William Diehl

When Linda Balfour, a young mother, is found butchered in small-town southern Illinois, a coded inscription stamped in blood on the back of her head brands her mutilated body. For Chief Prosecutor Martin Vail, the Bloody insignia drags up memories he'd like to forget - memories of Bishop Rushman, slashed and dismembered ten years ago by an altar boy, Aaron Stampler. But if Stampler is locked away, he cannot have murdered Linda. With his career - and his life - on the line, Vail needs answers fast before the killer signs someone else's life away.

Battling against the clock, Vail and his team work to uncover what links the crimes to the churches, the felonies to the fascists. But what begins as a high-wire act of negotiation explodes into a personal nightmare for Vail, as his most sinister adversary rears his evil head.

Thomas Culhane leaves the Californian town of Eureka to make his way in the world. On his return, he becomes sheriff, and 20 years later he is about to run as state governor. But how is he connected to the mysterious death of a woman and how did she happen to have $100,000 in her bank account?

Eureka. It's what you say when you strike gold. It's also a town in California where the truth might be buried forever. In New York Times bestselling author William Diehl's thrilling, accomplished new novel, the seamy past of America's most glamorous state lies in this deceptively peaceful area, one hundred miles north of Los Angeles. It was the lawless place from which young, rugged Thomas Culhane escaped to fight World War I. Now it's a place where, two decades later, police detective Zeke Bannon investigates a death that seems a sad accident. Until you look a bit closer. The year is 1941. Verna Wilensky has been electrocuted in her bathtub, leaving a lower-middle-class life, no survivors, and a bank account packed with almost a hundred thousand dollars. Mysterious checks have consistently come to her for more than twenty years, most drawn from a bank in San Pietro, a town once known as Eureka. Eureka was a town that used to be a bootlegger's paradise and a gangster's dream. Now it is the rebuilt metropolis where Sheriff Thomas Culhane is launching a bid to be the golden state's next governor. But something just might threaten his ambitions. As Bannon digs deeper into Wilensky's demise, he unearths a decades-old secret that starts in a shootout, builds to a bloodbath, and could end up within the upper echelons of California's elite, forever changing the destiny of a state. Rich in historical detail, complex in its connection between past and present, and filled with the nonstop action that are the hallmarks of this modern master, Eureka is an epic achievement of storytelling and suspense-William Diehl's most extraordinary novel yet.

Martin Vail, Chicago's most brilliant lawyer, has been set up by his enemies to defend a case he cannot win. Young Aaron Stampler was caught red-handed after a murder that had the city reeling. In a desperate gamble for justice, Vail must reach deep into the recesses of a killer's mind, to flush out a monster of infinite cunning and evil.