Win-Win" Winslow. Win-Win is the quintessential Texas good ol' boy. A former star lineman at Texas A&M, Win-Win now owns Texas Rolling Stock, an upscale SUV dealership that sells internal combustion monsters like gas was still 25[ a gallon. Which in Gasoline it still is. The town has its own oil field and refinery. And the Municipal Field is what the election is all about. Laddy vows to keep it. Win-Win wants to sell it to Big Oil, which is getting nervous about the idea of anybody in the country still having access to affordable fuel. Win-Win promises that every homeowner in town will get a windfall payment that will make the sale a good deal. Laddy cautions that Big Oil is way too slippery to trust. Who will win? Will the Winslow dynasty be extended another generation? Will Laddy ever find out who his daddy is? Will he marry his first love, now a famous movie star? Or will he chuck everything to take up with Win-Win's long lost daughter, Hayley? Finding out is a gusher of fun.

Two Cops Chasing a Rumor ... Sergeant Rick Valkonen, all but retired from the LAPD, is given a final no-worries assignment to carry him into his new life as a beach bum with a pension. Make sure the new chief of police's teenage twins, Justin and Justine, don't get into trouble in big, bad L.A. But Justine gives Valkonen the slip one night and that's when things start getting crazy. Detective Joan Duarte of the Santa Monica PD is fresh off a week's suspension from duty for assaulting a fellow officer. She coldcocked the guy who'd been sexually harassing her. Returning to duty, Duarte is told to go see an L.A. cop named Valkonen. Valkonen tells Duarte what happened to Justine after she ditched him. She was invited to an underground rock concert with a great new band. Only thing is, the band plans to commit suicide on stage - and the audience is supposed to follow right along into the hereafter. Has to be a gag, doesn't it? In SoCal, maybe not. When Valkonen and Duarte start to investigate, they don't like the vibe they get. The death concert begins to look more and more real. Problem is, the two cops don't know the band's name, the date, or the venue for the concert. Two cops who were supposed to debunk a hoax suddenly find themselves working the most deadly case of their careers.

Two men on the run ... Newspaperman Dan Cameron gets a cool old typewriter for his 40th birthday. It once belonged to Ben Hecht, who used it to write the movie "Notorious." Dan uses it to write a best-seller. Then the Hecht estate says the typewriter was stolen and demands its return. As his lawyers fight in court, Dan and his wife, Erin, take off so he can get at least one more book out of the machine. Bank robber Fetch McDonald is three weeks away from parole when his father brings bad news. Fetch's ex-wife, Verene, who still holds title to his heart, is going to remarry - in two weeks. One week before Fetch's release. With the help of his cousin, Lerome, Fetch breaks out. But the car Lerome has stolen breaks down. Right outside of Dan and Erin's cabin in the woods. The two desperados steal the Camerons' SUV. And Lerome, a quirky sort, steals Dan's typewriter and the only copy of his new novel. Not long after that Fetch and an unlikely accomplice are duplicating the crimes described in Dan's novel. Dan and Erin have no choice but to join in the manhunt. If the court rules against Dan, what's he going to say? An escaped convict stole the typewriter? Yeah, right. Besides, Dan thinks there's a new book in tracking down the thieves.

A cop gets shot. . . He loses his left eye. He loses his job. And that's after he loses his wife. So what's he going to do? Michael "Doc" Kildare, former undercover narc, sues the government. Claims one-third of the $45 million recovered in the drug raid he led. Armando Guzman, the drug lord who lost the money, doesn't like that. He puts out a contract on Doc's life. Doc's former boss, the superintendent of the Chicago Police Department, also takes exception. He says the confiscated drug money is his. So when he learns of Guzman's contract, he quietly passes the word: Nobody wearing a CPD star is to help Doc in any way. But that's not all. An old friend of Doc's asks a favor. Help find her son. The boy is 17 years old, but mentally handicapped. Doc investigates and soon learns there might be a serial killer working his neighborhood. Oh, yeah. Doc's ex-wife? She's back. He tells himself that she's only after the millions that might be coming his way. Thing is, he doesn't know if that's a good enough reason to turn her away. Hitmen to the right, a maniac to the left, and a redheaded distraction. Nobody ever said retirement would be easy.

Out for a day's adventure exploring the dry bed of Lake Travis in Austin, Texas, two young boys stumble upon a skeleton. It might be all that remains of a fugitive named Randy Bear Heart. Wanted for robbing three banks and killing three cops, Bear Heart was never brought to justice. The FBI is called on to determine how the outlaw avoided arrest for twenty-five years and who put him in the lake wearing chains. The BIA - Bureau of Indian Affairs - gets the very same job. Special Agent John Tall Wolf is put on the case because one of the dead cops was a Native American who worked at the Mercy Ridge Reservation. The FBI wants John to "coordinate all your efforts" through SAC Gilbert Melvin. John is having none of that, saying, "I'll conduct my investigation as I see fit." He doesn't even get along with his own boss, Marlene Flower Moon, head of the BIA's Office of Justice Services. While interviewing John for his job, Marlene was amused by his assertiveness, and asked him, "What do you want, a license to take scalps?" John said, "Yeah, that'd be good."

According to the polls, it's only a matter of time - and not that long a time - before the United States elects its first female president. Which will make her husband - what? Well, if he's the ex-cop who solved the murder of the president's first husband and brought the killers to justice ... and if he's not the kind of guy to stand on formality ... and if he doesn't want to be the head of the FBI ... and if he takes out a license and becomes the first private eye to live in the White House ... That would make him The President's Henchman. Jim McGill's first case is to find out who is stalking a member of the White House press corps, before that stalker turns the tables on McGill and maybe even threatens the president herself. He also has to be a shadow advisor to a young Air Force investigator who is looking into a he-said she-said charge of adultery leveled against a female colonel working at the Pentagon, a case with the potential to derail the new president's administration before it has a chance to begin.

When you win reelection to be president of the United States by one electoral vote, as Patricia Darden Grant has done, you're going to make a lot of people angry. Some of them might even try to change the outcome by violence. The Secret Service fears an assassination attempt at the president's second inauguration, one using drone launched missiles. The president could forsake the public ceremony, but that would tell the terrorists they have her running scared. Her second term would become a lost cause. She refuses to let that happen, and informs the Secret Service it will be up to them to keep her safe. Not entirely up to them, though. James J. McGill, will also be on the case. So will White House Chief of Staff Galia Mindel. Even retired SAC Celsus Crogher is called back to make sure no harm comes to the president. Then McGill's life gets even more complicated. His friends, Investigating Magistrate Yves Pruet and his bodyguard Odo Sacripant, come to town searching for a stolen Renoir painting. Gabbi Casale is already at the White House, finishing up McGill's official portrait. The old gang from Paris is back together. Only McGill feels Pruet is holding out on him. Something more than finding a masterpiece is at stake here. Something that, oddly enough, might tie in with the attempt on the president's life.

As a cop and later a private investigator, Jim McGill has worked some really big cases. Life and death cases. One case, solving the murder of Patricia Darden Grant's first husband, might even have changed the course of American history. But not every investigation is epic in scope. There are short cases, too. This is the first collection of three such cases. In Found Money, political enemies of the president - McGill's wife - try to concoct a scandal by making McGill look corrupt. If McGill is going to stop them, he'll have to turn things around overnight. In Lost Dog, a little girl wants McGill to find her missing pooch. Only the kid is the daughter of a Russian diplomat, and the Chinese might be involved, too. If McGill isn't careful, he might step in something nasty. In Pins & Needles, McGill is asked to help a first-round NFL draft choice who put himself on the wrong side of voodoo queen. To come out on top in this one, he'll have to steal the woman's juju. Sometimes, you'll want a lot of McGill. Other times you'll find good things come in short cases.

President Patricia Grant has been impeached. Her trial in the Senate and the fate of her presidency lie just around the corner. That leads James J. McGill to suggest publicly that he might break the noses of any number of Washington pols. White House Chief of Staff Galia Mindel tells McGill he's not being helpful. She sends him to work a case in Los Angeles. A friend of Galia's has just had her frozen embryos stolen. McGill knows he'll need a fed to run interference for him with the LAPD. He teams up with BIA Co-director John Tall Wolf. Even out in La-La Land, though, McGill can't escape Washington politics. The primary suspect in the theft has close connections to House leadership, the very people who initiated the impeachment charge. Even worse, McGill learns of a threat against his life. Somebody doesn't like him snooping around in SoCal. That guy wants to do more than bust McGill's beak, he wants to punch his ticket.

Special Agent John Tall Wolf of the BIA (Bureau of Indian Affairs) describes his job like this: "I work at the intersection of Native American and mainstream cultures. If there's a four-car pile-up, I try to sort things out." The metaphor is particularly apt on the August morning in New Orleans when all the traffic lights turn green at the same time causing citywide gridlock and providing the perfect cover for a gang of eight men on motorcycles to rob the Thibodeaux State Bank. Normally, the FBI would have sole responsibility to investigate. This time, though, John is called in because the robbers were decked out as Native Americans, a 21st century take on a war party. John raises the idea that the warpaint and feathers might be misdirection. Then a group calling itself Red Nation Rising claims credit for the robbery. That name might be double entendre. Washington suspects that China might be at work in the shadows, testing cyberwarfare against the United States. John Tall Wolf and his FBI counterpart, Deputy Director Byron DeWitt, have to come up with answers, bag the crooks and make it fast.

Round Robin Phinney ... She's 230 pounds of bad attitude. She dishes out sandwiches and insults to the customers at Screaming Mimi's deli. She takes a dim view of people in general and men in particular. Her home is her sanctuary. She has an apartment upstairs. Downstairs, she's created a private park, lushly landscaped, dotted with ponds, furnished with two Chicago Park District benches. Manfred Welk is what Charles Atlas would have looked like if he'd been serious about lifting weights. A former Olympic powerlifter for East Germany, his When cold weather hits and Robin's furnace goes out, the plants in her park start to die. Worse, she has no money for repairs - but she does have a small vacant apartment in her basement. Something she might swap for the services of a live-in handyman. After interviewing a number of prospective fix-it people, Robin finds, to her great horror, the best choice is a giant German with CIA connections. That's bad enough, but the guy turns out to have a kid, a blue-haired prepubescent brat named Bianca who's been raised in a brothel. Robin, Manfred and Bianca all have their demons to cast out. You'll have a grand time watching as they do.

One Saturday morning, a new client comes to Jim McGill with a desperate plea. Zara Gilford says someone is planning to kill her husband. Jordan Gilford is famous as a whistle-blower who exposed corruption at two major defense contractors. Now, he works for the Inspector General's office at the Pentagon. Zara tells McGill someone wants to make sure Jordan doesn't find any thievery inside the Department of Defense. That same morning, Abel Mays, a despondent public high school football coach who has lost two star players from his team to the recruiting efforts of the coach at the exclusive Winstead School in Georgetown, uses an assault weapon to gun down the players who deserted him, their new coaches and the teammates who try to intervene. Then Mays is found shot dead in his SUV - after his weapon is used to kill one last victim: Jordan Gilford. For FirePower America lobbyist Auric Ludwig this is a dream come true. A good guy with a gun has killed a bad guy with a gun. Zara Gilford isn't buying the idea that Mays killed her husband. She persuades McGill to find out who really killed him. McGill's investigation threatens Ludwig's narrative. But a political firestorm is just one of the problems McGill will face. The president asks her henchman to bring Jordan Gilford's killer in alive, and that's when things get really dangerous.

When friends need a hand, McGill is their man. Former Metro PD detectives Meeker and Beemer, now working as private investigators, have a client who has a winning Grand Slam lotto ticket worth $212 million. Only there's another winner, and this one has been officially announced while Meeker and Beemer's client feels like he's getting squeezed out. With a nine-figure payoff hanging in the balance, Meeker and Beemer decide they'll need McGill's help to make sure things work out the right way.That same morning, newswoman-provocateur Ellie Booker drops in on McGill. She has a simple request for him. Tell her just how much trouble she might be facing. Only Ellie doesn't want to share why she might be in danger. Unable to reach an agreement with McGill, Ellie walks out and almost gets gunned down the moment she leaves the building.At first glance, the two cases seem to have nothing to do with each other, but in McGill's world life is never that simple. The Big Fix is classic McGill.

John Tall Wolf's nemesis and sometimes boss, Marlene Flower Moon, has been nominated to become the next Secretary of the Interior. John has only himself to blame for that. He put in a good word for Marlene with his new acquaintance, the president. His thought was the new job would keep Marlene too busy to think about bothering him.If only. Marlene immediately comes up with an assignment for John. Go to the Cascade Mountains in Washington state and see if someone has set up an illegal marijuana growing operation on land belonging to a young high-tech billionaire named Frederic Strait.Of course, Marlene's playing an angle. She's seduced Strait so he'll bankroll her ultimate political goal, the Oval Office. Marlene also intrigues John by telling him that Strait is a Native American who was adopted outside his tribe -- just like John -- and now calls himself Freddie Strait Arrow.Before John can even get the investigation off the ground, his fiancée, Rebecca Bramley, arrives with the news she might lose her job with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Further complications include the presence of a Mexican Marine, a drug cartel boss with CIA connections, four Canadian mercenaries, Coyote herself and a grizzly bear that seems determined to eat someone.

McGill has left the building -- the White House, that is -- but he hasn't gone away. The Paris office of McGill Investigations International refers a case to the boss in Washington, DC. A man who's dying in Munich, Marlon Janeway, wants to get in touch with his sister, Alice. The problem is, he can't find her. Alice works backstage for Teagan Tobias, a performance artist with a barbed-wire opinion of the human race. Somewhere between Tobias' last show in Atlanta and his opening night in Washington, DC, Alice vanished. McGill accepts the task of finding her, preferably before Marlon expires.Another search is on for McGill's partners in the firm's Austin, Texas office, Maj Olson and Gene Beck. Only they're not looking for a missing person. Their job is to find a hat: the one John Wayne wore in the last movie he made. That makes it the most famous cowboy hat ever. In order to solve the mystery and recover the hat, Maj and Gene will have to contend with a challenge that might have made even the Duke grit his teeth.Things have changed somewhat for McGill and friends, but they work their cases with the same blend of wit, grit and style they always have.

When a classic Super Chief locomotive disappears between L.A. and Chicago and the case is handed to the BIA's John Tall Wolf, he asks the obvious question, "How do you steal a train?"Once more, John is working with FBI Deputy Director Byron DeWitt, and the question he wants answered is a perennial favorite. "Are terrorists behind all this?"Other possible suspects are Native Americans and two feuding Silicon Valley tech billionaires who were among the last people to see the Super Chief off from L.A.'s Union Station.All trails lead to the one place John swore he'd never go: the reservation where he was born. Looks like a good place to avoid, too, when John learns his grandmother has put out a hit on him.

Always a good sport, Jim McGill, the first private-eye to live in the White House, agrees to accompany his wife, the president, to London to be her escort at a dinner given by the queen-yes, the one who lives in Buckingham Palace. Problem is, he'll have a week in England beforehand, while the president attends a G8 meeting, with nothing to do. Then a client comes to McGill, the daughter of a former Chicago cop McGill knew but didn't like when he was a captain on the CPD. McGill's former colleague went to Paris to scatter the ashes of his late, French-born wife in the Seine. While tending to that solemn obligation, the former cop managed to get into a brawl with and kill France's national sports hero. The guy from Chicago claims he was only saving a blonde woman from being beaten by the Frenchman, as French law actually required him to do. Only problem is, the blonde has disappeared. The former cop's daughter asks McGill to find the woman and save her father. Beats glad-handing the locals in nearby London, he decides. He just has to wrap up the case in time to get to dinner with the president and the queen. ForeWord Magazine called The President's Henchman "marvelously entertaining." Its sequel, The Hangman's Companion, is even more fun. With a French accent.

As President Patricia Grant nears the end of her second term, three big questions hang heavy in the air: Who will succeed her as the next president: her vice president, Jean Morrissey, or Senate Majority Leader Oren Worth? After a Navy warship shoots down two Chinese fighter jets, how far will hostilities with China go? And, of the utmost personal importance to Patti Grant, will her husband and henchman, Jim McGill, live to see the end of her presidency?McGill is targeted by a cluster of killers known as los muertos, working under the direction of an enigmatic contract assassin called Taps. So McGill summons his colleagues -- the private detectives who will staff his newly expanded firm, McGill Investigations International -- to help keep him alive and kicking.They're soon put to the test when an ambush and ensuing fire-fight shatter the peace of the posh Washington neighborhood of Georgetown. Undeterred, McGill and his colleagues continue the hunt, leading to a climax that leaves McGill fighting tooth-and-nail for his life.

Nothing lights a fire under Jim McGill like the thought of someone threatening his family. So when he gets a call from his elder daughter, Abbie, about a frightening development, he's ready to rip somebody a new one. Only he learns that the Secret Service has initiated a new measure to protect his children. SAC Elspeth Kendry has combed the service's ranks to find young agents who closely resemble Abbie, Ken and Caitie, the idea being that the decoys will confuse and divert anyone harboring bad thoughts for the McGill kids. The plan works only too well. Special Agent Carrie Ramsey is kidnapped by a gang who think she's Caitie McGill. In no small way, and with some legitimacy, Caitie blames herself for the abduction. She's determined to help the special agent regain her freedom. That's something McGill is reluctant to do at first. Then Carrie's parents come to McGill and plead with him: Help save the life of a young woman who was ready to sacrifice hers for Caitie. Reasoning doesn't get any more compelling than that. McGill goes all out. Even to the point of wangling an FBI badge for himself.

Dr. Yvette Lisle might have solved the problem of overcoming drug-resistant bacteria, only her computer with all of her data has been stolen. Finding the computer will be more dangerous than John Tall Wolf expects.