Three Shirt Deal: A Shane Scully Novel (Shane Scully Novels)
by Stephen J. Cannell
from St. Martin's Press
Following the success of his bestselling novel White Sister, Stephen J. Cannell's latest blockbuster has Detective Shane Scully fighting to save a man railroaded for murder, while his wife, Alexa, has become a total stranger to him
A small-time crook is doing life in California's notoriously brutal Corcoran State Prison for the murder of his mother. He admitted to the crime, but now he claims his confession was coerced by the cops. A beautiful Internal Affairs detective, Secada "Scout" Llevar, asks Shane to help investigate, and he agrees after learning the original homicide detective was Brian Devine, a ruthless cop with whom Scully has a bad history.
What begins as a routine review quickly turns into something much more deadly. The case is abruptly shut down by an LAPD deputy chief, and Shane begins to suspect that for unknown reasons the prisoner really may have been framed by the police. But some things, once started, cannot be stopped, and the investigation spirals dangerously out of control, implicating a violent Hispanic gang, a millionaire power broker, and the front-runner in the Los Angeles mayoral race.
Meanwhile, Shane and Alexa struggle to save their marriage, which has come perilously close to disintegration since Alexa's near-fatal shooting in White Sister-just as Shane finds himself attracted to his new partner. Could the answer to their marital troubles be tied to the case he's investigating? In Cannell's latest heart-pounding thriller, Shane is tried in ways he has never been, risking his family, his job, and his life.
White Sister (A Shane Scully Novel)
by Stephen J. Cannell
from St. Martin's Paperbacks
Leaving L.A.’s Parker Center, Shane Scully and his wife, Alexa, agree to meet at home…but Alexa never arrives. Then Shane’s called to a crime scene on Mulholland Drive, where the victim, an apparent gang member, has been executed—and left in Alexa’s car. Her gun is the likely murder weapon.
THE OTHER Is his Nemesis.
As Shane desperately tries to find Alexa, his leads point to a feud between two gangsta-rap record companies, both heavily manned by Crips and Bloods. At the center of this war is a ruthless, beautiful Lady Macbeth-like white woman raised in Compton. Married to a multi-millionaire rap mogul, she is known as the White Sister.
It’s his worst nightmare come true…
Shane is no stranger to big trouble, but he’s never before been smeared as a “racist cop” or thrown in jail while there’s a hit out on him. Much worse is the unknown fate of Alexa, and the fact that in the mysterious White Sister—who holds the clue to a sinister conspiracy—he may have met his match.
The Devil's Workshop: A Novel
by Stephen J. Cannell
from HarperTorch
They told USC grad student Stacy Richardson that the death of her noted microbiologist husband was suicide, but nothing will convince her of that. Now only her own death will keep her from the truth...
They told "Lucky" Cunningham he was doing his patriotic duty, but not about the terrible plague he was bringing home with him from the war. Now, with nothing more in his life to lose, he's riding the rails across America--straight into the heart of a nightmare too horrifying to contemplate...
White supremacist Reverand Fannon Kincaid told his hobo acolytes that one day their racial "enemies" would perish. Now he holds in his possession the unthinkable means to an unspeakable end...
The Devil's Workshop
Cold Hit (A Shane Scully Novel)
by Stephen J. Cannell
from St. Martin's Paperbacks
Shane Scully has found his footing while his partner is going down in flames and a serial murderer rattles L.A.. Each corpse has been mysteriously defiled. Then, in the middle of the hunt, Scully gets an idea that may cost him his life.
AND COLD, HARD TRUTHS...
Scully suspects that someone with inside information has neatly “hidden” one murder inside this messy serial killer case. His copycat theory ignites a crossfire between LAPD and the Feds.
IS A WHITE-HOT CASE OF MURDER.
Now Scully knows he has a ten-year-old cop-killing to clear, while two street-smart detectives lead him into a secret world of international espionage and a powerful counter-terrorism chief from the top of the U.S. government warns him away. To do his job, Scully must risk everything—unraveling the mystery of a Cold War act of betrayal, a brutal street crime, and a killer just waiting to hit again...
“As the case spirals outward from local crime to international espionage dating back to the 1980s, the action rarely lets up. When it does, we’re reintroduced to the back story that is one of the pleasures of reading the Scully series.”—Los Angeles Times
The Tin Collectors: A Novel (Shane Scully Novels)
by Stephen J. Cannell
from St. Martin's Paperbacks
Stephen J. Cannell has written and produced enough TV cop shows to give him plenty of inside know-how about the LAPD, and recent events in OJ-land make the plot of The Tin Collectors--conspiracy, corruption, and murder by the boys in blue--more than credible. The tin collectors are the internal affairs cops, and they're out to make police sergeant Shane Scully the fall guy after he kills his former partner, Ray Molnar, in the midst of a domestic dispute that was just a click away from ending in the murder of Ray's wife. Not so coincidentally, she was once Shane's lover, a fact the tin collectors seize upon as evidence that Scully wanted the highly regarded Molar dead. As the wrongfully accused but redoubtable cop fights to clear his name, he discovers Ray's secret life: his other wife, his luxurious Lake Arrowhead home, and the ladder of corruption that reaches all the way to the top in the City of Angels. It should come as no surprise that this has TV-treatment written all over it. Read it now before it comes to a small screen near you, as it surely will. And applaud Cannell's growing ability to flesh out his characters with enough subtext and complexity to make a prime-time series starring Shane a strong possibility. --Jane Adams
Inside the department, they're called Tin Collectors: Internal Affairs Agents, the police of the police. If they catch you breaking the rules, they'll come after your badge. If they want you badly enough, they'll collect more than just your tin.
LAPD Detective Shane Scully is startled awake in the middle of the night by a call from his ex-partner's wife, who is being beaten by her abusive husband. Racing to their house to stop the fight, Scully ends up killing his ex-partner, a cop who is beloved within the department. Suddenly, Scully finds himself an outcast, shunned by his fellow cops who intend to exact vengeance no matter what the cost. Internal Affairs zeroes in on the "renegade" cop with their sharpest young prosecutor, the ice queen Alexa Hamilton, who has her own reasons for taking revenge on Scully.
Desperate to save his career, Scully starts kicking over rocks within the LAPD. What he uncovers is pure evil: a conspiracy going to the very top that ultimately threatens not just his own life but that of a young teenage boy, Chooch, entrusted to Scully's care by his mother - Sandy Sandoval. Known as the Black Widow, Sandy is a beautiful and courageous woman who also happens to be the LAPD's most important undercover informant, and Scully will do anything to keep her son safe. Stephen J. Cannell combines mystery and violence, loyalty and passion in a tale with an ending as unpredictable as LA itself.
Inside the department, they're called Tin Collectors: Internal Affairs Agents, the police of the police. If they catch you breaking rules, they'll come after your badge. If they want it enough, chances are they'll get it. But who polices them? When LAPD Sergeant Shane Scully rushes to the aid of his ex-partner's battered wife, he doesn't expect he'll need to employ lethal force. But when the ensuing altercation becomes ugly, Scully finds himself with no time to think and no option save the unthinkable. Now, with one cop--one of the mayor's bodyguards, a friend--dead at his hands, Shane becomes prey for the Tin Collectors. After they move him to another assignment, Shane soon realizes they're trying to move him out of the picture altogether. When a crooked cadre of Internal Affairs agents try making him fall-guy for a web of corruption that extends to the highest levels of the LAPD, Shane Scully has no choice but to fight back . . .
Final Victim
by Stephen J. Cannell
from Avon
A genius, hairless, seven-foot-tall psychopath, Leonard Land is many people wired into the cyber-subculture of Satanism and Death Metal. He is smart and cunning. He is quick, brutal and deadly. And he is everywhere. A renegade U.S. customs agent, a brilliant and beautiful forensic phychologist and a streetwise convict master hacker are on the trail of the maniac who is methodically slaughtering innocent women -- a hunt that is leading a trio of unlikely heroes across an imperiled nation...and deep into the darkest corridors of cyberspace. But there is no system the maniac cannot infiltrate, no secrets he cannot access. He knows he is being hunted...and by whom. And he's determined to strike first -- in ways too terrible to anticipate.
Runaway Heart: A Novel
by Stephen J. Cannell
from St. Martin's Paperbacks
Behind the impenetrable walls of a black-op government laboratory a top-secret weapon is being developed-a genetically engineered animal with superhuman strength and speed. It thinks. It obeys. It kills without conscience.
And The Danger Is Real...
Lost-cause attorney Herman Strockmire and his daughter Susan are passionate advocates against corporate Goliaths. When one of their employees is literally torn limb from limb by one of the government's experimental prototypes, Herman knows he is onto something big.
Survival Is Not An Option.
Hired to dig deeper into the employee's death, jaded PI Jack Wirta is a man with little left to lose. Armed with nothing more than determination, Herman, Susan, and Jack plunge headlong into harm's way, stumbling upon a nightmare beyond all imagining.
Hollywood Tough (Shane Scully Novels)
by Stephen J. Cannell
from St. Martin's Paperbacks
Against his wife's wishes, Shane begins to look into this heavy-hitter's past. At the same time, he becomes aware of a high-profile wiseguy's attempt to control Hollywood's unions. He initiates an elaborate and expensive sting operation, actually setting up a phony production company to produce a bogus movie at LAPD expense. The plan is to draw the starstruck wiseguy into revealing his real purpose for coming to L.A. But before long the overbudgeted movie is rocketing into production. Tough, streetwise Scully, who thought he'd seen just about everything, is astounded by the distorted egos and total insanity of the movie business, and while he struggles to keep his sting operation from spinning wildly out of control, he and Alexa find themselves and Shane's teenaged son, Chooch, involved in something much bigger than they had ever imagined, something that puts all their lives on the line.
The next high-octane, high-suspense, white knuckle police thriller from the master of high-adrenaline drama who brought you THE PLAN, THE FINAL VICTIM, and KING CON.
Vertical Coffin: A Shane Scully Novel (Shane Scully Novels)
by Stephen J. Cannell
from St. Martin's Paperbacks
First, a sheriff's deputy, a friend of Shane's, is gunned down while serving a routine search warrant. His fellow deputies blame the incident on the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, whom they angrily accuse of having failed to warn them that the suspect had a huge arsenal of illegal weapons in his house.
Soon thereafter, a member of the ATF Situation Response Team is shot to death, followed by the sniper murder of the Sheriff's Special Enforcement Bureau. At the request of the Mayor, LAPD, as an uninvolved and unbiased agency, assigns Shane Scully to investigate.
He is given an impossible deadline to find a solution before these two elite and deadly SWAT Teams kill each other off amid a hurricane of horrible publicity. Shane pursues his investigation in a direction that neither his chief nor his wife agrees with, and succeeds in putting himself, his loved ones, and his career in terrible jeopardy before he finally discovers the shocking and deadly truth.
The Viking Funeral: A Shane Scully Novel (Shane Scully Novels)
by Stephen J. Cannell
from St. Martin's Paperbacks
Stephen J. Cannell has taken to heart Raymond Chandler's remark about writing crime fiction. "When in doubt," Chandler advised, "have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand." There are so many bullets flying in The Viking Funeral that readers might be forgiven for missing this author's subtler efforts to fill out the dimensions of his series protagonist, LAPD Detective Shane Scully, introduced in 2001's The Tin Collectors.
Nobody believes Scully when he says he's just seen Jody Dean (his boyhood buddy and former colleague, who supposedly committed suicide two years before) speeding down a freeway. So the detective sets out to prove that Dean is alive, only to fall in with a crew of undercover cops who've slipped their leash and are now running a convoluted money-laundering scheme that ties U.S. tobacco shipments to South American drug barons.
Cannell, the creator of TV series such as The Rockford Filesand Wiseguy, certainly knows how to choreograph an action scene. But his dialogue is occasionally stilted, and The Viking Funeralloses some narrative steam during a lengthy tour of tropical hideouts. The story is at its best in illuminating the deceptive friendship between the emotionally scarred Scully and the arrogant Dean. Fans of The Tin Collectorsshouldn't be disappointed. --J. Kingston Pierce
The first clue to Dean's secret life--and suspicious death--is murder. The victim is Dean's former commanding officer. The connection taps into a corrupt, high-level conspiracy among L.A.'s finest that will put Shane and everyone he loves in harm's way. It will cut deep into the heart of betrayal and the meaning of friendship. And it will dare one cop already on the brink of madness to take on step further into darkness...
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