Showing results by author "Ridley Pearson" in All Categories

Private security firm Rutherford Risk’s new client is a philanthropist with a headline-making cause: to locate and shut down an Amsterdam-based sweatshop that uses enslaved girls as forced labor. Enter import/export entrepreneur John Knox, with his former combat experience—and forensic accountant Grace Chu, who can trap and trace even the most sensitive financial information. Working through the picturesque streets and canals of Amsterdam, Knox and Grace face Middle Eastern mobsters, the owner of a local brothel and police officers they don’t trust.

A troubled Mary Ann Walker takes a nosedive off a bridge. Seattle's police department macho man John LaMoia takes the call, along with the beauteous cop psychologist Daphne Matthews. They suspect her boyfriend, known to beat Mary Ann. Her seething brother, Ferrell, is convinced the boyfriend did the deed. But the case somehow becomes too slippery to close.

In this third installment of Pearson's Sun Valley series, Killer Summer takes us back to the high-stakes world of the wealthy and politically connected - just in time for the area's 17th Annual Wine Auction. The world's most elite wine connoisseurs have descended on Sun Valley to taste and bid on the world's best wines, including three bottles which are said to have been a gift from Thomas Jefferson to John Adams.

Steven "Steel" Trapp has been placed in an East Coast boarding school for gifted kids by his FBI agent father. He soon discovers that there's a clubby element of the faculty and upper classmen that is very secretive and protective. To his surprise, his friend Kaleigh arrives to board at the school and it isn't long before the two realize that this is not your normal boarding school.

Years ago, Lou Boldt's wife, Liz, had an extramarital affair with David Hayes, a young computer specialist at the bank where she is an executive. Drained by the overwhelming demands of marriage to a high-profile cop, Liz fell into the temptation of an office fling, which she soon regretted. When Liz ended the relationship, Hayes reacted by engaging in a daring embezzlement scheme. Now, years later, David Hayes is released from prison.

Umberto Alvarez is a grieving man whose quest is to bring down the railroad company he blames for the death of his wife and children three years earlier - no matter who gets in the way. Peter Tyler is an ex-cop looking to redeem himself after being suspended from the force. Now an investigator with the National Transportations Safety Board, he will stop at nothing to catch the elusive Alvarez.

A shipping container washed ashore leads Seattle television news anchor Stevie McNeal and reporter friend Melissa on the trail of a scam involving the importation of illegal aliens. A career stepping-stone for McNeal, the investigation puts her at cross-purposes with the Seattle Police Department's Lou Boldt and Sergeant John LaMoia.

For years FBI agent Cameron Daggett has been on the trail of an international triggerman responsible for planting at least two nearly undetectable explosive devices on airplanes. When a strange murder takes place in a Seattle aircraft training installation, Daggett suspects that his nemesis is involved. The man who was murdered was a specialist in training pilots to fly the Duhning 959-600 - a new breed of ultra-sophisticated aircraft - and he was killed in a Duhning flight simulator.

Seattle police detective Lou Boldt and police psychologist Daphne Matthews return in No Witnesses to confront the most challenging case of their careers. People are dying throughout Seattle - victims of a madman who is placing poisoned food in neighborhood supermarkets. But the criminal is intelligent: He writes the police chilling extortion letters, faxed directly from a laptop computer over public telephone lines, and retrieves his ransom electronically, through ATMs in hundreds of locations.

When ex-military contractor John Knox receives a text from partner Grace Chu warning that she fears her cover may have been blown while on assignment, he jumps into action. Knox must locate her overseas handlers, convince them of the threat, and then attempt to retrace the well-hidden steps of a woman who had been attempting to determine how one million euros' worth of AIDS vaccine disappeared, all while eluding angry poachers on a parallel trail.

Police Sergeant Lou Boldt heads a special task force within Seattle’s Homicide bureau. His job: find and stop the Cross Killer, a twisted, perverse serial murderer who has eluded police for six months and paralyzed the city. But when a body washes up on the shore of Puget Sound, Boldt thinks the killer has finally made a mistake. This body shows some of the work of the Cross Killer - but a job badly botched. Did this woman die while trying to escape? Did she knowingly jump in the water to preserve a clue? And is she now desperately trying to tell Boldt something?

Police lieutenant Joe "Dart" Dartelli made one critical mistake in his police career. Three years ago, he chose to ignore a piece of evidence in a suicide case - a suicide that may have possibly been a murder - because the dead man was himself a vicious woman-killer who more than deserved his fate. And the evidence that Dart ignored could have raised difficult questions about his former mentor, the brilliant forensic specialist Walter Zeller. But another suicide victim turns up - the body of a wife-beater - and Zeller has disappeared....

What's it like to see yourself in a picture you never knew was taken? John Knox is an expert at surveillance and delicate, international dealings. So he is understandably thrown when David "Sarge" Dulwich, his contact at Rutherford Risk, hands him a photo of a transaction he recently facilitated in the Middle East. More curious to him, he's shown that photo while in the Red Room, the private security company's highly secure underground bunker, where eavesdropping is impossible and privacy ensured. Why all the cloak-and-dagger?

The "blue flu" has struck the Seattle Police Force and the majority of officers are on an unofficial strike. Overworked and understaffed, detective Lou Boldt is committed to remaining on the job no matter what. But when a string of robberies and the brutal near-murder of a female cop descend on the city, the pressure of being a nearly one-man operation threatens Bodt's psyche and his marriage. With the help of Daphne Matthews and Sergeant John LaMoia, Boldt is able to make slow progress cracking the case and their work leads them to a Denver convict and his brother, a hardened criminal.

Six years ago, witness protection marshal Roland Larson did the unthinkable: he fell in love with a protected witness, Hope Stevens, whose testimony was to put away prominent members of the Romero crime family. When Hope's plan to "cut and run" is interrupted by both the government and the mob, she disappears into a new identity.

The setting is Carmel, California - a scenic, peaceful tourist haven where James Dewitt is the police force's only detective. His usual caseload is stolen bicycles and an occasional burglary. But things change with frightening speed when a series of apparent suicides, which soon prove to be murders, shocks the community. Dewitt, a former forensic scientist, struggles with the minutest of clues in his quest for the killer, while departmental turf wars and local politics increase the pressures on his investigation.

At The Shelter, no one judges the runaway teens who come in off the rainy Seattle streets. Volunteers, like police psychologist Daphne Matthews, want only to rescue and rebuild lives. Being a cop, Daphne thinks she's seen it all. But, as best-selling author Ridley Pearson's edge-of-your-seat thriller opens, what she encounters in a 16-year-old girl chills her in a way she thought a case no longer could. For help, Daphne turns to Lou Boldt, a man with creative instincts and an appreciation for forensic lab techniques.