Berthoud Community Library District

The organized criminal gangs of the former Soviet Union are bound by what they call the thieves' code. The first rule is this: A thief must forsake his mother, father, brothers, and sisters. He must have no family-no wife, no children. We are his family. If any of the rules are broken, it is punishable by death. Frank Meyer had the American dream-until the day a professional crew invaded his home and murdered everyone inside. The only thing out of...

As police evacuate a fire-threatened Los Angeles neighborhood, they discover the corpse of an apparent suicide. More gruesome is what they find in his lap: a photo album of seven murdered women. The suicide is identified as a former suspect in one of the murders. Lionel Byrd had been tried for the murder of Yvonne Bennett. It was Elvis Cole's discovery of an exculpatory videotape that allowed Byrd to walk free. But the discovery of the album shows...

A reckoning has come to the City of Angels ... Karen Garcia is missing and her father doesn't trust the cops he wants someone he knows on the case so he enlists the help of Elvis Cole and Joe Pike. It seems that Karen is the latest victim of a distinctive serial killer and the police are determined to pin her death, and four others, on the witness who found her body. Cole doesn't believe the man has the guts to murder, and with his partner and the...

Los Angeles, 1948: Easy Rawlins is a black war veteran just fired from his job at a defense plant. Easy is drinking in a friend's bar, wondering how he'll meet his mortgage, when a white man in a linen suit walks in, offering good money if Easy will simply locate Miss Daphne Money, a blonde beauty known to frequent black jazz clubs....

When the police tell a wealthy industrialist that her missing son has faked his own kidnapping, she hires Elvis Cole and Joe Pike, and Cole soon determines that it was no fake. The boy and his secret girlfriend have been taken, and are now lost in the gray and changing world of the professional border kidnappers who prey not only on innocent victims but also on one another, buying, selling, and stealing victims like commodities. Fortunately, the kidnappers...

When a dying millionaire hires Philip Marlowe to handle the blackmailer of one of his two troublesome daughters, Marlowe finds himself involved with more than extortion. Kidnapping, pornography, seduction, and murder are just a few of the complications he gets caught up in.-- publisher's description.

The latest target in a series of celebrity attacks, Hollywood actress Sheela Marks and her security head, Lymon Bridges, hire private investigator Christal Anaya to discover the motives behind the attacks.

On a dismal evening in the previous century, an unnamed writer in Venice, California, answers a furious pounding at his beachfront bungalow door and again admits Constance Rattigan into his life. An aging, once-glamorous Hollywood star, Constance is running in fear from something she dares not acknowledge — and vanishes as suddenly as she appeared, leaving the narrator two macabre books: twin listings of the Tinseltown dead and soon to be

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Set in Las Vegas, Clark's seventh Regan Reilly mystery (after 2002's Jinxed) takes aim at all sorts of eminently spoofable targets, including reality TV shows, advice columnists and screen actors. Regan answers a plea from a grade school chum who's involved in a contest where someone isn't playing by the rules. The owner of the Balloon Channel (aka Hot Air Cable) is sponsoring a contest between two groups-one developing a pilot for a sitcom, the other...

"Meet Elvis Cole, L.A. Private Eye.... He quotes Jiminy Cricket and carries a .38. He's a literate, wisecracking Vietnam vet who is determined to never grow up. When quiet Ellen Lang enters Elvis Cole's Disney-Deco office, she's lost something very valuable--her husband and her young son. The case seems simple enough, but Elvis isn't thrilled. Neither is his enigmatic partner and firepower, Joe Pike. Their search down the seamy side of Hollywood's...