Showing results by author "Blake Banner" in All Categories

Nobody has ever heard of ODIN. ODIN is about as secret as a government agency can get. Because within ODIN there is General Operations, which speaks for itself; ODIN 5i, which deals with intelligence gathering; and then there is ODIN 1i, which deals in operations so sensitive not even the CIA can touch them. All three are run with an iron first by The Chief, a giant with a gigantic IQ. His top agent is Alex Mason. But when an ODIN 5i agent based at the US Embassy in Manila goes missing and his encrypted laptop disappears with him, the whole ODIN structure is put in peril.

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… So one question facing Alex Mason and Captain Aila Gallin was, who was it who entered Saul’s apartment like an old friend and shot him in the face at pointblank range without flinching – just like a pro?

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. Or so they thought, until top ODIN agent Mira Finn was murdered in Paris, her tortured body dragged from the Seine. A handful of people knew she was in France, fewer than that knew what her mission was.

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

Sue Benedict wasn’t giving out treats, so she got the trick. It was a hell of a trick. She was raped and murdered in her apartment after attending a Halloween party with a bunch of art students. The killer did not use a condom or gloves, the CSI team got a perfect DNA profile and two perfect thumbprints from her throat, a witness saw her admit the killer to her apartment at 2:30 AM that night.

October, 2010, Sally Jones had been stabbed in the heart in her apartment on Commonwealth Avenue, in the Bronx. Her coat was on the back of her chair. Her shoes were beside her bed, her clothes were neatly folded, and she was dead under the sheets.

It was November in New York. Raining and cold, and the trees all looked like skeleton’s hands. And Detective John Stone was having a problem with habeas corpus, because all there was of the body were two bare arms. Two bare arms that somebody, 12 years ago, had put in a lock up in the East Bronx. What they had done with the rest of the woman, nobody knew. But as Stone and Dehan start to investigate, two things become clear: Whoever killed the woman, wanted her arms to be found, as a boast, as a challenge. And that meant they were dealing with a psychopath—a serial killer.

Kicked out of the SAS, Harry Bauer is sent home and told to be like everyone else...but he's not like everyone else... What do you do when the only skill you ever learned was how to kill, when you’re among the best of the best, but they tell you you can’t do that anymore? What do you do when they send you home from Afghanistan and tell you to get a job, like everybody else? But you’re not like everybody else.

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.

Colonel Kostas Marcović was one of the butchers of the Vukovar Hospital massacre. He was a mark like any other. Except that Marcović was hiding on St George Island in the Caribbean, where the Colombian cartel Bloque Meta was trying to open up a new path to Florida. And Harry had a big problem with drug cartels, a problem that threatened to pull the whole mission of track.

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. Bauer had grown up fighting for survival on the streets of the Bronx. He knew everything there was to know about hard reality, and he didn’t buy into fantasies or conspiracy theories. Until, that is, one came knocking on his door...

There are a lot of things you really don’t want to find when you’re a homicide detective in the Bronx. High on the list is a new serial killer. Serial killers are real bad news because they kill without motive, so they are hard to trace and they can take years to catch. But even worse than a new serial killer, is a new kind of serial killer: one who murders with a motive, but a motive so unfathomable nobody can understand it; a motive that makes his choice of victims incomprehensible and unpredictable, a motive that leads to each victim being killed in a particularly cruel and unusual way.

It started with a dream. A dream where the hunter was hunted by a baying pack lusting for blood and power. And when he awoke from that dream, Lacklan Walker, ten year veteran of the SAS, knew his days of killing were not over yet. They would never be over until the pack was dead. This would be a mission like none other. Now he would answer to nobody but himself. He could have no allies, no support, no back up, because what he was going to do was nothing less than assassination.

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.

It should have been a simple drive, from San Francisco International Airport, to Boulder, Wyoming, despite the snow. Was it because Lacklan was tired? Was it because he was thinking about the woman he loved, or the international crisis he had recently caused? Or was it the crazy blizzard that came out of nowhere and blinded him? Whatever it was, it made him turn the wrong way, it made him turn onto Bloody Creek Road, to the ghost town of Independence, population twenty-five.

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….

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.

Yasha Orlev has disappeared, and with him a flash drive. Only two men in the world know exactly what is on that flash drive, Orlev himself and the man called Nero, the director of the highly secretive ODIN, the organization that runs the Five Eyes. And they both know that the contents of that drive can cripple the USA and trigger World War III.

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?

At forty-something, Bob Walklet was about to make a fortune with his IT company. But he'd made the mistake of falling in love with his assistant, twenty-something Sorka Williams. They were crazy about each other, and Bob had told his wife, Sheila - a thirty-something, ex-cop insurance consultant. He wanted a divorce. And there was a prenup. When he was found in his bedroom, stabbed in the heart, her DNA was literally all over him, her prints were on the knife and a neighbor had seen her hurrying from the house at the time of death.