This was a blast. My first foray into this author and the retired FBI agent Gregor Demarkian. Full of wit, sly references to American icons and myth, for example: I grew up knowing Howard Johnson's as HoJo's the place you went to eat back then that the whole family could afford. Never really ...
This book was a lot of fun! Interesting structure for a mystery, characters who were memorable without being annoying, and the detective in it had just read some Agatha Christie novels so he kept talking about them and that was fun too.This is #26 in a series, so maybe I should look into the res...
At the Fountain of Youth Work-Out Studio, the work-out gets off to a rather unhealthy start when the naked and poisoned body of an aerobics instructor is found in the bushes behind the club. Why are the local police so unhelpful? Enter ex-FBI agent Gregor Demarkian.
The Order of the Sisters of Divine Grace is holding a convention on the Philadelphia campus of St. Elizabeth's College--and the list of invitees is studded with unlikely Main Line luminaries like charmless coronation king Henry Hare and fat, foul-mouthed Norm Kevic, the most-talked-about rad...
Eight nights of murder! That's what Hanukkah is shaping up to be in Philadelphia, where a killer is stalking America's most outrageous TV talk show host. Ex-FBI agent Gregor Demarkian discovers that behind-the-camera politics and off-the-set malice contribute to a very unfestive atmosphere in thi...
Following Act of Darkness , this fourth adventure of former FBI agent Gregor Demarkian takes place in two tense days at Independence College, a small but prestigious school situated in rural Pennsylvania. It is nearly Halloween: the students are preparing a traditional bonfire by heaping wood aro...
Not even five and a half decades of self-imposed exile on a rocky island off the coast of Maine can erase Tasheba Kent's fame. Her smoldering sexuality on the silver screen is as potent a symbol of movie glamour today as it was in her silent-film heyday. The love-hate rivalry she shared with her ...
Former F.B.I. agent Gregor Demarkian makes another holiday date with death in his fifth mystery. Demarkian faces his most bizarre case when a young nun is murdered on the eve of St. Patrick's Day. Deadly hemlock and mysterious apparitions abound as Demarkian discovers that putting all the clues t...
Down the aisle--to deathArmies on the eve of invasion could learn a thing or two about preparation from the denizens of Cavanaugh Street, who never do anything halfway. This time it's a wedding that's taking over the collective consciousness of the street...and bringing up painful memories for Gr...
A tale of malicious mayhem--and a most heartwarming Father's Day present--from Jane Haddam's acclaimed series of holiday mysteries. Rumors of a change in Charles van Straadt's will only widen the circle of suspects who would have liked to see the media mogul six feet under. Now former FBI agent G...
Summoned to a Christmas feast at the isolated country estate of multimillionaire Robert Hannaford, retired FBI agent Gregor Demarkian is soon back on the job when Hannaford is murdered. Originally in paperback.
Midlist mystery and romance writers are outraged when quite a few romance authors turn to the new hybrid of Romantic Suspense. Is this grounds for murder? When the newly minted romantic suspense writer Verna Train lands on the subway tracks, Patience McKenna, romance novelist-turned-true crime wr...
Discussions of murder should take place on gray days or in the night. In Hollman, in the spring, Gregor felt as though he were playing a movie scene on the wrong set. It was as if John Sayles had decided to make a movie of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” in the bright greens and very early sixti...
but that was almost as if he’d called the Mona Lisa “ cute.” Gregor had been at crazy crime scenes before. He’d been there in the dark when the Philadelphia Police Department had pulled an endless stream of bones out of a cellar, all thought to be the work of the Plate Glass Killer. He’d been in ...
It was one o’clock on the afternoon of Thursday, February 28, a cold, gray, bitter day with too much wind, and Gregor had just come from four solid hours of listening to a lecture on VICAP. VICAP was the Violent Criminals Apprehension Something, Gregor couldn’t remember what. It was also a comput...
and glory in the idea that he was a “hands-on boss.” Gregor had had a number of hands-on bosses in the course of his life. He’d even liked some of them. He’d found all of them irritating. From the look of him, Gregor thought he was going to find Ken both irritating and insufferable. It always sur...
There was something about the frantic ringing and pounding that went right through him. His first thought was that somebody must have been hurt on the street. He’d never known Cavanaugh Street to have a mugging, but that didn’t mean it was impossible. His second thought was that one of the people...
It was closer to the truth that he had liked every version of it he had ever seen, and that he liked this one, too, at least as it appeared in the morning. That was the trouble with New York, as far as he was concerned. It never stayed the same from one visit to the next. Of course, it didn’t hel...
Part of the reason for this was practical. Those gunshots bothered him. There was no gun in this case, and the Hadley house was far too close to town to be a suitable site for hunting. It was the kind of detail that made him think, again, of that first kidnaping case, the kind of detail that made...
They were one of the few of the new machines he had no real trouble with—although lately, being around Bennis as much as he was, he had become far more relaxed on the computer. They also had the virtue of being able to get him large amounts of material in a very short time without the waste or ex...
Now, standing at the window of his apartment and looking down at the construction crews beginning to arrive for their day at Holy Trinity Church—or what was left of it—it occurred to him that this was very odd. There had been a time, when he was very small and Stefan had just gone into the army, ...
and he was more than too old to spend it trying to discover just how women think. At least that was what he had been telling himself these last few months since Bennis had been gone. It might have been different if he’d known where she had gone, or if she’d taken her things out of his apartment b...
Even the king of Sweden, congratulating him on the first of two Nobel prizes, raising his voice a little to be sure the right people could hear, had called him “Jig”—or rather “Yig,” because of the problems Scandinavian pronunciation had with the letter “J,” and after that, for half a year, peopl...
Susan was drinking a cup of coffee. Sharon was trying to finish a hamburger that just wouldn’t go down. The shouting was far enough away so that the words were indecipherable, but clear enough in intent, to make Sharon think of blood. After a while, everything began to make her think of blood, ev...
The one on the refrigerator said: Where have you been? Make some time to talk. This, Gregor thought, was not entirely fair. He’d had plenty of time to talk the night before, which he had spent sitting by himself on David’s deck, looking out over the ocean. Last night had been David Sandler’s nigh...
Talking to Patchen Rawls was not easy. Listening to her, for any logical person, was worse. She seemed to be incapable of linear thought. Solid facts were scattered haphazardly through a dense mass of trivialities and cosmic philosophies, like raisins in a hot rice pudding. Pseudo-facts were brou...
She could make the stops at red lights and respond to other drivers wanting to change lanes, but the whole procedure seemed infinitely silly, useless, utterly unimportant. She longed to put her head down on the steering wheel and go to sleep. She longed to think about floating. She longed to go b...
He had Bennis Hannaford’s stack of computer papers under his arm. Bennis had errands to do in downtown Philadelphia and no particular interest in keeping the information, or the paper it was printed on. “After all,” she said through a haze of cigarette smoke, “I got it for you. I thought you’d be...
There were other sections of town with names. Stacey Spratz drove Gregor through at least one of them, called New Preston. He also drove Gregor past some of the most spectacular houses Gregor had ever seen, even more impressive than the big ones in the best parts of the Main Line suburbs. Large b...
Like all the best secrets, this is a secret hidden in plain sight. Open your copy of the mind-controlled mainstream press on the morning of November 9 and take a look at the pictures spread out across the “society” section. You’ve probably seen pictures like these before: young girls in ball gown...