Homicide by Hammer

Homicide by Hammer
Author: Barbara Barrett
Publisher: Barbara Barrett
Total Pages: 252
Release: 2022-08-30
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1948532484

Rowena Summerfield is so close to finishing the renovation of boyfriend Chuck’s wine bar, she can practically taste the champagne. But the project she’s doing with her daughter and partner in Nailed It Home Renos screeches to a halt when murder claims the brother of the wine consultant. Once again, the Shasta Police Department drafts Ro to return to her role as homicide detective and help her old partner Herc find the killer. But uncorking the mystery proves challenging given the small pool of suspects, most of them artists like the victim. Before Ro can sip success, she must also deal with a missing-persons case—her construction supervisor’s sister—and sort out her feelings for Chuck as their relationship warms up. Why would someone want to murder a loner whose career was just beginning to soar? And why would the benefactor who commissioned his new piece remain incognito? A palette of clues obscures the meaning of the murder, and Ro and her friends will have to strip away perplexing and dangerous layers to find the truth.

Hammers and Homicide

Hammers and Homicide
Author: Paula Charles
Publisher: Crooked Lane Books
Total Pages: 246
Release: 2024-01-16
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1639106006

Perfect for fans of Kate Carlisle and Victoria Gilbert, when a body is found in a hardware store, will Dawna Carpenter’s sleuthing measure up to find the killer? Recent sexagenarian widow Dawna Carpenter thought running her own hardware store after the death of her husband was hard enough. With her adult daughter, April, moving back into town, and Darlene, the annoying boutique owner next door to her shop poking around, Dawna has her hands full. But when she finds a dead man in the bathroom of her store, with a framing hammer by his side, she’s in way over her head. The victim, Warren Highcastle, was a land developer who was looking to purchase the old theater in town to build a new hotel. Dawna and April, worried about the implications of the crime scene at the hardware store, put themselves on the case. They soon learn that Warren had made quite a few enemies in his short amount of time in town. As the suspect list starts growing, so too do the threats against Dawna and April. Can Dawna and April nail the killer before they strike again?

Murderess on the Loose: The 1922 Hammer Wrath of Clara Phillips (A Historical True Crime Short)

Murderess on the Loose: The 1922 Hammer Wrath of Clara Phillips (A Historical True Crime Short)
Author: R. Barri Flowers
Publisher: R. Barri Flowers
Total Pages: 36
Release:
Genre: True Crime
ISBN:

From award-winning criminologist R. Barri Flowers and bestselling author of Murder During the Chicago World’s Fair, Murder of the Doctor’s Wife, Murder at the Pencil Factory, and The Pickaxe Killers, comes the gripping historical true crime short, Murderess on the Loose: The 1922 Hammer Wrath of Clara Phillips. On the evening of Wednesday, July 12, 1922, Los Angeles, California, was the scene of a shocking and deadly assault. The victim was an attractive twenty-one-year-old widow named Alberta Meadows. Her death came as the result of a vicious hammer and boulder attack on a twisting dirt road at the bottom of a hill in the subdivision of Montecito Heights on the city’s northeast side. The violent act was perpetrated by a romantic rival named Clara Phillips, who lured the unsuspecting victim to the unlikely crime scene. The twenty-three-year-old murderesses’ actions were spurred by jealous rage as Mrs. Meadows was the mistress of Clara’s husband, Armour Phillips, an oil stock salesman who was three years her senior. The heinous crime was witnessed by Peggy Caffee, a friend, who was too frightened to lift a finger to stop the attack. Afterward, Clara and Peggy fled the murder scene in the victim’s brand-new Ford automobile. Surprisingly, the killer’s husband Armour came to her aide in ditching the vehicle and fleeing Los Angeles by train, before self-preservation kicked in and he reconsidered his own actions after the fact, alerting authorities as to her whereabouts, leading to an arrest. Clara Phillips was given the moniker, “Tiger Woman,” by the overzealous L.A. press of the day after a police detective on the case suggested that Alberta Meadows looked like “she had been mauled by a tiger.” But Clara didn’t go away quietly, proving to be not only a cold-hearted killer, but a fabricator and masterful escape artist before justice for the victim finally had a chance to be served in what proved to be one the 20th century’s most disturbing acts of homicidal violence. Included are bonus excerpts of R. Barri Flowers’ bestselling historical true crime book, The Dreadful Acts of Jack the Ripper and Other True Tales of Serial Murder and Prostitutes, and historical true crime shorts, The Pickaxe Killers, Murder at the Pencil Factory, Murder of the Doctor’s Wife, and Murder During the Chicago World’s Fair.

The Killing Man

The Killing Man
Author: Mickey Spillane
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 198
Release: 1990-11-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1101174625

Mike Hammer walks into his office to find his unconscious secretary on the floor, a brutally butchered corpse occupying his office chair, and a note from a murderer on his desk: “You die for killing me.” So begins a tough-as-nails tale of government assassins and renegade mobsters, told with the breakneck pacing and brutal impact of a freshly fired .45 bullet.

Mike Hammer: Masquerade for Murder

Mike Hammer: Masquerade for Murder
Author: Mickey Spillane
Publisher: Titan Books (US, CA)
Total Pages: 245
Release: 2020-03-17
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1785655574

The New York Times–bestselling author of Road to Perdition breathes new life into Mickey Spillane’s iconic character, Mike Hammer—the hard-boiled PI who paved the way for James Bond and 24’s Jack Bauer. A martial arts killer terrorizes Wall Street—and only tough-guy, rough-around-the-edges Mike Hammer can bring him to justice. After Mike Hammer witnesses Wall Street superstar Vincent Colby getting clipped by a speeding red Ferrari, the shaken victim’s stockbroker father hires Hammer to find the driver. But the toughest private eye of them all soon is caught up in a series of bizarre, seemingly unconnected slayings marked by a forbidden martial arts technique. What do a lovely redhead, a short-tempered bartender, an exotic call girl, a murdered police inspector and a movie stuntman have to do with a scheme that might have transformed young Colby into a psychological time bomb?

The Hanging

The Hanging
Author: Søren Hammer
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2013-01-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1408816016

On a cold Monday morning before school begins, two children make a gruesome discovery. Hanging from the roof of the school gymnasium are the bodies of five naked and heavily disfigured men. Detective Chief Superintendent Konrad Simonsen and his team from the Murder Squad in Copenhagen are called in to investigate this horrific case - the men hanging in a geometric pattern; the scene so closely resembling a public execution. When the identities of the five victims and the disturbing link between them is leaked to the press, the sinister motivation behind the killings quickly becomes apparent to the police. Up against a building internet campaign and even members of his own team, Simonsen finds that he must battle public opinion and vigilante groups in his mission to catch the killers.A nerve-wrenching look at justice and retribution, The Hanging is a spectacular crime tale straight from the heart of Scandinavia.

Blood Frenzy

Blood Frenzy
Author: Robert Scott
Publisher: Pinnacle Books
Total Pages: 317
Release: 2012-03-01
Genre: True Crime
ISBN: 0786031042

He Used A Claw Hammer. . . Frankie Cochran knew her boyfriend, David Gerard, was possessive, controlling, and prone to violent rages. When she tried to break up with him, Gerard threatened her with a hammer. One week later, he used it to club her in the head. Again. And again. Then he stabbed her in the throat--and left her for dead. . . And A Sharp Knife. . . Miraculously, Frankie survived--but cops began to suspect Gerard of other vicious crimes. One of his previous girlfriends had died in a house fire, along with her children and her mother. A local prostitute's brutalized body was found in a pool of blood. But it was the unsolved murder of another woman--repeatedly run over on a country road--that finally exposed Gerard as a rage-driven monster out of control. . . To Unleash His Rage Justice finally caught up with Gerard. Hounded by the tireless efforts of detectives and incriminated by DNA evidence as well as up-to-date forensics that matched the tire marks at a crime scene to Gerard's car, one of the Pacific Northwest's most dangerous killers was finally locked behind bars. With 16 pages of shocking photos!

Indecent Advances

Indecent Advances
Author: James Polchin
Publisher: Catapult
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2020-05-26
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1640093877

Edgar Award finalist, Best Fact Crime American Masters (PBS), “1 of 5 Essential Culture Reads” One of CrimeReads’ “Best True Crime Books of the Year” “A fast–paced, meticulously researched, thoroughly engaging (and often infuriating) look–see into the systematic criminalization of gay men and widespread condemnation of homosexuality post–World War I.” —Alexis Burling, San Francisco Chronicle Stories of murder have never been just about killers and victims. Instead, crime stories take the shape of their times and reflect cultural notions and prejudices. In this Edgar Award–finalist for Best Fact Crime, James Polchin recovers and recounts queer stories from the crime pages―often lurid and euphemistic―that reveal the hidden history of violence against gay men. But what was left unsaid in these crime pages provides insight into the figure of the queer man as both criminal and victim, offering readers tales of vice and violence that aligned gender and sexual deviance with tragic, gruesome endings. Victims were often reported as having made “indecent advances,” forcing the accused's hands in self–defense and reducing murder charges to manslaughter. As noted by Caleb Cain in The New Yorker review of Indecent Advances, “it’s impossible to understand gay life in twentieth–century America without reckoning with the dark stories. Gay men were unable to shake free of them until they figured out how to tell the stories themselves, in a new way.” Indecent Advances is the first book to fully investigate these stories of how queer men navigated a society that criminalized them and displayed little compassion for the violence they endured. Polchin shows, with masterful insight, how this discrimination was ultimately transformed by activists to help shape the burgeoning gay rights movement in the years leading up to Stonewall.

The Lake

The Lake
Author: Lotte Hammer
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 385
Release: 2017-04-20
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 140887069X

Everything comes with a price The chilling next instalment in the Konrad Simonsen series, perfect for fans of Johan Theorin and Yrsa Sigurðardóttir The skeleton of a young woman is discovered, tied to a stone, in a lake deep in the Danish countryside. The woman's identity is a mystery; no one matching her description has been reported missing... After months of fruitless investigation by the local police force, a media scandal brings the case to nationwide attention and is quickly handed over to Konrad Simonsen and his team from the Copenhagen Police force. It soon becomes clear that this unknown woman is the key to a sinister world of human trafficking, prostitution and violence. A world where everything comes with a price and no mistake goes unpunished.

Scrublands

Scrublands
Author: Chris Hammer
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 384
Release: 2019-01-08
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1501196766

In this searing, “indisputable page-turner” (Associated Press), a town’s dark secrets come to light in the aftermath of a young priest’s unthinkable last act—in the vein of The Dry and Where the Crawdads Sing. In Riversend, an isolated Australian community afflicted by an endless drought, a young priest does the unthinkable: he kills five parishioners before being taken down himself. A year later, journalist Martin Scarsden arrives in Riversend. His assignment: to report how the townspeople are coping as the anniversary of the tragedy approaches. But as Martin meets the locals and hears their version of events, he begins to realize that the accepted explanation—a theory established through an award-winning investigation by Martin’s own newspaper—may be wrong. Just as Martin believes he’s making headway, a shocking new crime rocks the town. As the national media flocks to the scene, Martin finds himself thrown into a whole new mystery. What was the real reason behind the priest’s shooting spree? And how does it connect to other deaths in the district, if at all? Martin struggles to uncover the town’s dark secrets, putting his job, his mental state, and his very life at risk. For fans of James Lee Burke, Jane Harper, and Robert Crais, Scrublands is “a gritty debut...sensitively rendered” (The New York Times Book Review) that marks Chris Hammer as a stunning new voice in crime fiction.