Showing results by author "Blair Howard" in All Categories

Nobody knows what horrors Nicolette Percy endured the night she was murdered. Kate Gazzara caught the case and at first she thought it would be a quick and easy closer. She was wrong. With every passing day, the case became more complex. And then she made a mistake that almost cost her her career....

A vicious killer is on the loose in the small but affluent bedroom community of Lookout Mountain, Tennessee. The local police are ill-equipped to handle a murder investigation. So they call on the expert: the tenacious and dedicated Detective Kate Gazarra of the Chattanooga PD. The killer is careful, leaving no obvious evidence and no motive. Lieutenant Gazarra must pursue high-profile suspects, navigate interference by the city’s elite, and get inside the mind of the killer. All while training in a new partner and appeasing the formidable Chief Johnston.

It was April 1, 1998, when the bodies of two teenagers, a young fella and his girlfriend - both high school seniors - were found among the trees on a lonely road just inside the city limits. The bodies had been stripped and left for the wild animals to...well, you get the idea. The cops had a good idea who the killer was, but they never could prove it, so the case went cold until April 1, 2012, when local DA, Larry Spruce, asked me to take a look at it.

Cassie Morgan was just 17 years old when she died at the hands of a sadistic killer. Homicide Detective Harry Starke caught the case, and he knew right from the beginning that it was going to be a bad one, and he was right. Too many clues, too many suspects, too many bodies, and a police chief more interested in his career than justice for the victims. For Harry, it was the last straw, and it had been a long time coming.

It began when an FBI informant was brutally gunned down outside a soccer stadium. A tactical nuclear weapon has gone missing somewhere in the Middle East and is thought to have been smuggled into the United States by a small group of Iranian terrorists intent on chaos and destruction. The target? Unknown, but the FBI’s local director is convinced that it’s the Sequoya nuclear plant and that the clock is ticking. Convinced that the threat is real and that his only link to the terrorists is Harry Starke’s nemesis, Shady Tree, he turns to Harry for help.

The USF has assembled the largest battle fleet in its history as they prepare for the inevitable cataclysmic battle with the Swarm. Avenger, a Class C heavy battle cruiser, is sent on an urgent rescue mission to the planet Typhon in the Eta Persei star system. A planet devastated and left desolate at the beginning of the war against the Swarm, an alien invader from another reality. Their intent? The total eradication of the human race from the galaxy. What they find on Typhon could change the outcome of the war.

A secret plot to start a war. Two old enemies who must work together to foil it. Under any other circumstances, hired assassin Cassandra Wu would be trying to kill her partner. But that’ll have to wait. Right now, they need to stop a war. After escaping US custody in a deadly battle that leaves three FBI agents dead and another wounded, Wu is kidnapped by The Peacemakers, a Deep State organization dedicated to achieving peace on Earth. Unfortunately, to bring that about they must initiate WWIII and Wu must assassinate an impossible target: the Russian president.

When a well-known local socialite’s body is found during a round of golf with his father, Harry Starke suddenly finds himself embroiled in what quickly becomes a very thorny murder investigation. Who killed Angela Hartwell and why? The answers lie somewhere along a twisty-windy path through the patrons and morals of an exclusive golf club where the members are seldom what they seem, and their goals are infinitely more complicated than a simple round of golf. Harry Starke’s investigation takes him into a world he’s very familiar with. A world of affluence, privilege, and corruption.

Brandon Beck hanged himself, or did he? Was it suicide or cold blooded murder? On a cold dark night in February, Harry Starke runs into someone he hasn’t seen in almost 25 years. The man has a problem. He asks Harry for help. Harry turns him down, and thus becomes the last person to see Brandon Beck alive. Did Beck hang himself? Was he murdered? Either way, why? Harry Starke, now the prime suspect, vows to find out.

Every cop has an unsolved case they can’t let go. Georgina Harrison was mine. I can’t tell you why. Maybe it was because she was just a teenager that it stuck in my craw. Maybe it was because I was still a rookie when I accompanied Harry Starke to the crime scene that God-awful day. Maybe it was all of those things, but try as I might to move on, I couldn’t. And every year I opened the case file, flipped through it, and then closed it again. This time, though, I won't quit until Georgina gets the justice she deserves.

Albert Westwood, a.k.a. Nero, former British special forces sniper extraordinaire and ex-mercenary, just wants to live a normal life. Be left alone. The problem is, he’s a wanted man. A queen’s pardon for one more job could be just what he needs. But the job is deadly. He has to find and stop the current leader of a deep state organization known as the Peacemakers, whose goal is to bring about world peace even if it means destroying it in the process.

It takes only one phone call to turn Harry Starke into a monster. It begins when Harry’s kid brother is brutally murdered, his body thrown into the murky waters of the Tennessee River. That alone would be enough to set Harry on the warpath, but less than 24 hours after the body is found, Harry finds out there’s a bounty on his head, too. $25,000. His answer? Strike first and strike hard. And so it begins. Harry and his army of three must go up against old enemies, but they face almost insurmountable odds when they go looking for retribution.

The phone call came on a Tuesday evening in the middle of August. Harry Starke hadn’t heard from his old school friend in almost five years, and he hadn’t thought about him in almost as long. Tom Sattler wanted to meet, and it wouldn’t wait until morning. But when Harry arrived at Sattler’s home less than an hour later, he found him lying in a pool of blood with a single gunshot wound to his head and .22 revolver lying close to his hand. Was it suicide, or was Tom Sattler murdered? If so, by whom and why?

Harry Starke loves a cold case, but this one is really cold, more than a hundred years cold. Family Matters is a tale that takes place on the lonely coast of Maine, where Amanda, a true believer in the paranormal, has inherited—you guessed it—a haunted house. At least that’s what the rumors say. It all begins when Amanda inherits the house, substantial assets, and a large sum of money from her grandmother. The windfall comes with a request to look into the disappearance of Elizabeth, Amanda’s great-great-grandmother, more than a hundred years ago.

Emily Johnston is GONE. She’s been GONE for more than a week. She’s also the daughter of Harry Starke’s one-time boss and nemesis, Chattanooga Police Chief Wesley Johnston. Harry and Chief Johnston haven’t seen eye-to-eye in a long time, but when Johnston needs help, he knows there’s only one man he can turn to. But Johnston’s jurisdiction ends at the city limits, and when Emily’s body is discovered in a remote part of the county, Harry has to deal with the imperious sheriff Israel Hands and two incompetent county detectives.

Five years after physicist Mark Holder discovered the Slipstream Drive in 2058, humanity reached for the stars and began to colonize the galaxy. For centuries, humans continued to populate system after system without encountering intelligent alien life. Some twelve hundred years later, after many generations of relative peace, in the year 3278, human space is invaded by a powerful and mysterious enemy. To these invaders the very concept of free will is heresy. Their crusade—to eradicate humanity. The war begins, and the fight for the survival of the human race is on.

On a cold morning in October, 1987, Ohio State Patrol Officer Dan Walker finds an odd box on a quiet, county road. Twenty-five years later, in 2012, and more than 600 miles away, a young woman vanishes without a trace and another is found dead from what appears to be an overdose. In 2015, street-smart Lieutenant Kate Gazzara is suddenly transferred to the Cold Case Squad and assigned her first case. But as she painstakingly goes over the file she discovers a connection to all three incidents. Is there a serial killer on the loose, one who has been killing for almost three decades?

Commodore Richard Morian’s mission is to capture the Imperator, but it will take a planetary invasion on a grand scale to do so, a battle fought in space, in the air, and on the ground. And all this to a backdrop of political intrigue that threatens to bring the entire Sovereign system down.

A brutal murder. An impossible crime. Why did Genevieve have to die? Who murdered her? Caught between two worlds, one where she didn’t belong, the other she couldn’t give up, Genevieve committed the ultimate deception and married into a world of wealth and privilege and it cost her her life. Kate Gazzara’s most difficult case, a mind-bending riddle. A gripping, fast-paced thriller that will keep you listening long into the night.

It was one of those beautiful, balmy days on Calypso Key in the US Virgin Islands. The sky was blue and a cool breeze was blowing in off the ocean as Harry and Amanda took their vows. All of their friends were there and all was well with the world…and then the sky fell. Harry draws the line at getting involved when the death of one of his father’s friends intrudes upon his wedding day, until he finds out he owes the girl’s father a debt he can never repay. And so he is dragged into an investigation of not just one murder, but two—and the wealthiest, most dysfunctional family he’s ever met.