Showing results by narrator "Tom Taylorson" in All Categories

With Joe Gunther and his Vermont Bureau of Investigation team spread thin on assignment everywhere, from the remote dairy country of Northwest Vermont to the slums of Newark, New Jersey, they're pushed to their absolute limit when a string of serial arsons across the Green Mountain State evolves into the most shocking series of murders the bucolic region has ever known.

Limerick, Ireland. The driveway of the Stokes family home. American Oscar Harvey opens the trunk of the car his hosts have loaned him and finds in it the body of a woman beaten and bloody. But let's start from the beginning. Kate and Mannix Stokes and their children live beside Curragower Falls in Limerick, in a house they love but can barely afford in postrecession Ireland. On top of that, their autistic son, Fergus, is being bullied at school, and their daughter, Izzy, blames herself for not being able to protect him.

When Dr. Ayers uses the DNA of a long-dead alien life-form known as the Sansein, the Last Reaper finds himself caught up in an unprecedented situation. The Sansein, as it turns out, were not as extinct as Ayers originally believed. Possibly benevolent, definitely dangerous - these aliens are bound to react poorly to what has been done with their fallen kin. The life of a Reaper is never simple. The exodus fleet has old enemies that can’t be avoided for much longer. But those same enemies have a secret as well...and it just might save them all.

Avalon was thriving. The cold sleep colonists from Earth had settled on a verdant, livable world. The fast and cunning predators humans named “grendels” were under control, and the mainland outposts well established. Avalon’s new mainland hydroelectric power station was nearly complete, and when on-line would compensate for the nuclear power systems lost in the Grendel Wars. Humans would have power, and with power came the ability to make all the necessities for life. They would survive. They would not survive as a spacefaring people.

During a standard patrol, Thorn finds the scarred remains of a planet that has been reshaped by an unknown race. Massive machines were used to alter the landscape, and the only thing missing from the site is magic. Whoever is changing the galaxy, it isn’t the Nyctus.

Cursed, numb, rejected, scorned, wicked, sinister, dark, and twisted...this is Tex Campisi's legacy. He killed his father in cold blood and lost his soul right along with him. He craves war more than peace, and he's about to take his place in history as the youngest capo dei capi in the Cosa Nostra - that is until someone stops him, saves him from himself. But the only person able to do that is Tex's best friend's sister, Mo Abandonato, and she just ripped his heart out and asked him to hold it in his hands while she put bullets through it.

A year ago, local philanthropist and millionaire Nathan Lyon died a natural death in his sprawling mansion, a 150,000-square-foot converted mill, surrounded by his loving, attentive family. Or so it seemed at the time. Now Joe Gunther and his Vermont Bureau of Investigation team has discovered that almost nothing about that story was true. Nathan Lyon was actually Nick Bianchi from Providence, Rhode Island. His money came from Mafia-tainted sources. And his family now seems to be dying themselves, and their deaths are now revealed to be murders.

When a reclusive market gardener's death proves to stem from a 20-year-old bullet wound, Lieutenant Joe Gunther is presented with a very cold homicide to solve. But who was the victim exactly? A deeply private man eking out an ascetic existence from a hardscrabble mountain field, Abraham Fuller was virtually unknown to his neighbors, in the manner of someone pursuing more than mere solitude. The discovery of a bag full of unmarked bills and a body buried in the garden patch suggests that Fuller had motives beyond misanthropy.

The Fosk-ha spent a thousand years traveling to Earth. Violent, world-subjugating void travelers, they’ve terrorized and enslaved civilizations across the galaxy for countless eons. Humanity doesn’t stand a chance...or do they? A truck driver with a history of illegal street racing, a cop unwilling to back down from bullies and terrorists, and a game designer who’s learning to put theory into action; an unlikely crew to save the world, but somebody has to fight back.

David Osage must rescue the mysterious young Navigator - she’s the key to sending the Fosk-ha away forever. But he has to keep his sister from turning into a monster, even though they need that monster to fight the enemy. Although uneasy, Earth’s fighters must form an alliance with an alien overlord who has an agenda of his own. Can they choose the winning side, and if they do, can they live with it? The Fosk-ha have never lost a war, but the battle for Earth will be like nothing human or alien has ever seen.

When they meet in the 1930s, Doris and Tup’s love is immediate. They marry quickly and Doris commits to the only life Tup ever wanted: working the Senter family farm. Soon their first child, Sonny, is born and Doris and Tup understand they are blessed. More children arrive - precocious, large-hearted Dodie and quiet, devoted Beston - but Doris and Tup take nothing for granted. When an unimaginable tragedy turns the family of five into a family of four, everything the Senters held faith in is shattered.

In Archer Mayor’s intriguing new Vermont-based mystery, The Orphan’s Guilt, a straightforward traffic stop snowballs into a homicide investigation after Joe Gunther and his fellow investigators peel back layer upon layer of history and personal heartbreak to learn a decades-old hidden truth.

In rural, impoverished Burgoyne County, New York, a pattern of strange deaths begins to emerge: Adolescent boys and girls are found murdered, their corpses left hanging in gruesome, ritualistic fashion. Senior law enforcement officials are quick to blame a serial killer, but their efforts to apprehend this criminal are peculiarly ineffective.

When the body of a fast-living young stockbroker is found in a shallow grave, suspicion first falls on a cuckolded policeman. Lieutenant Joe Gunther investigates the increasingly bizarre details of the crime, but he's too far behind events to prevent a second murder. Indeed, whoever is responsible always seems to be a few steps ahead, as if there's a leak in the police force. Sweltering August heat does nothing to calm the increasingly agitated town selectmen, who demand results.

Halek Cain and his crew jump into one slip tunnel after another to escape a psychopath with an armada of deadly warships. Every system is a trap; every encounter a potential battle. When Cain and his friends receive a distress call from the Bold Freedom, innocent lives will hang on their every decision. And Cain still has debts that need to be paid. People who helped him off the exploding prison station are going to die horribly if he doesn’t pull of the impossible. But they don’t call him the Last Reaper for nothing.

There is one thing Halek Cain never does: leave a friend behind. There's no way he’s abandoning an entire unit. His newest allies, the JFT Destroyers, are cornered in a star system already ravaged by war. Problem is, Halek Cain has barely survived his own clash with Scheid’s forces. When everyone in the battered Maglan Fleet has given up on the Destroyers, Cain does what he does best—goes full Reaper Renegade to save their collective backsides.

In all his years as a professional diver, Will Sturman has never encountered a killing machine more ferocious than the great white shark or as deadly as the piranha. Now, off the coast of California, something is rising from the deep - and multiplying. It is voracious, unstoppable, and migrating north, an ungodly life-form trailed by a gruesome wake of corpses. With the help of the brilliant and beautiful oceanographer Valerie Martell, Will finds himself in a race against time to stop the slaughter by a predator capable of devastating the world’s oceans.

Joe Gunther and his team - the Vermont Bureau of Investigation (VBI) - are usually called in on major cases by local Vermont enforcement whenever they need expertise and backup. But after the state is devastated by Hurricane Irene, the police from one end of the state are taxed to their limits, leaving Joe Gunther involved in an odd and seemingly unrelated series of cases. In the wake of the hurricane, a seventeen-year-old gravesite is exposed, revealing a coffin that had been filled with rocks instead of the expected remains.

When the body of a young woman is found near a trail at a popular ski mountain, the case falls to Joe Gunther and his team at the Vermont Bureau of Investigation (VBI). They quickly have a suspect, Mick Durocher, and a confession, but not everyone on the team is convinced. Despite Mick’s ready admission, investigators quickly sense there might be more going on than is immediately apparent.

A 40-year-old skeleton is found encased in a concrete slab at a recently decommissioned nuclear energy site. It becomes a case for the Vermont Bureau of Investigation (VBI) and its leader, Joe Gunther, since they have the resources and the ability to investigate an old, very cold, missing persons case that has now been reclassified as murder. The victim was Hank Mitchell, and Gunther must chase down old rumors and speculations.