Now available in audio, the Anthony Award-winning short story that started it all. In Lucky Penny, award-winning author Linda Barnes introduces the red-headed, jazz-loving, cab-driving Bostonian and Private Investigator Carlotta Carlyle. As Carlotta lounges in her cab one night while waiting for a fare, the part-time cabbie is accosted and robbed at gunpoint. When she is unable to get any assistance from the police, Carlotta sets out on her own to recover the stolen goods and bring the perp to justice.

Her marriage over and career gone bust, Arly Hanks flees Manhattan for her hometown: Maggody, Arkansas. In a town this size, nothing much ever happens, so Arly figures she's safe as the town's first female chief of police - until the husband of one of the local barmaids escapes from state prison and heads for town. And that's not all. An EPA official with ties to polluting the local fishing hole has suddenly vanished off the face of the earth.

An 11-year-old boy's violated corpse is found in a town park. Eyewitnesses and fingerprints point unmistakably to one of Flint City's most popular citizens. He is Terry Maitland, Little League coach, English teacher, husband, and father of two girls. Detective Ralph Anderson, whose son Maitland once coached, orders a quick and very public arrest. Maitland has an alibi, but Anderson and the district attorney soon add DNA evidence to go with the fingerprints and witnesses. Their case seems ironclad.

Drue Campbell’s life is adrift. Out of a job and down on her luck, life doesn’t seem to be getting any better when her estranged father, Brice Campbell, a flamboyant personal injury attorney, shows up at her mother’s funeral after a 20-year absence. Worse, he’s remarried - to Drue’s eighth-grade frenemy, Wendy, now his office manager. And they’re offering her a job. It seems like the job from hell, but the offer is sweetened by the news of her inheritance - her grandparents’ beach bungalow in the sleepy town of Sunset Beach.

At the end of a long day battling street traffic, bike messenger Jace Damon has one last drop to make. But en route to delivering a package for one of L.A.'s sleaziest defense attorneys, he's nearly run down by a car, chased through back alleys, and shot at. Only the instincts acquired while growing up on the streets of L.A. allow him to escape with his life, and with the package someone wants badly enough to kill for.

"A" Is for Alibi: Nikki Fife, convicted of murdering her husband Laurence, is out on parole after eight years of prison. Now, she hires Kinsey Millhone to find out who really killed Laurence. "B" Is for Burglar: Elaine Boldt is missing, and her sister wants Kinsey Millhone to find her. It seems to be a routine job - until Kinsey is ordered to drop the investigation. "C" Is for Corpse: Kinsey Millhone is recruited to help Bobby Callahan, a young man struggling back to life after his Porsche was forced to take a near-fatal nose dive over the edge of a canyon.

Pericles "Perry" Christo is a P.I. with a past. A one-time NYPD homicide cop, Perry has been struggling since he lost his badge, and his marriage, in a notorious corruption scandal. So when wealthy Upper East Side matron Julia Drusilla calls him one cold February night, he jumps at the chance to work what seems to be a straightforward (and lucrative) case. Julia needs Perry to track down the whereabouts of her beautiful yet aimless daughter, Angelina, who is about to become a very wealthy young heiress.

When pretty, smart Sara Long is found bludgeoned to death, it's easy to blame the man with the bat. But Georgia Davis - former cop and newly-minted PI - is hired to look into the incident at the behest of the accused's sister, and what she finds hints at a much different, much darker answer. It seems the privileged, preppy schoolgirls on Chicago's North Shore have learned just how much their innocence is worth to hot-under-the-collar businessmen.

Disillusioned newspaper reporter-turned-private detective Ray Dudgeon doesn't want to save the world; he just wants to do an honest job well. But when doing an honest job threatens society's most powerful and corrupt, Ray's odds of survival make for a sucker's bet.

When the dead body of a Latino woman is found in a reservoir about 50 miles north of Manhattan, with a photo of a baby in her purse nearby, the police try to determine who the child is and if it is still alive. Along with the photo, they also find a disturbing note in the purse: "Go back to your country. You don't belong here."

Nobody knows what happened to Sarah Cook. The beautiful blonde teenager disappeared 15 years ago, the same night her parents were brutally murdered in their suburban Ohio home. Her boyfriend, Brad Stockton - black and from the wrong side of the tracks - was convicted of the murders and is now on death row. Though he's maintained his innocence all along, the clock is running out. His execution is only weeks away when his devoted sister insists she spied Sarah at an area gas station.

In the summer of 1986, two tragedies rocked Oklahoma City. Six movie-theater employees were killed in an armed robbery while one inexplicably survived. Then, a teenage girl vanished from the annual state fair. Neither crime was ever solved. Twenty-five years later, the reverberations of those unsolved cases quietly echo through survivors’ lives. A private investigator in Vegas, Wyatt’s latest inquiry takes him back to a past he’s tried to escape - and drags him deeper into the harrowing mystery of the movie house robbery that left six of his friends dead.

When prosecutor Vicki Allegretti arrives at a rowhouse to meet a confidential informant, she finds herself in the wrong place at the wrong time and is almost shot to death. She barely escapes with her life but cannot save the two others gunned down before her disbelieving eyes. Stunned and heartbroken, Vicki tries to figure out how a routine meeting on a minor case became a double homicide.

Twelve-year-old Billy Straight - precocious, heartbreakingly perceptive, relentlessly moral - has fled the chaos and abuse of his life at home and is fighting to survive on L.A.'s meanest streets. All alone, Billy has fashioned a precarious existence for himself, using principled tricks to nourish his body and his mind. Late one night he watches from his hiding place as a man viciously butchers a woman. Billy becomes the center of terrifying attention - from the media, from violent bounty hunters, and from the murderer himself.

Los Angeles greeting-card artist Wollie Shelley is dating 40 men in 60 days as research for a radio talk show host's upcoming book. Wollie is meeting plenty of eligible bachelors but not falling in love, not until she stumbles over a dead body en route to Rio Pescado - a state-run mental hospital - and is taken hostage by a charismatic "doctor" who is on the run from the Mob.

Disillusioned newspaper reporter-turned-private detective Ray Dudgeon doesn't want to save the world; he just wants to do an honest job well. But when doing an honest job threatens society's most powerful and corrupt, Ray's odds of survival make for a sucker's bet.

Nobody knows what happened to Sarah Cook. The beautiful blonde teenager disappeared 15 years ago, the same night her parents were brutally murdered in their suburban Ohio home. Her boyfriend, Brad Stockton - black and from the wrong side of the tracks - was convicted of the murders and is now on death row. Though he's maintained his innocence all along, the clock is running out. His execution is only weeks away when his devoted sister insists she spied Sarah at an area gas station.

Tim Hess is a semiretired veteran cop staring at a death sentence - his own. Detective Merci Rayborn, young enough to be his daughter, is brash, impatient, and not someone from whom Hess wants to be taking orders. He certainly isn't planning on falling in love with her. Together, they must track down a psychopathic killer who's been abducting beautiful young women from the malls of Orange County.

Los Angeles greeting-card artist Wollie Shelley is dating 40 men in 60 days as research for a radio talk show host's upcoming book. Wollie is meeting plenty of eligible bachelors but not falling in love, not until she stumbles over a dead body en route to Rio Pescado - a state-run mental hospital - and is taken hostage by a charismatic "doctor" who is on the run from the Mob.

Unemployed at 29, Tess Monaghan is willing to take any freelance job to pay the rent—including a bit of unorthodox snooping for her rowing buddy, Darryl "Rock" Paxton. In a city where someone is murdered almost every day, attorney Michael Abramowitz's death should be just another statistic. But the slain lawyer's notoriety—and his noontime trysts with Rock's fiancée—make the case front page news...and point to Rock as the likely murderer. But trying to prove her friend's innocence could prove costly to Tess.

Meet Elvis Cole, L.A. private eye.... He quotes Jiminy Cricket and carries a .38. He's a literate, wisecracking Vietnam vet who is determined never to grow up.

Lurking in the dark corners of J. P. Beaumont's bizarre case was not just a demented mind obsessed with murder, but secrets so deadly that even a street-tough cop could die guessing.

Ellery Hathaway knows a thing or two about serial killers, but not through her police training. She's an officer in sleepy Woodbury, Massachusetts, where a bicycle theft still makes the newspapers. No one there knows she was once victim number 17 in the grisly story of serial killer Francis Michael Coben. The only victim who lived. When three people disappear from her town in three years, all around her birthday - the day she was kidnapped so long ago - Ellery fears someone knows her secret. Someone very dangerous.

Detective Peter Decker of the LAPD is stunned when he gets the report. Someone has shattered the sanctuary of a remote yeshiva community in the California hills with an unimaginable crime. One of the women was brutally raped as she returned from the mikvah, the bathhouse where the cleansing ritual is performed.

When the badly decomposed body of 13-year-old Katie Pine is found, John Cardinal is vindicated. It was Cardinal who'd kept the Pine case open and Cardinal had been demoted to the burglary squad for his excessive zeal. But Katie Pine isn't the only youngster to have gone missing and Cardinal is now given the go-ahead to reopen the files on three other lost kids. When another youth is reported missing, he begins to see a pattern that screams "serial killer."

When Liv Dugan ducks out of work for lunch, it's just an ordinary day. When she returns, she stumbles onto a massacre. All her colleagues at Zuma Software have been shot. Only luck has left Liv unscathed, and that might be running out....

Every week a hundred million dollars in cash arrives at Miami International Airport, shipped by German banks to the Federal Reserve. A select group of trusted workers moves the bags through customs and loads them into armored trucks.

The Blues were born out of need, anger and pride. Murder comes from those same dark places. Memphis has both. One of Memphis' most seductive and notorious socialites has vanished. Either she's off on another drunken escapade or the disappearance is something much more frightening. What begins as an ordinary day's work for Detective Billy Able quickly grows into a complex spider's web of tragedy, mystery, suspicion, and sordid secrets including a few of Billy's own.

Detective Mike McCabe moved from a top homicide job with the NYPD to Portland, Maine, to leave his failed marriage and suspicions of wrongdoing behind, and to find a more peaceful life for himself and his 13-year-old daughter. But the small New England city is not nearly as safe as he thought. On a warm September night, a missing high school athlete is found dead in a scrap-metal yard, her heart removed from her body with surgical precision. As outrage over the killing spreads, a young businesswoman disappears while out on a morning jog.

It is an obsession that has haunted Nick Malick for seven years - to avenge the murder of his young son. In his gut Malick knows who did it. But the psychopath is in prison for another crime, scheduled to be released in a year. All Malick has to do is wait...and survive.