Showing results by author "Collin Wilcox" in All Categories

Tony Frazer takes a wide berth when he sees the homeless man. A millionaire playboy, he does not consort with street people, and is in the process of skirting the derelict, eyes averted, when the stranger calls his name. The king of the society pages turns just in time to be struck by three silenced bullets, slumping to his knees and dying there in the gutter.

For homicide lieutenant Frank Hastings, the day starts with an assassination attempt. During a rally in San Francisco's Civic Center, someone takes a potshot at the governor, sending the whole of downtown into chaos. Once he has taken control of the scene, Hastings chases down the gunman - a Mexican immigrant with a political bent - and captures him after a tense standoff. Miraculously, no one is killed. But Hastings's long day is just getting started.

It was just after he made lieutenant that Frank Hastings told Charlie Quade to resign. They had known each other at the academy, and Quade was a rotten cop from day one. Dogged by rumors of corruption, Quade left without protest, eking out a living doing security work. When Hastings hears Quade has been shot dead, he doesn't blink. The only surprise is the place the ex-cop died.

In a San Francisco apartment building, a young woman is found strangled beside a piano player with a broken neck. He's a nobody - a dreamer with little talent and no future - but she is Roberta Grinnel, daughter of one of the wealthiest men in the Bay Area. Stephen Drake, crime reporter for the Sentinel, feels nothing when he looks at their corpses, and this is a troubling fact. For Drake is a psychic, and when his sixth sense fails him, that means more trouble ahead.

It's the finest performance of Rebecca Carlton's career. The show is dedicated to her father, and the most famous woman in rock does everything she can to honor him. She gives the crowd at San Francisco's Cow Palace arena four encores before finally retiring backstage. The applause is still thundering through the stadium when Rebecca Carlton is shot dead.

Searching for a missing society matron, Hastings finds danger amid the upper crust. In a glamorous part of San Francisco, a maid has been strangled to death. Frank Hastings stands over the body, knowing it will be a long day. But before finishing with the crime scene, he gets another call - an officer has been shot, and Hastings must lead the tactical squad. By lunchtime, the boy who shot the officer is dead, and Hastings is hungry for an easy assignment. When he gets it, he'll soon wish he were back in the line of fire.

He calls himself Tarot. His first victim was a mother, killed while her daughter slept in the next room. His second was a truck-stop waitress, murdered - like the first woman - while she slept. After each one, he sent letters to the newspapers, boasting of his crimes and promising more to come. The third victim will die soon, he tells them. But first, she must be warned.

Senate majority leader Donald Ryan is a kingmaker, with the power to make or break presidencies, and the ability to reshape the country with a flick of his pen. He is also a very sick man, recovering from a heart attack that must be kept secret at all costs. But when a series of death threats jeopardizes his planned return to public life, the FBI calls in San Francisco police lieutenant Frank Hastings to find the would-be assassin.

Alan Bernhardt is just starting rehearsal when his pager goes off. No one in the small San Francisco theater minds - they know that to make it on the stage, you have to be prepared to do all sorts of odd jobs off of it. But this director’s job is odder than most. He works for Herbert Dancer, head of a boutique private investigation service. A corporate secretary has vanished with a sheaf of valuable documents, and it will take an off-Broadway sensibility to bring her home.

Charles Hardaway climbs the hill to his house, immediately missing the bright lights and conversation of the bar and dreading the return to his lover, who is slowly dying of AIDS. But Hardaway's self-pity is interrupted by a pipe-wielding stranger, who crushes his skull before slipping away. It's nighttime in the Castro, and another gay man has been sent to his grave.

The doctor comes through his front door as he always does, a bundle of mail in hand. He's about to walk up the stairs when the bullet passes through his back, puncturing his heart and leaving him dead in his front hall. By the time Lieutenant Frank Hastings arrives, rigor mortis has set in, and the doctor's body rolls easily away from the wall. Pinned beneath him is a note that begins, "Doctor, Lawyer, Merchant, Chief...." Pay $100,000, writes "the Masked Man", or a lawyer will be the next to die.

Alan Bernhardt is a theater director in San Francisco who pays his rent with the odd bit of private detective work. Searching for the man who strangled Connie, his biggest obstacle isn't Dennis but John - the dead woman's seven-year-old son. He may have witnessed something crucial on the night of the murder, but this sensitive child is too frightened to speak. Coaxing words out of John will be the toughest assignment of Alan's directing career, but not half as hard as keeping the boy alive.

Investigating a grisly murder in the park, Lieutenant Hastings finds that the victim had some secrets of her own. San Francisco's first murder of the year takes more than two weeks to come, but when it does, it's ugly. June Towers is 17, a high school senior just six months from graduation, when the police find her dead in the park. She's lovely, in the patchwork jeans and rainbow palette favored by the city's youth, but her hair is matted with blood.

Dominic Vennezio is found on the floor of his beachside love nest, murdered on a Sunday night. It looks like an ordinary mob hit, part of a routine power struggle with the East Coast Outfit, but Vennezio's widow has other suspicions.

In the underworld of San Francisco, a broken cop searches for his daughter. Seven years ago, Frank Hastings quit on his family. After a half-baked pro football career, he had fallen in love with the bottle and needed to go west. In San Francisco, he got sober, and now he's one of the toughest police officers around, in a city whose counterculture does not make life easy for the men in blue.

Brice Hanchett is a brilliant surgeon, and those who work alongside the man consider him either godlike or devilish. After years of success, he has begun to believe his own legend, and soon goes too far - toying not just with life and death, but with the heart of every woman he meets. He has a wife and a mistress, as well as the attention of all the nurses in the hospital.

After years of turning tricks and shooting junk, Amy has reached the end of the line. Heroin has wrecked her body, and her pimp is contemplating cutting her loose when she takes a client to the Bayside Hotel. The john asks her to turn around and undress, and as she slips out of her clothes for the thousandth time, he places his hands around her neck and starts to squeeze.

Lieutenant Frank Hastings checks his gun at airport security, so he can meet his son the moment the boy gets off the plane in San Francisco. After a year apart, he finds Darrell to be as moody and withdrawn as any other teenager, and prays that a fishing trip will bring them closer together. He is unaware that he and Darrell are about to experience the sort of bonding that only terror can provide.

For the past few weeks, Lieutenant Frank Hastings's girlfriend has sensed that she was being watched. They are on their way home from a too-chic party when Hastings spots something moving in the bushes - a shadowy figure who appears to have a gun. He should call for backup; he should stay in the car. But to protect Ann, this detective is willing to risk everything. After a chase, Hastings apprehends the lurker, but what he thought was a gun turns out to be a shotgun mike. Is someone recording Ann?

To honor a dying don's last wish, a mob lieutenant searches for hidden diamonds. After seven years ruling his empire from prison, Don Carlo remains as powerful as ever, but his heart is beginning to fail. On the verge of death, he begs his right-hand man, Bacardo, to look after his family. Not his wife and children, the don explains, but Louise and Angela - his daughter and granddaughter from a beloved mistress who died long ago.