Showing results by author "Linda Barnes"

Carlotta Carlyle thought that working undercover searching out fraud on Boston's Big Dig would be a challenging assignment. After all, the Big Dig, the creation of a central artery highway through downtown Boston, is a 14-billion dollar boondoggle, the largest urban construction project in modern history. But playing a mild-mannered secretary working out of a construction trailer is not quite the thrill ride she had in mind, so Carlotta starts moonlighting, taking on a missing persons case.

When six-foot redhead ex-cop and Boston-based private investigator Carlotta Carlyle agrees to help an elderly recluse burglar-proof her apartment, the last thing she expected was that the woman would turn up dead. Now Carlotta must find out why the eccentric yet seemingly harmless Valentine Phipps isolated herself - and needed protection. Who would want to hurt Valentine? What was she hiding behind closed doors? Is there a connection between her murder and an age-old mystery that the city’s top brass - and its real-estate moguls - want to keep buried?

As she looks for a missing taxi driver, Carlotta’s investigation sends her traveling the pub route with a bunch of blarney-loving geezers whose devotion to the Emerald Isle has gotten them involved in a deadly mix of Boston-Irish politics.

In Cold Case, a decades-old missing person case turns red-hot, threatening Carlotta’s composure and a Massachusetts political race. A mysterious client comes to Carlotta secretly with a wild tale: He has obtained parts of a recently written novel by Thea Janis, the literary sensation who disappeared 24 years ago. As soon as Carlotta begins to hunt for the author, her client calls off the search. But she accidentally discovers Thea’s grave in a nearby cemetery - unearthing a tangle of lies and scandal that Boston’s most prominent citizens will do anything to suppress.

The brash Boston P.I. Carlotta Carlyle takes on a case for the Green and White Cab Company. The investigation will lead her into the mysterious shadowlands of computer technology, where she finds that information is cheap and privacy is a thing of the past.

Best-selling author Linda Barnes sets her gripping P.I. Carlotta Carlyle mysteries - including Cold Case - on the mean streets of Boston, where blackmail, cover-ups, and murder abound. In this entry, Carlotta's allegedly unfaithful fiancé disappears right after his supposed mistress turns up dead.

The photograph - of a raisin-faced baby wearing something pastel - arrives in a blue envelope. There’s no identification or return address, just an unfamiliar postmark. But something in the baby’s face makes Carlotta keep the snapshot. Three weeks later, she finds out why.

But there are girls who vanish and never come back, girls whose clean white bones are dug up years later in vacant lots and distant forests. Carlotta Carlyle's latest case, investigating the disappearance of her adopted little sister Paolina, could change her life forever.

Now available in audio, the Anthony Award-winning short story that started it all. In Lucky Penny, award-winning author Linda Barnes introduces the red-headed, jazz-loving, cab-driving Bostonian and Private Investigator Carlotta Carlyle. As Carlotta lounges in her cab one night while waiting for a fare, the part-time cabbie is accosted and robbed at gunpoint. When she is unable to get any assistance from the police, Carlotta sets out on her own to recover the stolen goods and bring the perp to justice.

When Carlotta Carlyle agrees to help a mysterious woman locate her missing immigration card, she doesn't anticipate any complications. But then her client disappears, and the immigration card in question turns up on the dead body of another woman. Suddenly, Carlotta is plunged into the desperate world of illegal aliens, the cold-hearted immigration agents who hunt them down, and the deadly “coyotes” who bring the innocents across the border.

Harvard professor Wilson Chaney has a secret and somebody knows it. His adulterous affair with a freshman ended just weeks before she wound up dead. The sole trace of his infatuation is a stack of missing love letters - and they’ve fallen into the wrong hands… Carlotta Carlyle takes the case to find his blackmailer and retrieve the letters. Six-foot-one and red-haired, this private eye doesn’t blink when the going gets tough.

Edgar Award finalist Linda Barnes has been justifiably heralded for her scintillating mysteries. In Heart of the World, private investigator Carlotta Carlyle begins a frantic search when a young girl she’s been mentoring goes missing. Clues seem to indicate that the disappearance has something to do with the girl’s Colombian druglord father - a man believed dead but who Carlotta now suspects is very much alive.

Carlotta is eating pizza when two cases are dumped into her denimclad lap. One will take her into a combat zone of hookers and pimps, the other onto the campus of a wealthy prep school.

Mousy and shy to the point of agoraphobic, Em Moore is the writing half of a celebrity biography team. Her charismatic partner, Teddy, does the interviewing and the public schmoozing. But Em’s dependence on Teddy runs deeper than just the job - Teddy is her bridge to the world and the main source of love in her life. So when Teddy dies in a car accident, Em is devastated, alone in a world that she doesn’t understand. The only way that she can honor his memory and cope with his loss is to finish the interviews for their current book....

Now available in audio, originally published in Women on the Case, an anthology of 26 original stories by the best women in crime writing, a short story featuring Linda Barnes’ feisty, redheaded, ex-cop private investigator, Carlotta Carlyle. Carlotta can’t stay away when she’s offered a beautiful piece of classic blues history - the guitar of blues and gospel legend Reverend Gary Davis - in return for finding and stopping the uncomfortable advances of a blues-singing rock star’s stalker.

Now available in audio, originally published in the Boston Globe Magazine, a short story featuring award-winning author Linda Barnes’ feisty, redheaded, cab-driving, ex-cop private investigator, Carlotta Carlyle. On a great day to take in a ball game at Fenway, a seemingly harmless run-in with a familiar petty thief throws Carlotta into a wild chase through the park that turns up something far more interesting than the final score.

A case almost a quarter of a century cold turns red hot again when Linda Barnes's detective and part-time cabby, Carlotta Carlyle, gets ensnared in the hunt for the source of a manuscript in the unmistakable voice of Thea Janis, the young literary sensation who disappeared twenty-four years ago at the height of her fame. Thea was 15 when she vanished, after Nightmare's Dawn, her brilliant debut novel, propelled her and her prominent Boston family into the painful glare of the spotlight society reserves for genius. Now, pages from an inflammatory new manuscript are appearing, written in a voice that could be none other than Thea's. But a madman sits in a Massachusetts state prison, convicted of her murder. The "cold case" squad of the Boston Police, specializing in old unsolved mysteries, won't touch this one - they want to keep it irrevocably closed. Thea's brother, a dashing politician, is in the middle of a hotly contested gubernatorial race and has other problems, with a fiery young wife and a reputation for ruthlessness. Thea's older sister has withdrawn into her own oblivion. And her aristocratic mother finds her refuge in a bottle. Who wrote the new manuscript? Who is sending it piecemeal to Thea's family, demanding chapter-by-chapter blackmail? Who is playing games with Carlotta with every loaded word? Is Thea alive or dead? Is the author a victim, a plagiarist...or a killer? Carlotta Carlyle confronts demons from the past and from the present as she peels back layer upon layer of a glittering family's dark secrets in Cold Case, her toughest and most intriguing assignment yet.