Mostrando resultados por autor "Frederic W. Burr" en Todas las categorías

‘Strained Mercy’ opens with a more introspective Boone as he adjusts to married life with Deborah, while carrying the office by himself. Marianne works from home to care for infant Caden, recently out of NICU. Things for her go from bad to worse as developments threaten her marriage. Aside from a voicemail from a climate scientist Sarah Richardson, worried about threatening phone calls from a climate change cult, his principal concern is Abe Freed, his journalist friend. Abe is investigating MS-13 and the Albany drug trade, and Boone worries for Abe’s safety. At the same time, Abe ...

Struggling with grief and survivor’s guilt, Marianne no longer works at the office. Instead, she researches cases from home. She suffers from night terrors, visitations from a formless entity intending to end not only of her life, but also that of her unborn child. Marianne believes the specter to be Luca Aiello, who killed her husband and died trying to to murder her. For support, Marianne turns to Deborah, who feels unequal to the task, but tries her best. Meanwhile, Boone is hired by a woman to locate her runaway husband and serve him with divorce papers. As Marianne investigates the ...

“Abby’s Test” is the sequel to “Abby’s Maze.” In this story, we look in on Abby’s first year in solo practice. Between work and family life, she is hitting her stride. She has an expanding practice, even with the challenges presented by a new client with an extreme hoarding disorder. In addition to her growing practice, she has the support of her husband’s accounting firm in the same building. With daycare for their 18-month-old daughter in the building next door to her office, life couldn’t be better. Things take a turn for the worse after an elderly client deals with his...

Don Walker is a human resources manager for a mid-sized IT firm in Louisville, Kentucky. He is disenchanted with his profession and his employer. Divorced, he struggles to understand his fractious teen-aged daughter, and cope with the seemingly intractable problems of his ex-wife, an alcoholic in an unhappy second marriage, and his dissolute younger sister. The only bright spot in his life is a new relationship with a younger, free-spirited woman. At thirty-nine years of age, he fears approaching middle age, and the loss of that relationship. This story covers a brief period when Don’s ...

Private investigator Carl Boone finds himself pulled into the sexual undercurrent flowing through American culture in two unrelated cases. His office is on solid footing, with Marianne Bell now working as his office manager and assistant. When the wife of a local publisher seeks his help in an extortion case, he is captivated by her extraordinary beauty, only to learn that beauty is not always what it seems. At the same time, local attorney Clive Townsend, a significant source of business for Boone’s office, seeks his help. A friend of Townsend’s fourteen-year-old daughter faces a ...

Amateur photographer Scott Newcomb experiments with urban photography in downtown Albany, New York one Sunday morning. He unintentionally catches two men outside a delicatessen in one of his photographs, not knowing one of them is a crooked town police officer. As events unfold in an ever-tightening circle around Scott and his girlfriend, Alexandra Burton, the two are left with no answers to a rapidly growing list of questions, and begin to fear for their safety. Only after one murder, and an attempt at a second killing, are they forced to acknowledge that someone is playing for keeps, and ...

It was nearly midnight on a Saturday night in early June. Boone received a call from Mazie Tucker, the wife of New York State Police Detective George Tucker, a close personal friend of Boone’s. Mazie had returned home from a night out with friends to find Tuck in his recliner, dead, apparently from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The flat-panel set was blaring a cop show, the volume turned up as high as possible. Unable to accept her husband of thirty years would take his own life, and distressed by State Police focusing on suicide, Mazie reached out to the only person she could trust. ...

A young naval officer comes to grips with his feelings about racism, and the struggle to resolve the conflict between the needs of his family, and his career. Based upon real events, it is clear that many race problems in the US Navy were unresolved in the mid-1970’s. Lieutenant (junior grade) Mitch Payne reports to the USS Scarslund, a Navy destroyer long past its prime, ready to work hard and restart his stalled career. He has to navigate treacherous wardroom politics, even as building racial tensions deteriorate. Everything comes to a head when black sailors stage a massed disobedience...

“Old Salts, New Navy” is a companion piece to Frederic Burr’s first novel, “Mutinies.” In this story, an older Mitch Payne, along with one of his former shipmates from the USS Scarslund, joins with two retired chief petty officers to go on one of the Navy’s ‘Tiger Cruises,’ in which relatives of crewmembers are invited to ‘ride along’ during a transit from Rota, Spain to Norfolk, Virginia. The fictional USS Mulligan is one of the Navy’s newest destroyers, complete with every advanced weapon system and technology ever developed. However, the ship is short-handed due to ...

As Lethal Prey opens, Boone is heading for Buffalo to re-establish his relationship with his long estranged son Michael, and meet his daughter-in-law and two young grandchildren. His son is, from all appearances, a successful attorney headed for partnership in one of Buffalo’s larger firms. Later, Michael inadvertently stumbles onto information that has the potential of unmasking a long running bribery and money laundering scheme involving several partners. The firm has recently gone woke and implemented a DEI policy. Michael finds himself ensnared in a bogus complaint, and suspended from...

Russell Maitland just wanted to have lunch with his old school friend, another accountant. Instead, he found himself drawn into a massive criminal enterprise involving several multi-national and foreign corporations.Two years after the traumatic events in ‘Abby’s Test,’ Russell had been doing his best to support his wife’s emotional recovery, and help her to overcome her post-traumatic disorder.As the story unfolds, it becomes clear that the forces behind the enterprise will stop at nothing, including murder, to protect their identities and illicit revenue streams, running into the ...

Abigail (Abby) Conway is a lawyer approaching a critical point in her career. After ten years with a firm she joined fresh out of law school, and having built her section of the practice into a major profit center, she has been repeatedly passed over for full partnership. To add insult to injury, a new hire with political influence becomes an equity partner after only six months, and made chair of the committee that governs Abby’s compensation. The new hire then undertakes to make Abby’s professional life as unpleasant as possible. While Abby weighs her future with the firm, she becomes...

While on vacation with Deborah in Alexandria Bay, NY, Boone receives a call from Detective Alexandra Burton of the NYSP Bureau of Criminal Investigations. Alex tells Boone they believe the body of Shirley Anne Mosher, a seventeen-year-old girl who disappeared without a trace over thirty years ago, when Boone was a new trooper in the State Police, has been discovered. Detective Burton asks for his help in dusting off the old file to find Shirley Anne’s killer. Boone agrees to help, feeling remiss over treating the initial investigation as a runaway. The existence of two similar cases in ...

In ‘Letters From Peru,’ the reader meets Gerald Sullivan, an elderly retiree, who lives with his wife Judy, in a suburb of Chicago, Illinois. They have a married daughter, Natalie, who lives in Texas with her husband, and their son, known as ‘young Gerry.’ Their lives seem to be on autopilot, until one day, Gerry receives a letter from Peru. Knowing no one from Peru, and having never travelled to Peru, he believes the letter to be a scam of sorts. If true, the letter, and those that follow, will change the lives of not only Gerry and Judy, but Natalie as well. Long buried family ...

“Grab an Egg and Shave It” is the sequel to “For the Love a Pete.” Don Walker, having relocated from downtown Louisville, settles into rural Oldham County, and a new position in human resources recruiting and job placement. His relationship with Karen, a younger woman, deepens as she reveals her troubled past. Earlier choices by his fifteen-year-old daughter Lisa result in a vicious cycle of cyber-bullying that Don tries to overcome, without the help of community or law enforcement resources, while the unexpected death of a friend under tragic consequences throws him into depression...

Life for Abby and her husband Russell has returned to normal. Now in her first trimester, Abby is called on to sort out the estate of an elderly client, a retired FBI agent. Meanwhile, the fiancée of ‘Toph’ Lefan, Russell’s murdered friend, is seeking answers. Russell refers her to former New York State Police Detective Sergeant, Carl Boone, who has just opened his own office as a private investigator. Knowing the power and far-reaching influence of those indirectly responsible for Toph’s murder, both Russell and Boone try to dissuade her, to no avail. No one could have foreseen ...

Boone takes a call from a client seeking help locating a missing person. And not just any missing person. Frank Boland wants Boone to find his father, who abandoned his family on Frank’s fifth birthday some fifty years earlier. Boone thinks about his own father, who abandoned Boone’s mother and infant Boone. Worse, this case dredges up memories of Boone’s childhood, memories that he would rather forget, and his own guilt over his son’s estrangement. He takes the case, having no way of knowing this will put him on a trail more convoluted than anything he has faced before. At the same...

In ‘Calling Hours,’ attorney Clive Townsend, Boone’s friend and source of business for the office, refers what looks like a garden variety case of insurance fraud. Burglars had raided a local warehouse, and the insurance company suspects inside involvement in the heist. As Boone investigates, the case turns out to be more complex than it first appeared. And when people inside the company start dying, Boone has to wonder who is the killer’s next victim, and whether this is a case of insurance fraud, or something else? A teen-aged girl seeks Marianne’s help in recovering some ...

Wracked with guilt over his failure to prevent the murder of his friend’s widow, Mazie Tucker, and convinced it was dangerous for anyone to become close to him, Boone leaves Albany and everyone he knows behind, searching for anonymity and seclusion. He believes he has found such a place in the sparsely settled community of West Harper on the eastern shore of Chautauqua Lake. But his black dog of depression, stalking him throughout his career in law enforcement and as a licensed private investigator, continues to hound him.The death of a victim, or a friend, had always affected him deeply,...

In ‘Guardian Angel,’ the sequel to ‘BOONE’, Boone reluctantly allows Marianne, his office assistant, to work with him on a fraud case that seems routine. Things go well, Marianne captures incriminating photographs of the target which wraps up the case. Her accomplishment however results in catastrophic consequences for her. While the effects of the fraud case have yet to unravel, a friendly confidential informant from Boone’s days with the New York State Police turns to him for help after being fleeced by a crooked cop. The informant’s body is discovered the following morning. ...