Martelli NYPD

When the severed head of a Wall Street stock analyst turns up spiked on a horn of the Wall Street Bull, Detective Louis Martelli of the NYPD is assigned to track down the murderer. But why were this victim and the victims of two similar murders that followed singled out for execution? Martelli eventually learns the answer to this question and tracks down the killer, but not before uncovering some of Wall Street's and the US government's darkest secrets pertaining to the US financial markets and the nation's health care practices.

The head of one of the largest investment banking and securities firms in the United States has been assassinated in Times Square in the middle of New York City’s annual celebration of Halloween, the Festival of the Dead. Louis Martelli, NYPD, is one of the first detectives on the scene.

When a man dressed in a long priest’s robe and wearing a black ecclesiastical hat walked into a Catholic church just prior to a funeral service, stuffed garlic into the deceased’s mouth, and pumped a bullet into the corpse, NYPD Homicide Detective Louis Martelli was as puzzled as he’s ever been on a case. No stranger to the macabre, Martelli is even more mystified by Deputy Coroner Michael Antonetti’s findings, which confirm that the deceased, far from having died of respiratory failure and a possible heart attack, was murdered by someone who injected him with a lethal dose of Philippine cobra venom.  

When a wealthy Wall Street commodity futures trader is found dead in his townhouse of an apparent drug overdose, Deputy Coroner Michael Antonetti, NYPD, is suspicious. Antonetti tells Detective Louis Martelli he suspects what appears to be a suicide may in fact be murder. After a similar case is discovered involving a former friend of the Wall Street trader who played on the same high school football team almost twenty years earlier, Martelli is convinced he is dealing with someone bent on revenge.

When the mayor of New York City’s grandson and the grandson’s wife are murdered execution style in their Tribeca apartment, NYPD Detective Louis Martelli and his partner, Detective Sean O’Keeffe, are left completely in the dark. Months go by without any actionable leads until a meeting with the wife’s doctor and the bizarre torching of Stephanie Martelli’s car turn the investigation upside down and land Martelli and O’Keeffe in the hot seat.  

Even as a child, Katlyn Lundquist was drop-dead gorgeous. She also was willful. In her teens, perhaps out of spite, she created her own name and persona. As she grew up, she readily accepted money and gifts from her parents but thumbed her nose at society and her parent's way of life. A seeming infatuation with Tommie Lupinacci, head of a major crime-infested cartage association based in Brooklyn, led her to move east with the mobster. But when she showed up dead with a bullet in the back of her head, NYPD Detectives Louis Martelli and Sean O'Keeffe were stumped.