Axel Blackwell

Anna Dufresne lives in a factory that eats children. If the brutal machines don't kill Anna, her guardians' neglect and abuse probably will. The only thing this abandoned teen wants is out. But the factory is inside a stone fortress, on an island, where people are sent to be forgotten. It serves as a dumping ground -- both for orphans who are not welcome at finer institutions, and for nuns who have disgraced the Church. The walls of Saint Frances du Chantal's Orphan Asylum hum with secrets and buried scandal. In the catacombs below the factory, something long dead, something almost forgotten, stirs. It offers Anna a key, and promises freedom, if she will seek it out when she escapes. She knows her plan will endanger the other children, but Anna cannot resist the call of freedom. Her escape attempt triggers a chain reaction of chaos, shaking the orphanage to its foundation and laying bare its deadly secrets. As Anna flees into the night, she discovers that the evil nuns were the least of her worries. The swirling mist of the island hides terrors more dangerous than she could ever imagine.

Sisters of Sorrow

This is Book 2 in the Detective McDaniel Thriller series.The series is best read in order. Please consider reading Book 1, Hold Back the Night, before enjoying The Easy Way Out.Still reeling from his encounter with a depraved child killer and a professional hitman on the city's waterfront, Homicide Detective Darren McDaniel is thrown back into the fray. A headless corpse washes up in a secluded cove near the industrial district. The body shows signs of extreme trauma - torture - prior to being tossed into the sea. With no head, and no useable fingerprints to work with, McDaniel's first challenge is to identify the remains. But when he begins searching for missing persons, a disturbing pattern emerges. Multiple subjects matching the victim have disappeared over the past few years. Just as the investigation is beginning to break, McDaniel is blindsided by a disappearance much closer to his heart. His sister, June, the one remaining member of his birth-family, has vanished. She has been fighting a drug addiction for decades. McDaniel assumes it has taken her again. He knows from past experience, if he doesn't want to find her dead, he has to find her fast. McDaniel abandons the investigation, and his partner, Brent Vanderwyk, to search for June. His efforts fail and June's time is running out. McDaniel is forced to turn to the one person who might find her in time - the now-retired Detective Griggs. The grizzled old investigator has his own reasons to help, but he is intent on peeling his pound of flesh off McDaniel in return for his services. When their search resolves, McDaniel is left traumatized, wondering if some of the lost are better left unfound. He has no time to process these thoughts. Vanderwyk pulls him back into the investigation. The case that started with a headless corpse on the beach has spun out of control, expanding to include at least five men, dead or missing, and a sixth about to meet the same fate. All six are directly connected to a treacherously entangled trio - a petty drug-lord, a sheriff's detective, and a bombshell teenaged runaway.McDaniel and Vanderwyk finally begin to unravel the tangled mess of lies deception trickery and murder. But as soon as they understand what they are dealing with, it also becomes apparent that the body count is about to rise again. A discovery that plunges the two detectives into gunfights, car chases, and mayhem on the high seas, and a nail-biting conclusion that will leave you on the edge of your seat.

A Detective McDaniel Thriller

The Easy Way Out

4:23 a.m. The phone rings. The officer on the other end says, "It's a bad one, Darren. Can you come?" Darren McDaniel has worked dozens of homicides in his years as a detective. It's a dark and gritty business, and he's prepared to handle whatever it throws at him. Or so he once believed.The pre-teen girl is dead, dressed in a white princess gown, lying on a bus stop bench. There's a steel chain clamped to her ankle. A cryptic message scrawled across the booth's dusty glass wall may be the only clue.As McDaniel plunges into the case, he isn't surprised to discover the girl had been held somewhere horrible before her death. But, his blood chills when the evidence shows she wasn't alone. Other children were with her. Are they still there? Can McDaniel save them in time?The detective races against the clock, but the closer he gets, the deadlier the chase becomes. Secrets this dark fight back. When those secrets turn their murderous attention on McDaniel's family, he faces an impossible decision - let the killer walk free or risk losing his own daughter.

Hold Back the Night

This is Book 3 in the Detective McDaniel Thrillers series.The series is best read in order. Please consider reading Book 1, Hold Back the Night, before enjoying All the Way Down. Detective Darren McDaniel is finally back to work, not that his supervisor is happy about it. After his last explosive adventure, McDaniel's just barely managed to keep his job, and there's no way in hell the bosses are going to let him anywhere near a major case. One wrong move now will land him on permanent parking patrol.He can't stop turning the Polakoff case over and over in his mind. McDaniel and his former partner uncovered a horrific human trafficking organization, but McDaniel's loss of critical evidence allowed the criminals to escape and perpetuate their evil enterprise. He's haunted by his missteps and determined to work his way back into his boss's good graces. Now McDaniel is partnered with Detective Wooten on the much-less-likely-to-be-involved-in-a-shootout Property Crimes squad. He's intent on proving himself, focusing on the job at hand; purse snatchers, garden-shed burglars, and other petty thieves. If he can stay out of trouble, he might have a chance to do real detective work again...someday.When McDaniel is contacted by someone with inside information about Polakoff and his associates, everything changes. The informant delivers McDaniel a devastating new clue, possibly enough to dismantle the trafficking organization. In return for the information, the snitch insists on running a rogue operation against Polakoff's associates, with McDaniel riding shotgun.To pull it off, he'll have to risk everything. If it goes wrong, McDaniel knows he will lose what's left of his career, his marriage, and possibly end up in jail for a very long time. But if he lets the traffickers escape a second time, his career and his life won't have much meaning. Can he trust his own judgement, or will his desperate desire to redeem himself lead him down the wrong path?

All the Way Down

Dawn Lee McKenna

p> It's just another day in Paradise, if Paradise was in Detroit. In the quaint, coastal town of Port St. Joe, FL, Sheriff Evan Caldwell had been called out to the fancy new development to appease its influential owner and look into his missing shrubbery. He did not go out there to work a homicide, but since the old man in the pajamas probably didn't bury himself, a homicide investigation is pretty much mandatory. Finding out how and when the man died, and who killed and/or buried him, would be a lot easier if the Gulf County Medical Examiner hadn't gone missing, and easier still if he hadn't subsequently had the temerity to turn up dead. Now Evan and his deputies have two deaths on their hands, and Evan's life is further complicated by a county commissioner who thinks he knows something about law enforcement, a bright but morally ambiguous defense attorney trying to make a name for herself by ruining Evan, and a cat who seems unwilling to make himself more likable. This is the third book in the Still Waters Suspense Series, a series known for its rich, coastal atmosphere, dry humor, and multilayered characters. See why The Still Waters Suspense Series has earned hundreds of five-star reviews, Author's note: The actual page count of 264 pages will not be reflected until the paperback and ebook editions are synced by Amazon.

The Still Waters Suspense Series -

Dead and Gone

"Still waters suspense -- Book 1"--Cover.

Axel Blackwell

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