Somebody in Washington is updating Shakespeare. The first thing he wants to do is kill all the lobbyists. Knocking off three of them in consecutive weeks, he's off to a fast start. On the lapel of each victim, the killer leaves a pin that, arguably, resembles Porky Pig.The Metro police are on the case when Putnam Shady steps forward and identifies the third victim as a friend. Authority averse, Putnam gives the cops only bare bones information -- but he tells Margaret "Sweetie" Sweeney that he thinks he will be the next victim.The reason, he explains, is quite simple. There are two plans afoot to seize control of the federal government. At the center of one plan is the speaker of the House of Representatives. The group behind the other plan consisted of Putnam and his three dead colleagues.Sweetie vows to protect Putnam. She enlists Jim McGill, the president's henchman, to find out who is behind the murders. But then McGill's whole world is turned upside down. His son, Kenny, is diagnosed with leukemia.President Patricia Grant's life is only slightly less tumultuous. Her enemies force her to leave the Republican Party. Erna Godfrey implicates her husband, Reverend Burke Godfrey, in the killing of Patti's first husband, Andrew Hudson Grant. But Reverend Godfrey refuses to go down without a fight.Amidst the turmoil, Welborn Yates and Kira Fahey schedule their marriage -- and inevitably have to deal with wedding crashers.

Nobody knows the crooked turns, slippery slopes, and dark, dangerous stretches of the Beltway better than Margaret Truman, dean of the Washington, D.C., mystery scene. And no one is better equipped to lead a suspenseful tour into the treacherous territory of big-time political lobbying, where the right information and enough influence can buy power–the kind that corrupts . . . and sometimes kills. Arriving home from a fund-raising dinner, senior Illinois senator Lyle Simmons discovers his wife’s brutally bludgeoned body. And like any savvy politician with presidential aspirations, his first move is to phone his attorney. In this case, it’s his old friend and college roommate, former DA Philip Rotondi, who gamely agrees to step out of quiet retirement and into the thick of a D.C.-style political, criminal, and public relations maelstrom from which no one will escape unscathed. The crime scene is barely cold when the senator’s estranged daughter arrives hurling shocking allegations of murder at her father, despite a roomful of well-heeled witnesses who can provide Simmons with an alibi. Meanwhile, D.C.’s rumor mills and spin machines shift into high gear as speculation swirls around a tabloid- and TV-ready prime suspect: Jonell Marbury, a dashing lawyer turned lobbyist at a powerful K Street firm–and the last person to see the victim alive. But Rotondi harbors his own unsettling suspicions. And after a second woman is killed, he discovers that a long-buried secret from his past may hold the key to cracking the case. Aided by sleuthing ex-attorneys Mac and Annabel Smith, Rotondi reawakens the prosecutorial skills that served him so well in his gang-busting days, following the stench of dirty money and dirtier tricks across the country and across the thresholds of back rooms and front offices alike–where doing the right thing is for fools and taking on the system is a dead man’s gambit.

The author of "Digger" and "The Concrete Inquisition" presents this thriller featuring an ex-cop who solved the murder of the president's first husband and brought the killers to justice, and who himself becomes the first private eye to live in the White House.

Lorna Kepler was beautiful and willful, a loner who couldn't resist flirting with danger. Maybe that's what killed her. Her death had raised a host of tough questions. The cops suspected homicide, but they could find neither motive nor suspect. Even the means were mysterious: Lorna's body was so badly decomposed when it was discovered that they couldn't be certain she hadn't died of natural causes. In the way of overworked cops everywhere, the case was gradually shifted to the back burner and became another unsolved file. Only Lorna's mother kept it alive, consumed by the certainty that somebody out there had gotten away with murder. In the ten months since her daughter's death, Janice Kepler had joined a support group, trying to come to terms with her loss and her anger. It wasn't helping. And so, leaving a session one evening and noticing a light on in the offices of Millhone Investigations, she knocked on the door. In answering that knock, Kinsey Millhone is pulled into the netherworld of unavenged murder, where only a pact with the devil will satisfy the restless ghosts of the victims and give release to the living they have left behind. Eleven books into the series that has won her readers around the world, Sue Grafton takes a darkside turn, pitching us into a shadow land of pain and grief where killers still walk free, unaccused, unpunished, unrepentant. With "K" is for Killer she offers a tale that is dark, complex, and deeply disturbing. "A" Is for Alibi "B" Is for Burglar "C" Is for Corpse "D" Is for Deadbeat "E" Is for Evidence "F" Is for Fugitive "G" Is for Gumshoe "H" Is for Homicide "I" Is for Innocent "J" Is for Judgment "K" Is for Killer "L" is for Lawless "M" Is for Malice "N" Is for Noose "O" Is for Outlaw "P" Is for Peril "Q" Is for Quarry "R" Is for Ricochet "S" Is for Silence "T" Is for Trespass "U" Is for Undertow "V" Is for Vengeance "W" Is for Wasted "X"

Jim McGill, the first private eye to live in the White House, calls himself The President’s Henchman. As the husband of President Patricia Darden Grant, he can call himself pretty much what he wants.But with privilege comes obligation. When Patti travels to a G-8 meeting in England, McGill is fitted for evening wear and drafted to be Patti’s escort at a gilded dinner. He’s okay with that. But while Patti is busy reshaping the world, McGill fears his time will be occupied cutting ribbons.Then Glen Kinnard’s daughter, Emilie, asks for help. McGill knows Kinnard from their days as Chicago cops. They were never friends and once almost came to blows. But McGill is a soft touch for a young woman looking out for her dad, and, oh, does Kinnard need help.Taking the ashes of his late wife to her native Paris, Kinnard got into a fight with the star player of the French national soccer team. The brawl under the Pont d’Iéna, the bridge at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, left Kinnard unconscious and the Frenchman dead. Kinnard swears he was only trying to protect a woman the Frenchman was beating. But the woman has disappeared.The French allow McGill to investigate, provided he accepts Gabriella Casale, a State Department Security Officer as his bodyguard, that he works with the investigating magistrate assigned to the case, and that he wraps things up in a week.In Paris, McGill encounters gypsy con artists, British soccer hooligans and a monstrous brute known as The Undertaker. And he tries to ignore rumors reaching him that the president of France was Patti’s old college boyfriend, and things back in England are heating up once again.Time is short and there’s a lot to do— because at the end of the week McGill still has to don his white tie and tails for dinner with Patti and the Queen at Buckingham Palace.

Dig deep into the unsolved murder of Jackie English and join the hunt for a serial killer Fifty years ago, a serial killer prowled the quiet city of London, Ontario, marking it as his hunting grounds. As young women and boys were abducted, raped, and murdered, residents of the area held their loved ones closer and closer, terrified of the monster — or monsters — stalking the streets. Homicide detective Dennis Alsop began hunting the killer in the 1960s, and he didn’t stop searching until his death 40 years later. For decades, detectives, actual and armchair, and the victims’ families and friends continued to ask questions: Who was the Forest City Killer? Was there more than one person, or did a depraved individual commit all of these crimes on his own? Combing through the files Detective Alsop left behind, researcher Vanessa Brown reopens the cases, revealing previously unpublished witness statements, details of evidence, and astonishing revelations. And through her investigation, Vanessa posits the unthinkable: is it possible that the Forest City Killer is still alive and, like the notorious Golden State Killer, a simple DNA test could bring him to justice?

Starting in the 1950s, Americans eagerly built the planet’s largest public work: the 42,795-mile National System of Interstate and Defense Highways. Before the concrete was dry on the new roads, however, a specter began haunting them—the highway killer. He went by many names: the “Hitcher,” the “Freeway Killer,” the “Killer on the Road,” the “I-5 Strangler,” and the “Beltway Sniper.” Some of these criminals were imagined, but many were real. The nation’s murder rate shot up as its expressways were built. America became more violent and more mobile at the same time. Killer on the Road tells the entwined stories of America’s highways and its highway killers. There’s the hot-rodding juvenile delinquent who led the National Guard on a multistate manhunt; the wannabe highway patrolman who murdered hitchhiking coeds; the record promoter who preyed on “ghetto kids” in a city reshaped by freeways; the nondescript married man who stalked the interstates seeking women with car trouble; and the trucker who delivered death with his cargo. Thudding away behind these grisly crime sprees is the story of the interstates—how they were sold, how they were built, how they reshaped the nation, and how we came to equate them with violence. Through the stories of highway killers, we see how the “killer on the road,” like the train robber, the gangster, and the mobster, entered the cast of American outlaws, and how the freeway—conceived as a road to utopia—came to be feared as a highway to hell.

In the town of Santa Claus, Georgia, the holiday spirit lived all year round...until Jerry Scott Heidler came to town... In Santa Claus, Georgia, the streets were named Candy Cane Road and December Drive. Christmas was the lifeblood of the people. One terrible night in December 1997, Heidler broke into the home of his former foster family and brutally murdered them. Doug Crandell describes the harrowing incident that changed this one town forever.

The true story of a triple murder that shocked a New York community and drew the interest of famed criminal defense attorney F. Lee Bailey. Twenty-seven-year-old Peter Egan, his wife Barbara Ann, and Peter’s younger brother Gerald were familiar to Watertown, New York, authorities long before December 31, 1964. The police suspected the brazen trio in a long string of burglaries and petty crimes. They were also under investigation by the FBI for grand theft auto. But on that New Year's night, the Egan family’s criminal career came to a violent end. All three were found with a bullet to the head at a rest stop off Interstate 81. The gruesome killings puzzled local and state police. Was it a random murder? A confrontation gone awry? Or a premeditated act of retribution by hardened criminals who feared the Egans would turn state's witness? Then, a surprise arrest was made. But when F. Lee Bailey, lawyer for the self-confessed Boston Strangler, entered the fray, the case took an unexpected twist that shrouded the murders in mystery to this day.