Showing results by author "Dorothy Salisbury Davis" in All Categories

On a hot Saturday night in Manhattan, Father Duffy sits in a confessional, growing alarmed as he listens to the voice of a distraught young man who speaks of bloody hair and a dead woman and a compulsion to do things with a hammer that he does not understand. Before the priest can persuade the man to confess to the police, the killer flees, still clutching the hammer.

General Ransom Jarvis is writing his memoirs about a distinguished career that spanned five continents and three wars. Along the way, he stumbles upon a scandal about a philandering ancestor - America’s ambassador to England who went on to become president of the United States. But a very clear and present danger embroils the irascible retired general in a deepening quagmire of deceit, fraud, and murder.

For generations, bitter old Andy Mattson terrified the children of Hillside and puzzled his adult neighbors. How did the scowling old codger, who seemed to spend his life stroking his cat on the front porch, support himself? How did he pass the days? And why did he die such a gruesome death? The police find Andy dead on his sofa, covered in blood, eyes wide with fear. The most likely suspect is the dead man’s cat, a howling beast that resembles a trapped badger.

Twenty-five-year-old Julie Hayes is feeling overshadowed by her globe-trotting journalist husband and looking for some excitement and direction in life. On what amounts to a dare, she sets herself up as "Friend Julie", a storefront fortune-teller in Manhattan's seedy Theater District.

After two decades of covering riots, assassinations, and urban decay, Kate Osborn comes to Venice, Illinois, to profile Steve Higgins, an old-school Chicago-style politician. Although Higgins hews to tradition, the problems in Venice are thoroughly modern. Student unrest roils beneath the quiet surface of the university, kept in check only by the well-armed campus police, and in town, the white merchants and black coal miners are preparing to go to war.

Father McMahon is struggling to write a sermon when a boy runs into his office. A man in his tenement is dying, the boy says, and it is too late for a doctor or the police. In the basement of the apartment house, Father McMahon kneels beside the blood-soaked man, who has been stabbed with a knife. The man asks for no absolution. He wants to talk of life, not death, and takes to his grave the identity of his killer - and his own.

As Europe slides toward war, the faculty of a midwestern university fight a crusade of their own - the campaign against Communism. The local publishing magnate has accused economics professor Jonathan Hogan of being a Red, and the scholar is forced to defend himself in front of the university's elders. They spare him, for Hogan is no Communist - merely a free thinker, open and honest in an age when conformity is the norm.

One afternoon in Manhattan's Washington Square Park, Eric Mather is approached by two men, Tom and Jerry, with a business proposal: a bit of light espionage that may be considered treason. Eric's friend and colleague, physics professor Peter Bradley, is on his way back from an international conference in Athens. In his briefcase is a roll of film that must be confiscated to keep the Cold War from turning hot. Bradley won't miss this little roll of film, they say, and nobody will get hurt.

The hamlet of Hillside has one factory, three churches, and more bored teenagers than it knows what to do with. Georgie Rocco is more lost than any of his classmates, and decides one night to take control. When an attempted robbery at the factory turns into murder, Georgie discovers an empowering new talent for exploiting other people's vulnerabilities, including those of his lovely sister, Jo.

It starts innocently enough. Julie Hayes and her husband have just returned to Manhattan from a month in Paris. Julie looks forward to spending quality time with Jeff, whose career as a journalist takes him away from home for months on end. Now if they could just find the perfect work of art to hang over their mantel. Julie's quest takes her to a trendy SoHo gallery where she meets an itinerant artist named Ralph Abel.

When other young women left the little town of Campbell's Cove to acquire culture, see the world, fall in love, and marry, Hannah Blake stayed at home, taking a job at the bank and fighting for control of the library board. Overshadowed by the more stylish and popular women in town who seem to block every attempt she makes to improve her life, Hannah remains alone - an increasingly bitter woman whose frustration threatens to erupt into violence when something wonderful happens.

It is harvest season in St. Hilaire, and for those who take their living from the land, it should be a joyous time. But in the fall of 1943, there is no joy in France. Paris has fallen, the Vichy government is collaborating with the Germans, and the Gestapo roam the countryside, conscripting French men to toil in faraway German factories. For Sister Gabrielle, a novice in the local convent, the occupation tries her faith as nothing has before. But she is about to get an opportunity to stand up to evil in a way that few of her countrymen have dared.

As housekeeper to James Jarvis' recently deceased father, a retired major general of the US Army, Mrs. Norris has raised Jimmie since boyhood. Now the Wall Street lawyer faces a challenging case. The son of one of the firm’s old blue-blood clients has been slapped with a paternity suit.

With a new president in the White House, Major General Ransom Jarvis suspects that his retirement from the US Army is imminent. But at Washington’s annual invitation-only Beaux Arts Ball, the decorated soldier becomes an unwitting pawn in a far-reaching conspiracy. It begins when Ransom meets Virginia Allan, a beautiful blonde with secrets. And there is something decidedly shady about Frenchman Leo Montaigne.

Julie Hayes is finally making it as a reporter - with a column at the New York Dailyunder her own byline - when her husband, Jeff, tells her he has fallen in love with another woman and wants a divorce. Blinded by anger and hurt, she flees their Chelsea apartment. Before the night is over, she will be lying bound and gagged on the floor of a trailer, the victim of a sexual assault by two masked men. Now a tabloid headline herself, Julie tries to help the police search for her assailants. But she is not the same woman anymore.

John Eakins returns to Greece, seemingly to pursue Byron scholarship. But his deeper concern is to find out the truth about the murder of an American newspaperman named Alexander Webb, killed during the Greek Communist rebellion seventeen years before. Eakins had been implicated in that murder. Now, his search takes him from Athens to the primitive village of Kala, where he finds Paul Stephanou, a blind man also implicated in the Webb murder.

Julie Hayes has come up in the world. Her days as a starving actress behind her, she is married to a globe-trotting journalist, keeping up with her friends from her fortune-telling days, and celebrating a year of gainful employment at the New York Daily. But one of her colleagues is found shot dead in his office - and Julie may have been the last person to see him alive. With a reporter's nose for a scoop, Julie investigates the violent death of one of New York's most infamous - and despised - gossip columnists.

When the Valiant weighs anchor, the Irish that are crammed into her hold break into song, and with the hymn, say good-bye to the island of their birth. Famine, nationalism, and sectarian strife have crippled the Emerald Isle, and those who can afford it crowd aboard leaky ships, risking death for the possibility of a better life.

A hard-boiled newsman and a sharp-witted sheriff team up to solve a murder mystery in Grand Master of crime fiction Dorothy Salisbury Davis’s suspenseful and disturbing story of death and violence in a small coal-mining town.