by Carolyn Mulford (2013)
Former CIA operative Phoenix Smith and Acting Sheriff Annalynn Keyser find a missing farmer dead with a rifle at his side and a broken antler in his back. The women suspect a human framed a deer. Phoenix hunts for the deadly deer as an excuse to investigate the widow, a hostile neighbor, an ecoterrorist, and other suspects. Rule-bound Annalynn leads the official investigation, stretching the law and her ethics to convert Phoenix's illegally obtained leads into court-admissible evidence.
Benjamin Black
After a suspicious car crash death and the disappearance of an acquaintance of his daughter, Irish pathologist Quirke seeks help from his friend Inspector Hackett. Before long, events lead them deep into a shadowy world where one of Dublin's most powerful men uses the cover of politics and religion to make obscene profits.
Kenneth Wishnia
Whoever saves a single life saves the entire world . . .In 1592, as the Catholic Church and the Protestants battle for control of the soul of Europe, Prague is a relatively safe harbor in the religious storm. Ruled by Emperor Rudolph II, the city is a refuge for Jews who live within the gated walls of its ghetto. But their lives are jeopardized when a young Christian girl is found with her throat slashed in a Jewish shop on the eve of Passover. Charged with blood libel, the shopkeeper and his family are arrested. All that stands in the way of a rabid Christian mob is a clever Talmudic scholar, newly arrived from Poland, named Benyamin Ben-Akiva. Pleading the shopkeeper's innocence to the city's sheriff, Benyamin is given three days to bring the true killer to justice.But the search will not be easy. Hampered by rabbinic law, and with no allies or connections, Benyamin has only his wits, knowledge, and faith to guide him on his quest—a trail that weaves from the city's teeming streets to the quiet of a shul, from the forbidden back rooms of a ghetto brothel to the emperor's lavish palace.The Talmud says many things in life depend on mazl, luck. Fortunately, Benyamin is blessed, for an unlikely group of heroes will risk their own lives to help him discover the truth: Anya, a Christian butcher's daughter; the renowned reformist rabbi Judah Loew; a wise herbal healer known as Kassandra the Bohemian; and even the emperor himself.Who would most profit from the girl's murder—and from having the entire ghetto sealed off? Is the killer a Christian indebted to the girl's apothecary father? Or a messianic Jew bent on the destruction of his people to precipitate the Messiah's coming? The desperate search for answers is complicated by the arrival of a new Holy Inquisitor determined to root out witchcraft and heresy, and reclaim the fractious Bohemian territory for Rome. With time running out, Benyamin must dare the impossible—and commit the unthinkable—to save the Jews of Prague . . . and his own life.Infused with history and spiritual insight, rich in atmosphere and color, The Fifth Servant vividly re-creates sixteenth-century Prague—a bustling city where superstition, ignorance, and hatred clash with curiosity, knowledge, and tolerance; a world in which innocent lives are swept away by political and religious struggles, and righteous men and women sacrifice everything in the name of justice and truth.
Albert A. Bell, Jr
"While staying at his villa on Lake Comum, with Tacitus and his wife as guests, Pliny decides to add on to the house. When workmen begin demolishing a wall, they find a human skeleton. Pliny knows when the wall was built and he knows his wife's father disappeared at that time. But his father-in-law supposedly drowned. Shortly after finding the skeleton, Pliny begins to receive warnings and threats to halt his investigation. Then his wife, Livia, is kidnapped. The kidnapers want a document in exchange for Livia, but Pliny has no idea where it is. With the help of Tacitus and Aurora, he rescues Livia, but Aurora is injured and suffers a miscarriage. (She had not told Pliny she was pregnant.) Pliny learns that an innkeeper in the town of Comum was his father's mistress. She knows where the missing document is. Ultimately Pliny discovers that his biological father was complicit in the death of Livia's father by hiding the body in the wall. Livia's father and two other men were involved in a pedophile ring. Her father was killed in an argument among the men."--
Chris Culver
Detective Ash Rashid has finished law school and is ready to swap his badge for a courtroom as a prosecutor, but when it seems the rest of the Indianapolis police force might ignore rather than investigate a murdered mother, he finds himself entailed in a mix of politics, crime and street justice.