Mark L Dressler

Author, Essex Westbrook's wife, Svetlana leaves the 26th floor suite of their Manhattan residence to take her usual morning walk. Westbrook awakens and finds a note on the living room carpet by the front door. We have your wife. $100,000 will get her back. Instructions to follow.Westbrook thinks this letter is an April Fool's prank that Svetlana is playing on him because these are the same words the author penned is a previous novel. BUT THIS IS NO JOKE.Detective Lex Stall and her partner Gil Ramos start to investigate the kidnapping. After a frustrating search, in order to save Svetlana, Westbrook and the detectives agree to meet the abductors at Washington Square Park and are met with an unexpected event. It isn't long before this case turns into a homicide that Lex, Gil, and the FBI are determined to solve.

Lex Stall, Manhattan's tenacious female detective is on the hunt for a killer. Retired Metropolitan Museum of Art curator and artist, Fredrike Cambourd is murdered in his basement studio. Who would kill this seemingly harmless man? Jerry Davidson, the artist's friend is at the crime scene and his edginess doesn't sit well with the veteran detective, and she tags him a person of interest. Davidson, an art consultant, proves to be elusive, and suddenly disappears to London on a business trip. Lex continues her investigation and discovers that the man's alibi has a hole in it. She also learns Davidson is not the man he pretends to be. Upon his return to New York, Lex pursues her prey until an unforeseen event occurs and upends her investigation. Was she wrong about Davidson, or was he indeed Cambourd's killer?Either way, it was Fredrike Cambourd's dark secrets that led to his demise. Dying wasn't the worst thing that could have happened to him.