Bücher veröffentlicht von Level Best Books

Parker City, Autumn 1984 . . . As the leaves begin to change colors and the weather starts turning cooler in the historic city in the heart of Western Maryland, Parker City Police Detectives Ben Winters and Tommy Mason are called to Saint Paul's where the recently installed Father Roland Taylor, who has become very popular in the community, has been found dead in his office at the church. By all appearances it seems to be a tragic case of a break-in gone wrong. Only twenty-four hours later, the detectives find themselves at the home of the city's well-known morning radio show DJ, Morning Mike Moran, who also seems to have been the victim of a robbery gone wrong. Coincidence? Neither Ben nor Tommy believe in coincidences. But at first glance, it seems to be just that. Until they find that the victims shared a common interest and begin an investigation that leads them to uncover a secret Parker City has been hiding for over one hundred and twenty years.

Josie Posey, a mature yet¿ever-feisty¿big city crime¿reporter turned crime solver, has officially¿retired to a small, touristy town in middle America where she and her posse of friends "unofficially"¿have their noses in everything. Josie loves her new life, but äweekly game of mahjong isn't enough: she itches¿to get back into the action. She gets more than she bargained for when¿The Village Gazette¿asks¿her to interview their local celebrity, a former NYC prima ballerina. Then, the ballerina's husband is discovered dead-face down¿in the couple's beloved field of flowers. Now, Josie has the inside track on solving the murder, with her¿quirky Mahjong Mavens as useful sidekicks. And if a killer in their midst¿wasn't enough distraction, Josie's matchmaking friends¿are pushing her to date again-particularly, to pursue an attraction toward¿a certain local blacksmith, with whom sparks fly.

D/C Mike O'Shea, a young cop with a knack for working hard and following hunches, is on the verge of cracking a prostitution ring when an undercover from another unit burns him. With only days left before their pimps shuttle the girls out of the country, Mike pushes his team into overdrive. Hours later, with too little information, sleep, or luck, the unthinkable happens. And now, the chase is personal. In the first of the Mike O'Shea Series, 10-33 Assist PC draws us into the dirty world of human trafficking through the eyes of the cops who put their lives on the line every day to shut it down.

Would the assassins plotting to kill Theodore Roosevelt on his visit to the Panama Canal succeed? Until this trip, no president while in office had ever traveled abroad. White House secretary Maurice Latta, thrilled to accompany the President, could not anticipate the adventures and dangers ahead. Latta befriends watchful secret service agents, ambitious journalists, and anxious First Lady Edith Roosevelt on their hot and humid trip, where he observes a country teeming with inequalities and abounding in opportunities. Along the way he learns about his own strengths-what he never imagined he could do, and what he discovers he can't do.Theodore Roosevelt did visit Panama in 1906, accompanied by White House staffer Maurice Latta. Interweaving the stories of real-life characters with fictional ones, Path of Peril imagines what the newspapers feared to report and what historians never discovered about Roosevelt's risky trip.

It's 1967 in California's magical City by the Bay- a bold new era of sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll...and murder. Graduating from UC Berkeley just as the Summer of Love begins, twin brothers Jack and Bobby Doyle forge two different career paths. Jack heads off to Vietnam to serve his country, while Bobby remains in the Bay Area, immersing himself in the world of music journalism. As the summer progresses, both brothers witness death firsthand for the first time, Jack on the battlefield and Bobby on the drug-infested streets of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district. Their experiences are equally shattering, with Jack losing newfound comrades-in-arms and Bobby enduring the murders of two women he'd grown close to. Bobby's traumas become as threatening as Jack's daily perils when he falls under suspicion in the murder investigations. Conferring with Jack by letter, Bobby tries to discover who actually committed the crimes. As the Summer of Love draws to a close, stunning events overtake the entire Doyle family.

Really . . . ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿What's eating Iris Warner's former husband, WarnerCorp founder and CEO Buck Warner? Iris would really like to know. ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿Who is trying to blackmail Ilona Marchand, WarnerCorp's human resources supervisor? Ilona would really like to know. ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿Where have Ed Stroh's stay-at-home in-laws, Eugene and Lawrence Abernathy, disappeared to? Ed would really like to know. ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿What's the meaning of the list of letter pairs and the Polaroid photo that Seamus Ellenbogen bequeathed to his niece Viola Ketchum? Viola would really like to know. ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿To find out, they have hired private detective Leo Schwartz and his assistant Rainer Zufahl. While they are unraveling the tangled skeins of these problems, Schwartz at least doesn't need to figure out how Phil G., his former AA protegee, really feels about him. With Phil's revolver pointed at his chest, he knows. ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿And by the way,¿Crime in Italy¿really has nothing to do with law-breaking in southern Europe.

An ex-FBI agent. A dying matriarch. A family secret that keeps killing. Northern California. Anne McCormack has plenty of her own problems-a vile ex-husband, a rocky exit from the FBI, and a struggling new estate-sales business. But when finding a watch leads her to a prominent Wine Country matriarch, she can't say no to the dying woman's plea to solve her young son's decades-old murder. Teaming up with her retired-cop uncle, Anne convinces the DA to reopen the cold case and is sworn in as a temp-hire detective. But as she wades through suspects, witnesses, and shocking evidence implicating those closest to the dead child, she fears it's too late for justice. Can Anne find a killer who's on the loose and out to take down the rest of the family?

When a beat-up suitcase full of bones washes up by the pier, the residents of the quaint resort town of Mermaid Bay are whipped into a hurricane-sized frenzy over the gruesome find in the middle of their Christmas in July festivities. The holly-jolly mood retreats like the tide, with everyone wondering who was in the suitcase.Christmas shoppe owner, Jade Hicks, wades into the fracas when voodoo dolls and mysterious notes and posters about impending doom start popping up all over town, threatening to destroy the economy of a community that lives and dies by tourist dollars. Then tensions crest when the prickly bookstore owner is found strangled to death with a string of holiday lights.Jade and her French bulldog Chloe, have to solve the crime before anyone else gets hurt, and her business and the festival are forever tainted. Sticks and Stones and a Bag of Bones is the first in the Mermaid Bay Christmas Shoppe Mysteries cozy series.

In January 1919 tank bursts in Boston's North End, flooding the neighborhood with molasses. When a woman is found murdered in the wreckage, Frances Glessner Lee asks her old friend, medical examiner Dr. George Magrath to help exonerate a young serviceman. He's a resident at the home for returning soldiers on Beacon Hill that Fanny has come from Chicago to manage. Frustrated by her lack of education and skills, she wants to clear the young man's name and find the killer. Will creation of a miniature crime scene lead to the truth? It's the best she can do.This is the first in a series of fictional stories roughly based on the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death. Over twenty miniature crime scenes were used from the 1940s to the present to train police detectives. Set in the 1920s, these stories imagine Frances Glessner Lee working with Dr. George Magrath to learn about "legal medicine" as forensic science was known at the time. Working with Magrath provided the foundation for the miniatures for which Frances Glessner Lee has become known as the Mother of Forensic Science.