Axel Blackwell

This is Book 2 in the Detective McDaniel Thriller series.The series is best read in order. Please consider reading Book 1, Hold Back the Night, before enjoying The Easy Way Out.Still reeling from his encounter with a depraved child killer and a professional hitman on the city's waterfront, Homicide Detective Darren McDaniel is thrown back into the fray. A headless corpse washes up in a secluded cove near the industrial district. The body shows signs of extreme trauma - torture - prior to being tossed into the sea. With no head, and no useable fingerprints to work with, McDaniel's first challenge is to identify the remains. But when he begins searching for missing persons, a disturbing pattern emerges. Multiple subjects matching the victim have disappeared over the past few years. Just as the investigation is beginning to break, McDaniel is blindsided by a disappearance much closer to his heart. His sister, June, the one remaining member of his birth-family, has vanished. She has been fighting a drug addiction for decades. McDaniel assumes it has taken her again. He knows from past experience, if he doesn't want to find her dead, he has to find her fast. McDaniel abandons the investigation, and his partner, Brent Vanderwyk, to search for June. His efforts fail and June's time is running out. McDaniel is forced to turn to the one person who might find her in time - the now-retired Detective Griggs. The grizzled old investigator has his own reasons to help, but he is intent on peeling his pound of flesh off McDaniel in return for his services. When their search resolves, McDaniel is left traumatized, wondering if some of the lost are better left unfound. He has no time to process these thoughts. Vanderwyk pulls him back into the investigation. The case that started with a headless corpse on the beach has spun out of control, expanding to include at least five men, dead or missing, and a sixth about to meet the same fate. All six are directly connected to a treacherously entangled trio - a petty drug-lord, a sheriff's detective, and a bombshell teenaged runaway.McDaniel and Vanderwyk finally begin to unravel the tangled mess of lies deception trickery and murder. But as soon as they understand what they are dealing with, it also becomes apparent that the body count is about to rise again. A discovery that plunges the two detectives into gunfights, car chases, and mayhem on the high seas, and a nail-biting conclusion that will leave you on the edge of your seat.

4:23 a.m. The phone rings. The officer on the other end says, "It's a bad one, Darren. Can you come?" Darren McDaniel has worked dozens of homicides in his years as a detective. It's a dark and gritty business, and he's prepared to handle whatever it throws at him. Or so he once believed.The pre-teen girl is dead, dressed in a white princess gown, lying on a bus stop bench. There's a steel chain clamped to her ankle. A cryptic message scrawled across the booth's dusty glass wall may be the only clue.As McDaniel plunges into the case, he isn't surprised to discover the girl had been held somewhere horrible before her death. But, his blood chills when the evidence shows she wasn't alone. Other children were with her. Are they still there? Can McDaniel save them in time?The detective races against the clock, but the closer he gets, the deadlier the chase becomes. Secrets this dark fight back. When those secrets turn their murderous attention on McDaniel's family, he faces an impossible decision - let the killer walk free or risk losing his own daughter.