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

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.

Will Violet Darger agree to a face-to-face meeting with the man who shot her? Still awaiting trial, the infamous serial killer Leonard Stump has hinted at the locations of additional bodies - more desert graves waiting to be uncovered. He wants to talk, but he has one condition. Violet Darger must be present at the interview. Now, the pressure is on. Should Darger head to Vegas and sit down with Stump? Everyone else seems to think so.

Some conspiracy theories turn out to be true. FBI profiler Victor Loshak works a brutal murder case in Watertown, New York - a woman found strangled in her basement, her face gone purple and baggy. But as he sifts through the crime scene details, his mind keeps drifting back to Kansas City, his last job. The human trafficking case there ended in something of a cliffhanger, and it's a loose end that everyone else in law enforcement seems in no hurry to tie up. The truth is out there. Always just out of reach.

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.

Jake saw something unspeakable when he was nine. An act of violence. Brutal. He doesn't know it, but this trauma will play a key role in shaping him later in life. Now, he's 15. A wimp. He flinches. Always. He seeks the guidance of the biggest bad-ass he knows, his cousin Nick. Nick is a professional burglar and makes Jake his apprentice. Nick teaches Jake his dark philosophy - that there is no right or wrong in the world, just a series of events that happen without meaning. At first this helps Jake, but it also unleashes an aggression in himself he never thought possible....

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.

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.

New crimes lead FBI profiler Victor Loshak to revisit former scenes and witnesses in the Las Vegas area. The evidence suggests the return of a notorious and brutal serial killer from years ago - the one who got away. Loshak conceals his work from his partner, Violet Darger, and tries desperately to stay one step ahead of both her and the murderer. Leonard Stump is back. Maybe. And things are about to get so much worse.

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.

While a hurricane slams the tourist strewn coast, a killer runs amok in the storm. A group of vacationers are pinned down in the midst of the danger. It was supposed to be Kaitlyn and Logan's wedding day. The storm was supposed to hit 90 miles south of here. There's no safety in the storm. The rain pours. The wind rips. The sea crashes up onto the land. Water main? That broke. Now floodwater gushes through the city streets. Gallons and gallons. Engulfing cars and surging up around the buildings. Brickwork crumbles. Roofs get torn off. And a killer walks among the devastation.

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.

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.

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.