Showing results by author "L.T. Vargus" in All Categories

When Gloria Carmichael’s body is found broken and bleeding on the sidewalk just days after knocking on Detective Charlie Winters’ door begging for help to locate her father’s will, Charlie’s instinct is confirmed: Her latest case is about more than just a simple family feud. The Carmichaels are famous in Salem Island for their large family and charitable work, but, moments before she died, beautiful, trustworthy eldest daughter Gloria called Charlie to say she had uncovered a terrible secret that would break the mystery of her father’s death wide open.

Some secrets don’t stay buried. Three elaborately staged victims. No clues. A public verging on panic. FBI profiler Victor Loshak heads to Kansas City to hunt another serial killer. But something about this case is all wrong. The three corpses lie posed. Face up. A glove laid to cover each right eye. The victims seem to be selected at random. Suburban. Upper middle class. Squeaky clean. It doesn’t make sense. A piece is missing from this puzzle.

Catch up with Izzy, Erin, Baghead, and Delfino in the fifth volume in The Scattered and the Dead series. The road trip from hell continues as planned. Delfino shares revelations from his past as Baghead begins to recover from his injury. But there's a problem. They're being followed.

When multiple murders terrorize a small town college campus, FBI profiler Violet Darger heads to rural Michigan to investigate. As soon as she arrives, a grim history begins to emerge. The crimes have progressed steadily over a period of 18 months. Indecent exposure to stalking. Stalking to rape. Rape to murder. The UNSUB's emphasis on power and control rapidly verges toward full blown sadism. He grows ever bolder, ever more vicious.

When a serial arsonist terrorizes Los Angeles county, FBI profiler Violet Darger heads over to California to investigate. The fires keep coming faster. The body count rises, and the threat hangs over the city as thick as the smog. The case file is brutal - stuffed with photographs of charred bodies, human faces melted beyond recognition. And when Darger gets up close to the crimes - the real thing - that sense of savagery only intensifies.

Her body seems to hover above the forest floor. Arms and legs torn away from the trunk. A bloody stump mounted upright on a skewer. Not just a corpse. A warning. The most recent body was discovered in the woods just beyond a logging cabin. Dismembered. Put on display. Ghostly pale skin stark against the forest's green.

This audiobook includes the first four thrillers in the Violet Darger series: Dead End Girl, Image in a Cracked Mirror, Killing Season, and The Last Victim. A pause-resisting thriller series packed with heart-stopping suspense. Fans of John Sandford, Michael Connelly, Karin Slaughter, and Lisa Gardner should get to know Violet Darger.

A mass-shooter rages through Chicago in the days after Christmas. Brutal. Efficient. He etches a path of destruction through the city. Shooting up the mall. Opening fire in traffic. Rampaging through a movie theater. That's just his opening act. FBI profiler Victor Loshak heads to the windy city to investigate and finds himself swept up in a frenzied manhunt.

When a search party trawling Salem Island find a girl’s body curled on the damp earth, the hunt for missing waitress Emma Jacobis grinds to a devastating halt. The day before, Emma had come to Detective Charlie Winters convinced someone was watching her. In her trembling hand, she held a sketch of herself sleeping peacefully with the stuffed rabbit she’d had since she was a child. On the back, scrawled in black ink: You will be mine.

When three bodies turn up in a landfill outside of Philadelphia, FBI profiler Violet Darger heads to Pennsylvania to investigate. Right away there's a major complication. The emaciated corpses appear to have been starved to death. Darger arrives in time for the autopsies. As she watches the withered bodies laid out on the stainless steel slabs of the morgue, their faces crusted with sandy soil, skin pulled taut around knobby cheekbones, she thinks: what kind of a person could carry out such harsh acts?

He slips through the unlocked window. Creeps down the hall. A shadow standing in the bedroom doorway. Will you wake when death comes ripping? A string of brutal home invasion murders terrifies Dade County, Florida. The killer strikes in the dead of the night, savages innocent people in their beds, wipes out entire families. He attacks at random. Rich. Poor. Young. Old. No one is safe. When the city sleeps, he comes alive. Stalks the night. Walks among us.

Special Agent Violet Darger must make sense of this savagery - figure out how brutality like this could happen in rural Michigan. The victim had been living the American dream. A small-business owner who built a construction empire. Started a family. Coached youth hockey. He seemed to have it all. But his surface life didn’t tell the full story. He carried dark secrets to the grave. Left clues which offer more questions than answers, clues that seem to lead Darger to Detroit.

The first blast takes out an actor from a string of famous coffee commercials. A plain cardboard box in the mail blows when he opens it—pumps hot nails through his face. So begins the series of mail bombs that beckons FBI profiler Violet Darger to New York. The bomber's plan is meticulous—an ever-growing spectacle of gruesome violence meant to spread his cryptic message piece by piece. And the clock is ticking. Starting at midnight tonight, a bomb will go off roughly every eight hours, and a target will be neutralized.

When a popular podcaster receives a disturbing package in the mail, FBI profiler Victor Loshak heads to Denver to investigate. The grisly contents of the bubble mailer are unlike anything he's seen. Somewhere out there is a victim without a face. Feds swarm the scene. The US Postal Inspection Service tracks down the point of the packages origin.

When a homemade explosive device detonates on the set of a network sitcom, FBI profiler Violet Darger heads to Hollywood to investigate. Her gut tells her this is only the first of what will be multiple attacks. Her gut is right. Darger enters the strange world of the studio lot. Elaborate sets surround her. Actors and crew members stream past in all directions. The excitement vibrates in the air—the passion necessary to capture the collective dreams of a culture within the lens of a camera.

A shocking death launches Special Agent Victor Loshak on a new investigation with an ominous message: They know everything. He heads to Tucson, Arizona, where a recent murder spree seems to be linked to the human trafficking conspiracy he's been working in secret for months. Loshak still has dreams about the Kansas City case. Nightmares about the team of techs peeling up the floorboards in a suburban home. Finding the rotting bodies face down in the muddy earth of the crawlspace. A grisly discovery that ultimately led to more questions than answers.

Thousands of girls go missing every year in Las Vegas. Taken. Bought and sold. Or worse. These lost girls summon FBI Profiler Violet Darger to Sin City. There are fresh dead to sort through - two bodies burned beyond recognition in the trunk of a sedan - and there’s reason to believe there are missing girls waiting to be saved. Rumors swirl that a legendary killer is responsible for these crimes: an escaped prisoner with a personal grudge against Darger. One who disappeared for 20 years. If Darger finds the killer in time, the girls will live. If not...

A family has been massacred in their home, a display of violence both brutal and bizarre. The details prove curious - not only are the bodies savaged way beyond anything found at a normal murder scene, every mirror in the house has been shattered. The spectacle shocks a peaceful island community, and when local police turn to the FBI for assistance, Agent Violet Darger finds herself working another harrowing crime scene. She stares, once more, into the abyss, and mankind's warped reflection stares back.

Her body floats. A bloated thing half atop the river. Naked. Pale. Mouth and eyes open wide. When two fishermen discover a corpse floating in the Clackamas river, profiler Violet Darger heads to rural Oregon to hunt another serial killer. What she discovers in the woods might change the course of her life. What secrets does the water conceal? The girl in the water marks the third such case in the area - all drowned with superficial stab wounds and discovered in a body of water - and Darger feels certain she won't be the last. The corpses are badly decomposed.

Down the beach, she can just make out the rusting hulk of the Ferris wheel through the dawn mist. The hairs prickle on her neck as she drags her focus back to the chestnut hair fanned out in the shallow water at her feet, to the grains of sand decorating the beautiful girl’s white cheeks like freckles.