Thomas Kies

Whisper Room

"It's a crime scene worthy of Hieronymus Bosch, so shocking and so senseless it challenges the local law and intrigues veteran reporter Geneva Chase, whose career may be dying alongside that of her small town newspaper. The Sheffield Post headline shouts, 'Cops Call Murder Scene "Slaughterhouse."' On the scene, Genie spurs the Deputy Police Chief to tell her quietly, 'Six bodies--all nude--hacked to pieces.' Even tough Geneva shivers. How could such a slaughter happen on Connecticut's moneyed Gold Coast?"--

Random Road

The newshound in Geneva Chase spurs her to bad if not downright dangerous choices as two unrelated crimes unexpectedly collide. A fifteen-year-old girl at her ward's high school has vanished along with her English teacher. Is this the same-old, or something more? And then there's the abused woman who torched her sadistic husband, and how to keep her out of the clutches of powerful mobsters--and thus, out of the news. Out on the crime beat, Geneva works to unravel the connection, if any, between these two disparate stories while her newspaper is put up for sale, a high-flying Hollywood production lights up the town, and her personal battles accelerate.

Darkness Lane

Time is running out... The nude bodies of a corrupt judge and a Jane Doe are found under the icy, black waters at Groward Bay Marina, chained to the prongs of a mammoth fork lift. A videotape points to Merlin Finn, a ruthless gang leader with a proclivity for bondage and S&M who had recently broken out of prison. In the videotape, he's wearing a black leather bondage mask. With the newspaper she works for about to be sold and her job in jeopardy, journalist Geneva Chase investigates pill mills, crooked doctors, and a massive money laundering scheme in an attempt to identify the murdered woman and find the killer. Along the way, she finds herself working with a disgraced New York cop and a host of other unlikely characters with ties to the criminal underworld. Geneva is clearly hot on the killer's trail, but when she is kidnapped and held at the mercy of the criminals she hoped to stop, it looks like her chance to uncover the darkness that has seeped through her hometown may be lost forever.

Graveyard Bay

How far would someone go to protect corporate profits? Just days before Morris Cutter, a retired powerful oil executive, is scheduled to give a pseudo-scientific report to Congress that will delay crucial action on climate change for decades, he and his wife are found shot to death in their Greenwich, Connecticut, home. The police call it murder-suicide. The couple's son refuses to accept the official conclusion and hires Geneva Chase, crime reporter turned private detective, to prove otherwise. Genie soon learns that there are suspects everywhere, including within the deceased's immediate family. Morris Cutter's own daughter hadn't spoken with him in years, and his nephew is a climate activist with a radical organization. But Cutter's former company has a vested interest in keeping a low profile until it is able to present its mock-science on Capitol Hill. Genie is bribed, then threatened, to wrap up her investigation before the scheduled hearing date—and to concur with the police findings. When the lead scientist of the study goes missing, followed by Cutter's daughter, Genie begins to piece together what actually may have happened to Morris and Julia Cutter, putting herself in harm's way as she races to find the truth.

Shadow Hill

2022 Sue Grafton Memorial Award Nominee, Thomas Kies' newest Geneva Chase Crime Reporter Mystery turns up the heat with an investigation embroiled in sex, blackmail, and murder. Geneva encounters a deceptive cast of suspects who pull her into a high-speed chase into the Whisper Room, a dating app for only the most elite members of society—where affairs, blackmail, and murder are all on the menu. When wealthy men crave no-strings attached encounters, the Whisper Room promises to deliver. Escorts are turning up dead, and Geneva Chase is ready to dive into the exclusive dating ring and catch the killer. But then one of The Whisper Room's escorts turns up murdered—and she looks a lot like the blond in the blackmail video. The more Genie digs, the more blackmail victims and potential suspects she finds—and the more people she angers. Dangerous people, with links to organized crime and human trafficking. Will this story of a lifetime put a premature end to her own?

Some vices are deadlier than others... Veteran reporter Geneva Chase is at the end of her professional rope. Battling alcoholism and bad choices, she's lost every major news job she's had; working at her hometown newspaper is her last chance to redeem herself—and now the paper's future is in doubt. And then she lands the story of a lifetime: Six nude bodies are found hacked to pieces in a Queen Anne mansion on the coast of Long Island Sound. The sensational headline is picked up by the metro papers, and Geneva is back in the game, using her reporter's nose to sniff out the secrets of Sheffield's rich and entitled citizens. As her investigation leads her deeper into dangerous waters, her toxic affair with a married man and her inability to get sober threaten to undo everything she has worked so hard to achieve—and not everyone is thrilled to have a reporter digging up secrets that might be better left buried... This special First-in-a-Series edition includes: A New Introduction by the Author A Reading Group Guide A Conversation with the Author An Excerpt from Darkness Lane, the Next Geneva Chase Crime Reporter Mystery

Thomas Kies

About

Books

Join the club