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.
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.
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
Three Shirt Deal: A Shane Scully Novel (Shane Scully Novels)
by Stephen J. Cannell
from St. Martin's Press
Truit Hickman is a small-time crook doing life in a California prison for the murder of his mother. But now Hickman is claiming that his confession was coerced. Enter Secada “Scout” Llevar, the gorgeous Internal Affairs detective who partners up with LAPD detective Shane Scully to investigate the claim.
What began as a routine review is turning into something far more complicated—and deadly. Because some things, once started, cannot be stopped… Now the Hickman case is spiraling out of control as gang violence, rivaling cops, political heavyweights, and Shane’s dangerous attraction to Scout threaten to put an abrupt end to the investigation. And their lives.
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
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.
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.
Hollywood Tough (Shane Scully Novels)
by Stephen J. Cannell
from St. Martin's Paperbacks
Riding the Snake
by Stephen J. Cannell
from William Morrow
Stephen Cannell's extensive experience as a television writer (he's most famous for creating and scripting The Rockford Files) is readily apparent in Riding the Snake. He's done his homework, so his movement among the worlds of the aging playboy Wheeler Cassidy, the Hong Kong Triad, and the Asian Crimes Task Force of the LAPD is natural and well executed. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Cannell's book, though, is his depiction of Tanisha Williams, a young and gifted African American detective on the LAPD. Tanisha is assigned to Asian Crimes to get her out of the way--she's refused the advances of her superior, and now she's been put under investigation. She eventually crosses paths with Cassidy who is jolted from his wastrel life of alcoholic binges and womanizing by the mysterious disappearance of his brother and the gruesome murder of his brother's secretary. Cassidy and Williams join together to investigate what appears to be a massive infiltration of the U.S. government by powerful leaders of Chinese organized crime; along the way they develop an unlikely romance. The novel blurs reality with fiction, talking about President Clinton's attempts to normalize relations with China and making connections between real campaign scandals and Cannell's fictional Chinese mobsters. While the metaphors are occasionally strained, Cannell is an old-style craftsman who knows how to tell a good story and keep his reader fully engaged until the final pages. --Patrick O'Kelley
Sweeping from the exclusive golf clubs of Brentwood to the depths of Hong Kong's mysterious walled city, Riding the Snake is a thriller torn straight from the headlines. It's set in a deadly Asian underworld where terrorism, international influence peddling, and illegal immigration converge into a single sinister web with a heartless Chinese crime lord at its center.
To prankster/L.A. playboy Wheeler Cassidy, things look a little bleak. His trust land is dwindling, his good looks are dissolving into the daiquiris, and his life has no direction -- until his golden-boy younger brother, a prominent lawyer and political power broker; is found mysteriously dead. Wheeler joins forces with the beautiful Tanisha Williams, an L.A. cop from South Central who's been parked on the Asian Crimes Task Force while Internal Affairs investigates her career. Together they embark on a dangerous quest for the truth -- against deadly odds.
Tentatively at first, then with growing confidence and passion, the two follow their leads into a labyrinth of violent intrigue and a multibillion-dollar Chinese criminal conspiracy that teaches to the top of the U.S. government. Soon they find themselves up against the most ruthless Triad leader, the Washington Establishment, and violent L.A. gangsters. As Riding the Snake races to a riveting climax in the sewers beneath Los Angeles International Airport, you can almost hear it ominously ticking down -- like the suitcase nuke that's set to incinerate a big chunk of Southern California.
+++
