Showing results by author "Frank Zafiro" in All Categories

Jack “Mac” McCrae is about to retire. Without children or any family, he looks back over his career and his life and finds himself wondering what, if any, impact he’s had on this world.

Dead Even features 15 stories highlighting major and minor characters from the River City series, including series favorite Katie MacLeod, Detectives Finch and Elias, hard-luck Officer Paul Hiero, and transplanted gangster Dominic Bracco.

Sandy Banks is the last of The Four Horsemen, a vigilante group of ex-cops determined to right the injustices of a broken court system. But now, the project is disintegrating, putting him in the middle of chaos.

A city councilman is dead of an apparent suicide. Ex-cop Stefan Kopriva finds himself drawn into the case, serving an unlikely client. Once involved, he discovers that things are not as they seem.

Jake Stankovic has been flying below the radar for years, dealing safely in stolen property crime with his two-man crew. But times are tough, so he decides to step up to the big money with a drug deal. Everything that can go wrong, does.

When half-brothers Mick and Jerzy Sawyer are summoned to their father’s prison deathbed, it isn’t for a tearful goodbye. The spiteful old man tells the two estranged brothers about an old diamond heist with outstanding loot, and sets them on a path of cooperation and competition to recover the jewels.

Explore the tangled lives of these men and women in 14 short tales set in River City!

Carl is a Yankee cop in a small Texas border town. Isabella is a beautiful Mexican woman that everyone in town loves, including the hapless Pete and the wealthy, powerful Jack Talbott...but most of all, Carl.

Officer Lee Salter is a third-generation cop who bleeds blue. Amid the departmental chaos, he does the only thing he can—be a good officer. That means showing up for every shift, responding to calls for service, and always doing the right thing. All the while, the Department of Justice and its local supporters hope to catch another officer in its net of reform. Salter refuses to be that officer.

Boone has been prospecting with the Iron Brotherhood outlaw motorcycle gang for almost a year, trying to earn his patch with the club. When a simple muscle job goes terribly wrong, his world changes forever. He is quickly plunged deeper into a world of drug and intimidation, and the lines between right and wrong blur. The bonds of brotherhood that he forges with other members clash with the dark actions they take. His girlfriend, Faith, represents a danger of another kind, but Boone can’t stop himself where she is concerned, either.

George “Mase” Masaryk knows about secrets. He has a few of his own, including the reason he left the police department. The son of Czechoslovak hippies, his life has been a strange journey from rebel to cop to private investigator. It is a path his parents would never have chosen for him. One full of secrets and regrets.

Times are tough for the River City Police Department. The city budget is collapsing, forcing an already understaffed department to contemplate laying off cops. The community is upset over the handling of recent events, and their anger is impacting the agency from the ground up. Negotiations with the police union are somehow both heated and stagnant at the same time.

The last two years have been tumultuous ones for the Spokane Police Department. On the surface, the agency has suffered from scandal and police officer deaths. Underneath, a secret and deadly game of cat and mouse has played out. Now the Department of Justice has sent investigators to determine if federal intervention is needed. Their presence disrupts everyone’s agenda and threatens to expose dark secrets. Goals shift from winning situations to simply surviving. Not everyone will.

In this third installment of the Officer Tyler Garrett saga, the stakes have risen even higher. Garrett seeks to solidify his position. Officer Gary Stone undergoes a surprising metamorphosis. Captain Farrell tries to bring the situation to a head. Rookie Jun Yang struggles to find her place, while Officer Ray Zielinski must repay a debt that threatens to land him in greater danger. Meanwhile, Detective Wardell Clint continues to gnaw at the bone of the case that has consumed him for almost two years. Something has got to give.

After two tours in Vietnam and 25 years as a police officer, Thomas Chisolm is looking forward to a quiet retirement. That hope is quickly shattered when Mai, a ghost from his past, finds him and demands justice for the horrors she suffered during the Vietnam War…horrors Chisolm couldn’t save her from. Now Chisolm must find the man responsible and bring him to justice to repay an old debt and in the hopes of putting his own demons to rest…once and for all.

Sugar Got Low contains a tale of grifters, a prequel story to the well-regarded Ania series, several trips back to River City, and one to La Sombra, Texas. Enjoy a Walter Mitty homage set in San Francisco, a deadly day in Roman Britain, the heartbreaking story of a junkie, and the suspenseful one of a murderer in a black car. And at the end of it all, you’ll experience the dark but inspiring title story of perseverance that was only made possible because of a misunderstood lyric.

Detectives Finch and Elias have seen a lot - murders, assaults, rapes, missing persons - but they've never investigated a missing mummy before. Follow the two partners as they sift through a half dozen different suspects and try to solve the mystery of a stolen child mummy from the River City museum. Part whodunit mystery, part procedural, with more than a little wise-cracking along the way, The Bastard Mummy has a little something for all kinds of mystery listeners, set in Frank Zafiro's River City universe.

Spokane Police Officer Tyler Garrett is a man of many different images. To the public, he is a once-maligned and now redeemed cop, the victim of public prejudice and city politics. To the Chief of Police and the Mayor, he is a good cop, falsely accused and thankfully back to work. To his wife, a man she no longer knows. And to those who know his secret, he is the most terrible thing any police officer can be — a traitor to his badge.

Good Shepherd is a three-story collection of erotic crime fiction swirling with lust, revenge, and insatiable sexual gluttony. Three very different men and women sit at the center of each story. Yet, in the end, they’re all the same — forever changed by forbidden temptation in a world where justice pretends to be blind.

A Podcast featuring crime fiction authors (mostly) in which we discuss crime fiction (theirs, ours, everyone's), and life.