Cody Bonner, an identical twin, daughter of a major movie star, a teenage street kid in Los Angeles, a bank robber at nineteen, and a prison inmate at twenty. When she’s released after six years, she returns to L.A. with a purpose: to learn the truth about her sister Julie, who washed up on a Malibu beach a year earlier. The connection between the twins was so powerful that the day Julie died, Cody collapsed in the prison yard. Now that bond is driving her to find out what happened to her sister. Using bootleg skills she learned in prison, Cody begins to peel back the layers of mystery. Her search leads her to the darker alleys behind the dazzle of the film business and into the world of high-powered agents, high-priced call girls, and men with a taste for sexual violence.

FIRST BOOK IN THE MICHAEL CASSIDY SERIES

It’s New York City circa 1954. The McCarthy madness is in full swing, and Michael Cassidy is a detective who doesn’t like to follow orders that don’t make sense. He’s already thrown an abusive cop out a third story window when, in the course of an arrest, he crosses Roy Cohn, McCarthy’s right-hand-man. Cassidy’s father, a well-known Broadway producer, is an immigrant with a fierce love for America and a past that makes him vulnerable. Cassidy’s girlfriend has just left him, and loneliness makes him vulnerable. When a beautiful woman moves in next door and an investigation into the torture and murder of a dancer in the cast of his father’s play is pulled out from under him by the FBI, it becomes increasingly clear that Cassidy is knee-deep in something more than merely dangerous. Red scares, loyalty oaths, turf wars between the FBI and the nascent CIA; conservatives, communists, politicians and the military all vying for power; missing photographs and missing bodies… A 1950s thriller that is also a classic mean-streets noir detective story.

2ND BOOK OF THE MICHAEL CASSIDY SERIES

Michael Cassidy and “Night Work” return to New York City, but not before a side trip to one of the only other settings able to compete with ’50s Manhattan for that smoky, jazz-filled, neon-lit noir mood: Havana in the last, desperate days before Castro closed down the party. Michael Cassidy, the New York cop from the monied Upper East Side, has been tasked with returning a Cuban prisoner to Havana for trial. Then things get interesting: Cassidy spots his former lover, KGB agent Dylan McCue, in a Cuban prison and helps her escape. Slipping out of Cuba in the chaos following Castro’s takeover, Cassidy returns to New York and is assigned to the security detail for Fidel Castro’s visit to the U.S. At the same time, he is trying to solve the murder of a man found sitting on a chair at an entrance to Central Park with a bullet in his head. Why was he left on display? The answer may implicate some of his family’s friends who live in the monied towers that overlook the park.

3RD BOOK IN THE MICHAEL CASSIDY SERIES

1956 - New York City - Someone is threatening to kill Michael Cassidy. Not immediately, but at time to be announced. Late one night, a stateless driver of a Central Park horse carriage, follows a married couple, Karl and Magda Brandt, into Central Park. After a heated confrontation, Magda coolly sticks a hat pin into the back of the man’s neck and watches him die. At first, the authorities treat the death as a possible heart mugging. When a chemist throws himself out his hotel room window, his death is pegged as a suicide. As Cassidy looks deeper into the two cases, however, he begins to see a disturbing connection. The relationship between the Brandts and the deaths gradually emerges as Cassidy and his reporter lover, Rhonda Raskin, try to unravel a web of intrigue that has its roots in the end of World War II and involves the CIA and a government program growing out of the Cold War.