A Jake Curtis / Vanessa Malone Mystery Series

Vanessa, along with her husband Jake a D.C. private investigator, while on a tour of the about to be demolished Primrose Hotel, stumble on a skeleton with a bullet hole in the center of his forehead. The curious thing about the skeleton is it is laying in the dust behind the bar in a long abandoned speakeasy in which no one has set foot in since prohibition ended in 1933. The speakeasy is located in the hotel's unknown, undocumented sub-basement and was only recently rediscovered by the prep work for the demolition. Jake and Vanessa's natural curiosity and sense of right and wrong demands they find out who the skeleton was and who committed this murder. If they don't solve this murder, the killing goes unsolved. The town police don't have the time or the funds to investigate the old killing. They're going on the assumption everyone connected to the skeleton is already dead. Town police detective lieutenant, Tom Forsythe, convinced the town father to hire Jake and Vanessa as police officers, but without pay, to investigate the case and give them police authority in their investigation along with the power to make arrests. They start by talking with the tour guide, the elderly woman whose grandfather owned the hotel during prohibition. Their investigation leads them to a variety of people who knows of the hotel or worked there. Several people they talk with allude to the disappearance of a hotel maid just before prohibition ended. Every one thought she ran off with her lover until the woman's decomposing body is discovered in the woods a year later. Post mortem examination reveals the woman was strangled, and pregnant. Now Jake and Vanessa have another murder on their hands which seems to be intertwined with the skeleton. They struggle along with the feeling they are fighting an uphill battle to solve this case as everyone has nothing to offer until they talk with Detective Forsythe's maternal grandmother, a woman who Jake and Vanessa feels knows something about the skeleton and is determined to take what she knows to her grave. During the course of the investigation, Jake is shot on the sidewalk in front of the police station and Vanessa draws her pistol from her purse and deftly handles the shooter. Jake's wound is not life threatening. The interviews continue until they talk with the gay, timid scullion worker who worked in the kitchen of the hotel during the time of the maid's disappearance. He loved the man everyone thought ran off with the maid. Jealousy makes the scullion worker follow the maid and her lover as they head into the woods for a romantic picnic. He watches the romantic picnic turn into a heated shouting match. He sees the shouting become physical between the two and watches his love interest kill the maid. He keeps the secret to himself until Jake and Vanessa pry it from him. Jake and Vanessa feel they will never solve the death of the skeleton until they make the detective's grandmother tell them what she refuses to tell. The detective's mother, Sara, who took her mother in when granny could no longer care for herself properly, stands over her mother like a snarling watch dog. Jake and Vanessa resort to drastic actions to get the grandmother to talk. How far will Jake and Vanessa go to get the old woman to talk? Will they resort to arresting the old woman as a uncooperative material witness? The detective feels his family places him in the middle as his mother wants him to protect his grandmother while the lawman in him wants to see the murder solved. Under three days of questioning, the grandmother relents and tells a fantastic story of her past and how it relates to the skeleton and who shot Jake. Who is the murderer and how does it relate to the detective?

Jake sitting in his office reading the paper as he usually does each morning, gets a call from a Marine Corps buddy, Gordon, a new member of the Old Order Amish Church. He called from the Lancaster County, Pennsylvania jail. He stands accused of murdering his fiancee's father. The two men fight in the barn after his fiancee's father slapped her. A gas fueled lantern is knocked over turning the barn into a blazing inferno. Gordon carries his future father-in-law from the burning barn, but he is dead when Gordon laid him on the ground. The autopsy reveals his future father-in-law was stabbed in the back several times. A witness, his fiancee's brother Caleb, tells the police Gordon killed his father. Jake and Vanessa undertake to prove Gordon innocent and Jake calls on some of his other Marine Corps buddies, which he calls his platoon, for help while Vanessa takes on Gordon's legal defense. The police believe they have an airtight case. Failure to prove Gordon's innocence could mean a life sentence in a Pennsylvania prison for Gordon, but Jake and Vanessa see more holes in the police's case than in a colander. While the Amish people have a great deal of respect for Gordon and believe in his innocence, Jake and Vanessa are stymied by the local Amish people's refusal to talk with the Englischers. The Amish call all non-Amish people Englischers. Gordon's friend, mentor and father figure, an elderly Amishman named Ephraim Glick, offers to smooth the way and the people now open up to Jake and Vanessa. Under intense questioning, Caleb recants his accusations and the charges against Gordon are dropped, but the real killer is still unknown. Jake and Vanessa believe that until the real killer is brought to justice, a cloud of doubt will hang over Gordon's head forever. Jake and Vanessa proved Gordon innocent, now they have to remove the cloud hanging his head. At first their course of action was to interview everyone they could to prove Gordon's innocence, now they have to reinterview everyone again to find the real killer. Their questions must be hitting close to someone's home as three Amish thugs attack Vanessa in the parking lot of a convenience store and put her in the hospital. Armed with the names and descriptions of the thugs, the police make the arrests. Jake threatens to kill the thugs who hurt his wife until his platoon corporal, Lyons, convinces him to stay out of the fray so Jake can maintain his innocence when the police come knocking. Lyons and a few of the old platoon soon convince the thugs to mend their ways or bleed out on the cell floor. Jake and Lyons' investigation runs into dead end after dead end. It looks as if whoever killed Gordon's father-in-law simply vanished in a puff of smoke. This case had Jake at his wits end. At dinner at Gordon's fiancee's mother's farmhouse, Jake admits he's stumped by this case and is ready to give up and go back to D.C. The sounds of fight between a man and a woman erupt outside the farmhouse. The neurotic woman who fancies herself in love with Caleb's older brother, David, and fancies he's in love with her enter into a screaming match with him. The woman, as tempers flare and the argument intensifies, goes into a psychotic episode, yelling, screaming and cursing David, his father-in-law and anyone else who tries to intervene. In the midst of her tirade, she screams she's the one who stabbed Gordon's father-in-law.

The beautiful, statuesque, blond Crystal O'Shea, the owner of a chain of high end dress stores, hires Jake Curtis and his wife Vanessa Malone to investigate the theft of valuable diamond necklace which turned up missing after a party she hosted at her swanky apartment. With only ten people attending the party; her four store managers, their dates, Crystal O'Shea and her head of store security Boyle Cavanaugh, and the two catering staff, the list of potential thieves is limited. By the process of elimination, the thief turns out to be one of her store managers who also moonlights as a part time hooker. Jake and Vanessa follow the trail of the stolen necklace from the thief to her pimp who either sold it or had it stolen, the pimp wasn't clear on the matter, by another bad guy who later sold it to the head of one of the major D.C. Crime families, a fierce and ruthless man who would stop at nothing to get what he wanted. Two automatic weapons carrying masked gunmen break into Crystal's apartment, kill two of her employees and seriously wounding her. Jake is bound and determined to capture the shooters until they turn up dead, two nine mm bullets each in the back of the head. Jake's Marine Corps buddy and platoon corporal from the First Gulf War, Ben Lyons, who makes his living by means better left unsaid, has a contact in the other major D.C. Crime family who casually mentioned a valuable necklace up for sale. A meet is arranged and Jake and Lyons buy back Crystal's necklace. Jake still wants justice for Crystal and her dead employees. He wants to find the killer's killers. Jake and Lyons' search leads him into treachery and counter treachery, the plots and counter plots of the city's warring underworld families. The dealings and double crosses of their sinister manipulations to gain control of the city and its potentially profitable vice trades. And finally evolving into a conflict between the two rival crime families culminating in a major confrontation the day before Christmas Eve in the Grand Rotunda of the Smithsonian Institution's Museum of Natural History.

Sixteen hours after winning her divorce from her cheating husband, Blanche Bickers was found, by her maid, naked in her bed and dead, with a raw bullet hole in the center of her forehead. With no eyewitnesses to the murder and only forensics evidence to go on, the police were baffled. No one saw anything. Jake Curtis, Private Investigator, and his partner and wife, attorney Vanessa Malone, are hired to defend the victim’s ex-husband, John Bickers for her murder. It was a simple job. All it took was good old fashioned legwork. A tour thorough the victim's BFF's, the BFF's husbands, assorted family members and other miscellaneous interlopers led down trails from dead end o more dead ends. No one knew anything. Jake Curtis and Vanessa Malone verified their client's alibi and forced the police to release him and look elsewhere for the murderer. Jake and Vanessa worked on the premise there were only two people in Blanche's bedroom when she died; Blanche and her murderer. Based on the the victim's first ex-husband, Marshall Evans', admission that he'd been with the victim only hours before the murder, the police arrested him. Barbara Evans, Marshall’s current wife hired Vanessa to defend her husband against the murder charge. Jake and Vanessa believed him to be innocent. Was it because of Blanche's string of lovers that got her murdered or was it only one of her many lovers? Questions pile up but answers still remain allusive. Our diligent private investigating team persevere deeper and deeper into the labyrinth of this case in search of the murderer. Repeated interviews with family members and BFF's revealed a Southern Belle who said something about the murder to Jake and Vanessa that no one outside of law enforcement knew. The BFF steadfastly refused to divulge who told her the one thing she shouldn't of known caused Jake and Vanessa to reinterview the BFF time after time, each time more forceful and the last. The threat of turning the BFF over to the police as the actual killer convinced her it was in her beat interests to reveal who told her the unreleased fact. What she told Jake and Vanessa led to the killer and to the surprising reason why the murderer killed Blanche Bickers.

How do you prove that something did not happen? How do you prove a negative? This is the conundrum facing Jake Curtis and Vanessa Malone as they tried to prove their beautiful client, Isabella Patrillo, didn't murder her ex-husband. Alberto Patrillo dropped dead of arsenic poisoning at his ex-wife's feet during a gala at the Italian Embassy in Washington, DC. Post mortem tests revealed Alberto had been poisoned over the two months before he died. The private investigator Isabella hired to look into the possibility of Alberto's unfaithfulness found out Alberto had not only one mistress, but that he had two mistresses. When the PI told Isabella about Alberto's cheating on her, she blocked him her mind and heart. She went to Reno, Nevada to obtain her divorce and returned back to DC three weeks before Alberto's death. DC police homicide Detective Lieutenant Robert Murdoch is a good cop with one of the highest conviction rates in he department. He is a sometime protagonist of Jake and Vanessa and a sometime antagonist depending on his mood at the time. Murdoch considered the wife, or in this case the ex-wife, the prime suspect in her ex's murder. Isabella maintained her innocence. Jake's Las Vegas PI friend and former Vegas cop, Linda Hampton, with whom he once had a brief relationship back before he met Vanessa discovered Isabella obtained her divorce three weeks before Alberto dropped dead and she didn't leave Nevada for the six weeks of her residence in Reno and the four days she later spent playing tourist 0in Las Vegas. Vanessa knows of Jake's friendship with Linda, but not of their relationship, or at least he doesn't think she does. If Isabella didn't murder her ex, then who did? Did Alberto's daughter, Donatella, who stood to inherit her father's wealth, murder her father? Was it one of the two mistresses he promised to marry? Who dun it? Through interviews with Isabella's daughter and Isabella's closest friends, Jake and Vanessa determined Isabella didn't have the opportunity to administer the poison to Alberto during the day. It was Isabella's nights that proved to be more of a problem. Did Isabella meet with Alberto at night, and if so, did she poison him? Isabella's Jewish mother suggested that if Jake and Vanessa couldn't prove Isabella didn't meet Alberto at night, then prove Alberto didn't meet Isabella at night. Jake and Vanessa confronted Alberto's two mistresses. The ex-husband is not the only person murdered in this love rectangle. Tessa Lombardi, Alberto's fiancee with whom he lived when Isabella threw him out dropped dead from arsenic poisoning as Jake and Vanessa knocked on her door. Post mortem tests revealed Tessa died of the same poison that killed Alberto Patrillo. Jake and Vanessa's investigation led them to a pair of biker bars, a shootout, subterfuge by a waitress, culminating in the chase of an escaped murderer through a busy detective squad room.

A hundred pound Klieg light falls from a light bar thirty feet above a movie sound stage at a D.C. filming location, crushing a driver, Jerry Blackwell, to a gruesome, bloody and horrible death. The medical examiner first ruled the death was accidental. Jake Curtis and Vanessa Malone, private investigators who are now also paid consulting detectives to the D.C. Police, are hired by the widow to find out what exactly happened to cause her husband's death. Reinvestigation at the behest of the widow revealed the clamp holding the light to the light bar shows signs of being cut almost completely through. The answer lies somewhere between D.C. and Hollywood. Jake and Vanessa's natural curiosity and sense of right and wrong demands they find out if the tragedy was a freak accident as the medical examiner originally stated, or a cold blooded murder. Their investigation, along with police detective Bob Murdoch take them through the maze of L.A. police corruption, theft of official police arrest reports, lying, blackmailing the beneficiaries of the stolen records into doing what the mastermind wanted and other strong arm tactics. Everybody at the unfinished filming still in D.C. have been eliminated as suspects. This means the killer is back in L.A. As the filming ended and the L.A. cast and crew head back to L.A., Murdoch convinces the D.C. Chief of Detectives the crime will go unsolved unless somebody from D.C. goes to Hollywood. Murdoch is assigned to go and takes Jake and Vanessa with him. Two former D.C. detectives, now detectives with the LAPD homicide unit, are assigned to provide the D.C. visitors an L.A. police presence while investigating in their city. They travel around L.A. collecting bits and pieces of information from a lot of people who worked at the D.C. shoot but, left the filming before the investigation starter in earnest. Through out their talks, no suspect popped to the forefront. They talk with a man on parole who left California without letting his PO know. A script girl who was above being blackmailed and went to school with the studio owner's daughter, Valarie. She introduced Jake Vanessa and Murdoch to Valarie. Valarie is married to the picture's executive producer. They talk with a young recent graduate from UCLA Film school on his first job doing grunt work at the D.C. shoot. This recent graduate provided a general body size description of a person he saw late at night making cutting motions up near the light that fell. He couldn't get a good look at the man's face or clothing in the dark. Each person they talked to, led them closer to the killer until they met Danica Winters, a makeup artist whose arrest report was stolen. The mastermind coerced her into an unwanted sexual relationship until coming up with another plan for her. The mastermind forced her to cut the clamp. If she didn't her arrest report would mysteriously reappear and she would be rearrested and sent to prison. Danica didn't ask why the mastermind wanted the clamp cut and the mastermind didn't confide the reason to her. Who was the mastermind and why was the clamp cut? Vanessa added another career to her resume. What career did she add?

Death in the Gilded Cage is the story of two women. One a ruthless, greedy, determined and known only through her anonymous diary entries. The other Marjorie Withers, the middle aged hostess at The Gilded Cage nightclub. The Diarist teams up with an unnamed partner to achieve their prize, The Gilded Cage nightclub and it's illegal poker games upstairs. No deed is too crazed for the partners to contemplate in their pursuit. Marjorie calls on the PI firm of Jake Curtis and Vanessa Malone as she feels a co-worker and former lover is out to kill her. When the co-worker ends up dead, the PIs drop the case. The Diarist writes almost daily in her diary. She writes she stole an SUV and used it to kill the co-worker clearing the first obstacle blocking their path. The Diarist writes, she murdered the club's floor manager next. She writes her next kill was a total stranger to throw the police off. The Diarist and her partner break into Marjorie's room, attack her, shooting her in the leg, again to throw off the police. The partner takes the gun away to dispose of it only to have it turn up later. Jake and Vanessa, how hired as police consultants, are as baffled as DC police Lieutenant Bob Murdoch. When Marjorie is released from the hospital with a cast on her leg, she turns to Peter Palumbo, The Gilded Cage club owner, for help. Marjorie falls in love with him, even though he is married and they begin a trist. The diarist's next victim is Tim Henderson, the assistant bartender at the club. Three days later the diarists shoots and wounds Henderson's widow and kills Palumbo's wife at Henderson's gravesite. As the murders go on, The Diarist is dubbed The Gilded Cage Killer, and the diary entries of her killings become more and more sexually satisfying as the murders and assaults continue. The Diarist begins to look forward to the next kill more for the sexual satisfaction derived, than growing closer to achieving their prize. The diarist's next kills a club waitress by an overdose of hot heroin and then stabs Palumbo's secretary, Janie Sullivan, in a staged mugging. Thinking the best way to get the police off their backs, the Diarist and her partner plan to kill the police lieutenant and Jake Curtis and Vanessa Malone in a cross fire, but the partner never shows. The Diarist does the shooting alone. Vanessa is shot three times and seriously wounded. Her life balances on the skills of the best surgeon in the hospital, sixteen hours of surgery and a lot of Jake's prayers. Jake is shot twice, in the shoulder and near his hip. Murdoch receives a flesh wound on his upper arm and both are treated and released. After the shooting, The Diarist runs into the nearby subway station and tosses the gun before hopping on a train and escaping. The Diarist, in her writings, dwells on the eroticism of her kill, for she is sure they are dead. She feels erotic sensations as she imagines seeing the victim's skin depress as the bullet, needle point or knife blade pushes against the skin just before piercing through. She needs to kill. She needs the feel the pleasures derived from her kills. The last four murders are not about achieving the prize but about The Diarist achieving her own satisfaction. She kills the club's head bartender, an unsatisfying lover, so she can feel the friction of the knife blade cut across his throat; Michael Penner, when she finds out he spent the night with the new redheaded waitress the night after he spent the night with The Diarist. Renting an abandoned warehouse in a slum neighborhood under an assumed name, the Diarist captures and tortures the red headed waitress to death for spending the night with her man. The Diarist's final kill is the realtor who can identify her as the woman who rented the warehouse. What about the prize? Do they get the prize? Death in the Gilded Cage ends with a twist and a shocking conclusion you won't believe even after you finished reading it.