E. C. Ayres

Private investigator Tony Lowell travels west to answer an urgent plea from his daughter Ariel. A good friend of Ariel's, a Hispanic woman from Santa Fe, has disappeared and all indications point to foul play. Tony reluctantly agrees to go to Santa Fe to track down the missing woman. Assisted by his old acquaintance P.I. Joshua Croft, and, at Ariel's insistence, a New Age mystic, Lowell soon finds himself in over his head in a situation involving deeply divided cultures, traditions, and a general western mistrust of outsiders.Stubbornly pressing forward, Lowell discovers that the missing woman, Alicia Sandoval, was once married to a violent felon who has continued to stalk her. He then discovers something even more chilling: The felon, a locally popular man, was previously married to a woman who also disappeared, and whose remains have just been found in a high mountain cave.One of the last Sixties holdouts, Tony Lowell is a man with a conscience and a knack for getting embroiled in the most harrowing of situations.

The controversy over the authorship of Shakespeare is two centuries old, and the doubters were numerous: Mark Twain, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Walt Whitman, Henry James, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Dickens, Sigmond Freud, Charlie Chaplin, even Orson Welles questioned the veracity of Shakespeare as author. For starters, the man had no known education. He was raised by illiterate parents in a rural farm village, where the local school only had three grades. But even that much schooling is in doubt, because there is no evidence he was ever registered there (or anywhere) as a student. He signed his wedding certificate with an 'x'. His will included no books-not even a bible-and his gravestone epitaph is superstitious and illiterate.So, who was the true author? Once again, the evidence is extensive and conclusive and points in a single direction, to a man forced to live in exile sending plays from Italy to the Globe, where Shakespeare, whose three roles in the company (actor, producer and 'author') assured that he would be first to receive anything, then he simply stamped his name on them. Four centuries of grave injustice cannot easily be overcome. But this is a start...

San Francisco based Investigative reporter Jake Fleming has a problem: Desmond Lewis, a Professor of English Literature and an old friend of his from London has vanished, en-route to a talk at the University of California in Berkeley about a new book promising shocking revelations. He never arrives. When a rented car is found parked on the Golden Gate Bridge with Lewis's travel bag in the trunk, the police deem it a suicide. Jake doesn't believe that for a minute, and convinces his newspaper, The San Francisco Tribune, to sponsor a trip to London to investigate. When Jake arrives, he discovers Lewis's office and apartment have both been ransacked. Any evidence of a new book is gone: no manuscripts, no flash drives, nothing. The only remaining clue is a list of brief words or abbreviations. Their meaning escapes him, but it's all he has.

When Timothy Cross, a recent young college graduate and environmental activist working for the government, is found murdered in an alligator pond, Florida private eye Tony Lowell and his friend, police detective Lena Bedrosian, search for a cold-blooded killer.Lowell doesn't hesitate to join the fray, for the victim was the nephew of Ernie Larson, one of Lowell's oldest friends. As Lowell begins investigating, his array of suspects includes a baseball fanatic, a single mother, and her dangerously violent boyfriend. Soon he finds himself pitted against powerful industry types, as well as black advocacy groups concerned about jobs and backwoods racists who resent meddlers. The stakes are raised even further, however, when he discovers that the very safety of Florida's diminishing water supply is at stake. Lowell is determined to find the killer, but he's got to save his own skin while he's at it.

Winner of the 1992 Best First Private Eye NovelAnthony Lowell carries neither gun nor badge, doesn't own a briefcase, and prefers sandals to suits. A dropout from a once-stellar career as a news photographer, a retired photographer now restoring boats, he's also a freelance, licensed private eye who's the best detective on the Gulf Coast of Florida. In spite of his pacifist nature, Lowell isn't afraid to venture where he's not wanted-in this case directly into the path of a raging political hurricane.Maureen Fitzgerald, Lowell's latest client, is murdered right in front of him, before she can even finish telling him about her problem. When the police arrive, Detective Lena Bedrosian is disgusted to find Lowell at the scene since he represents everything she detests. The hard-working, perfectly groomed, by-the-book officer hopes to be rid of Lowell, but the case throws them together.When Maureen's murder begins to cast a shadow of doubt on a Florida judge aiming to move up the political ladder, the situation develops a whole new dimension. Taking on the judge and his chief Senate sponsor in a power struggle that doesn't flinch at murder, Lowell and Lena light a fuse that will burn its way clear north to Washington D.C.