This is definitely not a love story for Phoenix. I used to read Jon Talton's columns when he wrote for the AZ republic (and his jabs at it in the book ring true!). This book exposes much of what is wrong with the city and brutally portrays the worst side of us. The sliding of the city parallels ...
This is the first in the Phoenix Cold Case series, featuring Professor David Mapstone. Mapstone is an ex-cop, who left the police, and Phoenix, for a new life in California as an academic. Now divorced and refused tenure, he is back in the house he grew up in, wondering how he reached forty with ...
In this prequel to the popular David Mapstone mysteries, author Jon Talton takes us back to 1999, when everything dot-com was making money, the Y2K bug was the greatest danger facing the world, and the good times seemed as if they would never end. It was a time before David and Lindsey were toget...
This one ends on a very bitter note. Surprisingly so. David Mapstone is approached by a former student who discovered a letter written by her father before he died confessing to killing someone in 1966. The letter gives directions on how to find the body but doesn't say who the dead man was. But ...
The past is never past on the mean streets of Phoenix, especially when the mercury hits a hundred and it's only April. Half a century after the unsolved murder of an FBI agent, the missing badge is found on the body of a dead transient. The case seems a perfect fit for David Mapstone, history pro...
Cheryl Beth felt strangely free and light after telling him. She felt safe with him knowing. It was as if a new world had opened at her feet. He started slowly up Vine Street, past Piatt Park where the murdered President James Garfield looked out on the city from his statue, past the public libra...
She had three new consults and half a dozen follow-ups. She wanted to get as many of her patients over from IVs to oral pain drugs as soon as possible. People were hurting: stabbings, shootings, chest tubes, every kind of mayhem in the belly. Will was hurting, the pain etching deep ravines around...
Edgemont, Windsor, Cambridge, Virginia, Wilshire, Lewis, Vernon, Encanto Boulevard, Cypress. Hardly anyone lived in the neighborhood from those days. One friend from grade school went into the Diplomatic Service and was posted to Budapest, another was a lobbyist in Califor...
Only one person had called me on the cheap phone I had bought in El Centro. “Time’s up, Doctor Mapstone.” “For you,” I said. “You escaped once, you won’t again.” “Did you ever serve in the military? In combat?” &n...
The lock had been replaced, but the room was still musty with my suspicions. It wouldn’t have surprised me if Kate Vare had broken in. But, no, that wasn’t her style. So who? The tattooed man? Dana Earley, perhaps? She certainly knew where my office was located. So much had happened since the bre...