Showing results by author "James Scott Bell" in All Categories

A man shoots his young wife to death. He drives to a freeway overpass, gets out, shoots himself, and drops 100 feet to the freeway below, crushing a Toyota Camry. Inside is an elementary school teacher named Jacqueline Dwyer, who dies at the scene. Ty Buchanan is a hotshot lawyer. Jacqueline Dwyer was the woman he was going to marry. Ty goes into a tailspin. And it gets worse when a mysterious man finds him at the funeral and says Jacqueline's death may not have been an accident after all.

Fifteen years ago their son was taken. Now somebody says they can have him back. Dylan and Erin Reeve have lived with a gaping emotional wound ever since their five-year-old son, Kyle, was kidnapped in broad daylight. And never found. Though the shadow of their loss hangs heavy, Dylan and Erin have managed to get on with their lives, even finding bits of happiness along the way. Until one night when a crayon-scrawled note is slipped under Dylan Reeve's door. All it says is, Your son is alive. Could it be true? Or is it a sick game played by somebody out for money? Or something else? But ...

Mike Romeo is an ex-cage fighter living off the grid in LA. Running from a dark guilt that dogs him, he's finally found a place where he can rest and even heal. Then a church blows up. And with it all of Romeo's hopes to be left alone. When he stops to help an injured woman whose kids are missing, someone decides to put a target on his back.

A suspense novel that asks what if a liberal Supreme Court Justice, and the all-important swing vote, has a religious conversion that changes her whole life--and the way she views the law?

Lawyer Steve Conroy has one last chance to overcome the past that has haunted him for 25 years. But he learns that the present can be darker than any nightmare he's ever had. At the age of five, Steve Conroy saw his seven-year-old brother kidnapped from the bedroom they shared. His brother was never found. And the guilt of his silence that night has all but destroyed Steve's life. Now, 30 years old with a failing law practice, Steve agrees to represent a convicted criminal, Johnny LaSalle, who has ties to a notorious family....

Public defender Lindy Field puts her faith to the test and risks her reputation - and her life - when she defends a young man accused of a series of grisly murders. After all - he may just be innocent.

Winner of the International Thriller Writers Award “I don’t want anybody bleeding to death, okay?” I said. “I think your problem is education. There’s just no discipline anymore. You have to know there are consequences for bad behavior. Without that, society falls apart.” Baton Guy croaked, “I can’t breathe.” “You just can’t go around doing this sort of thing,” I said. “It isn’t right. Now, one of you is bleeding pretty badly and won’t be riding a bike anytime soon. The other one still needs to learn, am I right?” “Don’t kill us,” Knife Guy said. Mike ...

From a "master of suspense" ( Library Journal) and writer of "heart-whamming" fiction ( Publishers Weekly) comes an all new suspense collection by James Scott Bell. In the full-length novella One More Lie, high-flying divorce attorney Andrew Chamberlain is on top of the legal world. He buys his suits in Beverly Hills and wins his cases in court. But one day he's approached by a friend to handle the split with his wife. That's the day things start to go very wrong for Andrew Chamberlain...up to and including murder.

Mark Gillen has the storybook life other men dream of, complete with a beautiful wife and an adoring five-year-old daughter. Then his wife announces she's leaving him. And taking their daughter with her. The other man is a famous film director with unlimited funds and the keys to stardom and wealth for Paula. How can Mark begin to compete? But the most bitter blow comes when he is kept from seeing his daughter because of false charges....

Dallas Hamilton's perfect world is torn apart when her husband, a rising superstar in the evangelical world, is arrested for the murder of a porn star.

They tried to kill Romeo, but didn’t finish the job. Now his rage is about to rain down… Mike Romeo is helping a reformed gang member protect a girl rescued from a sex trafficking ring. When the girl is kidnapped, Romeo sets out to find her—and plunges into a heart of darkness unlike anything he’s fought before. The layers of this evil run deep in L.A., stretching from Skid Row to Malibu, from Little Guatemala to Beverly Hills. When the cops tell Romeo to back off, he only goes further in. Because Romeo has rules, the most important being: Always protect the children. Now he is a ...

“Everybody has got to die, but I have always believed an exception would be made in my case. Now what?” - Last words of William Saroyan But there are no exceptions. Now what? James Scott Bell spent a good chunk of 2015 thinking and writing about that. Some famous people died that year. So did others not so famous. It doesn't matter, because each life is a story. And if we look deeply enough they all have something to say. In Some People Are Dead, Bell weaves his musings on the departed into a form of essay combining memoir and reflection, thoughts on how to live and how to die, and an ...

I drove away tired. Tired of the road rage guys, the bar fight guys. There’s always more of them. History is about one thing, and has been ever since hunter clubbed gatherer and took his berries. Conquest. It’s always been about beating the other guys into submission. From the Greeks and Romans to mobs on a city street. Destroy and dominate. The Spartans understood this better than anybody. From age seven the boys were trained to fight. It was fight or be conquered. There was no sitting it out. After a battle you came back with your shield, or on it. I still had my shield. The tragic ...