Showing results by author "Blake Banner" in All Categories

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.

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.

When your only training is as a first class killer, it can be hard to find a job on Main Street. Unless you work for Cobra, the secret agency that takes out the worst of the world’s trash. So when Harry Bauer left the Regiment, the toughest special ops outfit on the planet, Cobra offered him a job, taking out the trash.

Detective John Stone of the NYPD has the best arrest record in the 43rd precinct. But he’s a dinosaur who belongs to another age. Detective Carmen Dehan has such a bad attitude that nobody at the precinct can stomach her. Captain Jennifer Cuevas wants them both out of the way and thinks they make a perfect pair. So she gives them the Cold Cases file–the cases nobody gives a damn about.

The Cold Cases team at the 43rd Precinct in the Bronx tend to focus on homicides. But now, Detective John Stone, head of the team, is curious about a two-year-old rape case. A rape case where Sadie Byrne got HIV, turned out to be a rapid progressor and died of AIDS within a year. She never named her attacker.

The Russians have a special way of gambling. They take a revolver and they place one round the chambers and spin it. Then they take it in turns to put the gun to their heads and pull the trigger. It’s called Russian Roulette. Now they have a new, deadlier way of playing it.

It seems to be a kiss and tell season thanks to black ops whistleblowers and journalists willing to come out and tell their stories, lured by the promise of fortunes to be made from book sales and media celebrity. But this time, it’s a little different.

It seemed to be a cold case like any other. So much so that Stone and Dehan hadn’t even considered reviewing it—until private investigator Karl Baxter requested a copy of the police file. Then Stone got curious. Why did a second-rate PI in the Bronx want to look into the case of a low-life petty criminal found tied to a chair in his apartment, beaten and shot through the heart? And that question led to other questions, like, whose was second pool of blood on the floor? If there was a second victim, where was the body?

When the body of a tramp was found in a dumpster on Lafayette and Bryant in the Bronx, with no papers and no ID, the case was filed as unsolved–another victim nobody cared about, shot by some punk nobody cared about. That was 12 years ago. Then Detective Stone notices that the "tramp" had a $100 haircut and manicured nails. That makes him curious. He wants to know, who dresses a murder victim up as a tramp, then leaves them in full view in a dumpster? But the answers he gets are not the ones he expects.

One thing Harry Bauer knew for certain: He was not a man who could ever fall in love and make a home. Until it happened. And then he knew something else. He had to give up his job as an assassin for Cobra. He could not lie to that woman; he could not bring danger into her life. But then a hit squad came after him, and Cobra made him an offer he could not refuse. One last job, the Einstaat Brief, and they would keep her safe.

Why was Dr. Robert Magnusson murdered? More to the point, why was he murdered 500 miles from anywhere, in the frozen wilderness of Greenland? And then there is the question of what he was doing 70 miles north of the UCLA base camp, where he should have been—and what were the instruments he had secretly set up and housed in the shack out there?

Detective John Stone is taking early retirement. He has informed the chief, Inspector John Newman; and his partner and wife, Carmen Dehan, is retiring with him. She is pregnant and both Stone and Dehan want a safe, secure environment for their future child. Their sights are set on New England, where Stone will write his memoirs. So the last thing either of them expects is a curtain call from one of Stone’s old flames. Yet that is exactly what happens when actress Jane Morley shows up and asks Stone to investigate a very particular cold case.

The world population is hurtling toward nine billion; some say more than the planet can support. Two titanic blocks rule that population – East and West – bound together in a global economy - and a secret, war to the death. Never has so much been at stake, never has the prize of absolute power been more seductive. And never have the leaders of these titanic blocks been quite so insane. Insane enough to invoke the Son of Hell, to bring the war out of the shadows and fire down from Heaven; and count the dead not in dozens but millions.

When Wayne Harris contacts Detectives Stone and Dehan, of the 43rd Precinct’s cold case unit, and tells them he has information relating to the Westchester Angel murder two years earlier, they agree to go and see him–at Rikers Island.

In the wake of the Vietnam debacle, when the mighty USA was humiliated by Soviet-backed Vietcong, the CIA plotted to drag the USSR into a "Russian Vietnam" in Afghanistan. The plan was such a success it led ultimately to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Now, 40 years on, as Russia limps, scarred and crippled, from the battlefields of Kherson, Donetsk, and Kharkiv, Colonel Alexandrina Vitsin swears to drag the USA into an American Ukraine.

When Silvie Martin moves to New York from Texas with her husband, Simon, and their one year-old daughter, Mary, she is filled with the joy and hope she derives from their shared faith. But no sooner have they moved into their new home, which backs on to their church, than her husband is brutally murdered before her very eyes. The only trouble is, the shock has completely erased her memory. Now, 18 years later, Detectives Stone and Dehan have to piece together a crime where their prime witness remembers nothing, and the suspects are as bizarre as they are unlikely

It wasn’t just the 20 years since Danny Brown’s death that made it the hardest case of their careers: it was that the manner of his death was, quite simply, impossible. His body was reduced to ash from his neck to his ankles, in the middle of Soundview Park. Detective Stone keeps an open mind, but his partner, Detective Dehan, is convinced there is a logical terrestrial explanation for the gruesome murder. The X-Files, after all, exist only in fiction, don’t they?

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 for two blissful weeks they must forget about work, about cold cases and about murder.

When Karl and Christen Redfern were brutally murdered in their apartment in the Bronx, a lot of things were never explained, like why he was stabbed only twice, with clinical precision, but she was stabbed 20 times in the heart, in a crazed frenzy; like what happened to their Chevy Impala, and why Christen’s sister, Ingrid, had never reported it missing. But the biggest mystery of all was perhaps where Karl and Christen’s daughter Amy had disappeared to, along with her boyfriend, Charlie, on the very night of her parents’ murder.

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….