検索キーワード： 著者 "Blake Banner" すべてのカテゴリー

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 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.

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.

A leak at GCHQ–the UK’s version of the NSA–means that sensitive Allied and Israeli intelligence is being fed to Iran and Israel’s wider enemies. ODIN, the Five Eyes’ ultra-secret Special Operations Office, has teamed up their best operative, Alex Mason, with the Mossad’s Captain Aila Gallin to investigate and plug the leak.

Cherise Brown, her small daughter Shevron, her husband Earl. The only survivor, eight year-old Leroy who witnessed the whole thing. His story, that his father broke his sister’s neck, his mother stabbed his father in the back and his dad, before dying, in a kind of berserker rage, took the knife and killed his mother. Four years later Leroy Brown is murdered along with his adoptive sister, Lea. He is stabbed in the back, while his sister’s throat is cut, in a tool shed in the back yard of his adoptive family.

When a leading international financier is murdered in his Beverly Hills mansion, at first it looks like just another daemon at work in the City of Angels. But when the ritual nature of the killing emerges, the FBI take an interest. And then the international connections start to emerge: the European Commission, high ranking officials in Hong Kong…and Iran. That’s when the file gets passed to ODIN, and Alex Mason.

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.

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?

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.

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.

At forty-something, Bob Walklet was about to make a fortune with his IT company. But he'd made the mistake of falling in love with his assistant, twenty-something Sorka Williams. They were crazy about each other, and Bob had told his wife, Sheila - a thirty-something, ex-cop insurance consultant. He wanted a divorce. And there was a prenup. When he was found in his bedroom, stabbed in the heart, her DNA was literally all over him, her prints were on the knife and a neighbor had seen her hurrying from the house at the time of death.