Alex McKnight war Polizist in Detroit, bis sein Partner erschossen und er selbst schwer verletzt wurde. Nun lebt er in der Einsamkeit von Paradise, einem idyllischen Fleckchen im Norden Michigans und vermietet Holzhütten an Touristen. Zwischen Fischern, Imbissbuden und seiner früheren großen Liebe verläuft sein Leben in geordneten Bahnen. Doch mitten im Winter finden sich in dieser Gegend Spuren eines Fremden, der eigentlich nicht dort sein kann. Er sitzt im Gefängnis. Kurz bevor das Tauwetter einsetzt, erkennt McKnight, seine Wirklichkeit gleicht einem Spiegelkabinett. Nichts war, wie er es sich vorgestellt hat und nichts wird mehr sein, wie vorher.-
Alex McKnight--hero of Steve Hamilton's bestselling, award-winning, and beloved private eye series--is back in a high-stakes, nail-biting thriller, facing the most dangerous enemy he's ever encountered.
On the Mediterranean Sea, a vacationer logs on to the security-camera feed from his home in Scottsdale, Arizona. Something about his living room seems not quite right--the room is bright, when he's certain he'd left the curtains closed. Rewinding through the feed, he sees an intruder. When he shifts to the bedroom camera, he sees the dead body.
Martin T. Livermore is the key suspect in the abduction and murder of at least five women, but he's never been this sloppy before. When the FBI finally catches him in Scottsdale, he declares he'll only talk to one person: a retired police officer from Detroit, now a private investigator living in the tiny town of Paradise, Michigan. A man named Alex McKnight.
Livermore means nothing to McKnight, but it soon becomes clear McKnight means something to Livermore...and that Livermore's capture was only the beginning of an elaborate, twisted plot with McKnight at the center. In a hunt that will take him across the country and to the edge of his limits, McKnight fights to stop a vicious killer before he can exact his ultimate revenge. And his grand finale will cut closer to home than he ever could have imagined.
In the stunning follow-up to the New York Times bestseller The Second Life of Nick Mason, the remarkable hero fights to take back control from the crime lord who owns his life, as he races to complete a daring and dangerous new mission. . . .
Nick Mason has been given a true mission impossible: Infiltrate WITSEC, the top-secret federal witness-protection program that has never been compromised, locate the three men who put his boss Darius Cole behind bars for life, and kill them.
But first he has to find them—they’re ghost prisoners locked down around the clock in classified “deep black” locations by an battalion of heavily armed U.S. marshals charged with protecting them—and the clock is ticking. Cole is appealing his conviction, and these witnesses are either his ticket to freedom or the final nail in his coffin. If they testify, Darius Cole will never step foot in the outside world again. If they are killed, he will walk out a free man.
As he risks everything to complete his mission, Mason finds himself being hunted by the very man he replaced, the ruthless assassin who once served, then betrayed, Darius Cole. Rather than waiting to be Mason's next victim, he has escaped witness protection to hunt down and kill Mason himself.
In an action-packed journey that leads from a high-security military installation in the Appalachian Mountains to a secret underground bunker hidden far below the streets of New York City, Nick Mason will have to become, more than ever before, the lethal weapon that Darius Cole created.
"Steve Hamilton amazes me. Every time I think he's going to zig he zags."-Michael Connelly
"A gamechanger. Nick Mason is one of the best main characters I've read in years."-Harlan Coben
From New York Times-bestselling, two-time Edgar-award-winning author Steve Hamilton comes an unforgettable new hero, a man who will walk out of prison and into a harrowing double life that is anything but free.
Nick Mason has already spent five years inside a maximum security prison when an offer comes that will grant his release twenty years early. He accepts - but the deal comes with a terrible price.
Now, back on the streets, Nick Mason has a new house, a new car, money to burn, and a beautiful roommate. He's returned to society, but he's still a prisoner. Whenever his cell phone rings, day or night, Nick must answer it and follow whatever order he is given. It's the deal he made with Darius Cole, a criminal mastermind serving a double-life term who runs an empire from his prison cell.
Forced to commit increasingly more dangerous crimes, hunted by the relentless detective who put him behind bars, and desperate to go straight and rebuild his life with his daughter and ex-wife, Nick will ultimately have to risk everything-his family, his sanity, and even his life-to finally break free.
Even though Alex McKnight swore to serve and protect Detroit as a police officer, a trip to Motown these days is a trip to a past he’d just as soon forget. The city will forever remind him of his partner’s death and of the bullet still lodged in his own chest. So he’s more than happy to stay in the little town of Paradise, three hundred miles and half a lifetime away. Then he gets a call from his old sergeant. It turns out that a young man Alex helped put away will be getting out of prison. That one big case marked the highlight of his career, before his partner was killed, before his marriage fell apart, before he left Detroit, forever. Now that man is about to walk free. When the sergeant invites Alex downstate to have a drink for old times’ sake, it’s an offer he would normally refuse. However, there’s a certain female FBI agent he can’t stop thinking about, so he gets in his truck and goes back to Detroit. While there, he’s reminded of something about that last case, a seemingly small piece of the puzzle that he never got to share. It’s not something anyone wants to hear, but Alex can’t let go of this gut feeling that they arrested the wrong man. And that the real killer not only got away, but went on to kill again. And again. And again.
A plane lands in a deserted Upper Peninsula airstrip one night, and five dead bodies are found the next morning. The evidence suggests that not only are these murders the beginning of something bigger, but that Alex McKnight's friend Vinnie may be part of it. Alex knows he needs to find him before it's too late. Vinnie LeBlanc is an Ojibwa tribal member, a blackjack dealer at the Bay Mills Casino, and he just might be Alex's best friend. He's certainly come through for Alex more than once in the past, so when he goes missing, Alex can't help but be worried. There's a deadly crime war creeping into the Upper Peninsula, leaving bodies in its wake, and Alex never would have expected that his friend could be involved. But when a mysterious stranger arrives in town also looking for Vinnie, Alex will soon find out that the stakes are higher than he ever could have imagined.
On a frozen January night, a young man loops one end of a long rope over the branch of a tree. The other end he ties around his neck. A snowmobiler will find him thirty-six hours later, his lifeless eyes staring out at the endless cold water of Lake Superior. It happens in a lonely corner of the Upper Peninsula, in a place they call Misery Bay. Alex McKnight does not know this young man, and he won't even hear about the suicide until another cold night, two months later and 250 miles away, when the door to the Glasgow Inn opens and the last person Alex would ever expect to see comes walking in to ask for his help. What seems like a simple quest to find a few answers will turn into a nightmare of sudden violence and bloody revenge and a race against time to catch a ruthless killer. McKnight knows all about evil, of course, having faced down a madman who killed his partner and left a bullet next to his heart. Mobsters, drug dealers, hit men - he's seen them all, and they've taken away almost everything he's ever loved. But none of them could have prepared him for the darkness he's about to face.
Lying face down on the floor with a gun to the back of his head is where Alex McKnight finds himself after a game of cards turns into a professional heist at the home of local developer Win Vargas. When the dust settles, McKnight is one of police chief Roy Maven's lead suspects. Worse, Vargas's own sense of vigilante justice has targeted the former private eye as well, and the brash millionaire may be responsible for the sudden disappearance of Alex's best friend Jackie. Now, with officials pointed in the wrong direction and his closest allies either missing or in jail, Alex knows he is the only one who can uncover the truth. But McKnight can't possibly know how dark this conspiracy truly is - or how close to guilt he actually stands... "Agreeable plot twists (the revelation of whodunit really is a surprise) and thoughtfully engages some larger questions about wilderness real estate developments and the limits of friendship." - Washington Post
In an unprecedented literary feat, Steve Hamilton's debut novel, A Cold Day in Paradise, captured both the prestigious Edgar and Shamus awards. Now the bestselling author presents the third installment in his critically acclaimed mystery series: a complex, atmospheric tale that will plunge listeners back into icy, unpredictable Alex McKnight territory, where the private investigator finds himself doing a favor for an old friend - but this favor could cost him his life... In the remote, wintry reaches of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, it's hard for a man to remember what springtime is like, let alone Spring Training. But when a former teammate tracks him down, erstwhile minor league player Alex McKnight is instantly transported back to the good old Toledo dugout, circa 1971. Unfortunately, Randy Wilkins didn't trek 3,000 miles to the bleak shores of Lake Superior to sit by the fire with a couple of imported beers, dissecting the past, inning by glorious inning. He's here to pitch a proposal: that Alex help him find the woman with whom he had a brief, passionate affair three decades ago. Who is Alex to deny a fellow the chance to ward off classic midlife chill by rekindling an old flame? What he doesn't consider is that there might be a good reason the mysterious, missing Maria is more elusive than a starting position in the majors - and that his trusted old pal might not have told him the whole score...
Other than the bullet lodged less than a centimeter from his heart, former Detroit police officer Alex McKnight thought he had put the nightmare of his partner's death and his own near-fatal injury behind him. After all, Maximilian Rose, convicted of the crimes has been locked in the state pen for years. But in the small town of Paradise, Michigan, where McKnight has traded his badge for a cozy cabin in the woods, a murderer with Rose's unmistakable trademarks appears to be back to his killing ways. With Rose locked away, McKnight can't understand who else would know the intimate details of the old murders - not to mention the signature blood-red rose left on his doorstep. And it seems like it'll be a frozen day in Hell before McKnight can unravel the cold truth from a deadly deception in a town that's anything but paradise. "Chilling as the November wind. A must for PI and suspense fans." - Charles Todd, author of Wings of Fire "Hamilton combines clear, crisp writing, wily, colorful characters and an offbeat locale (Michigan's Upper Peninsula) in an impressive debut. ...This book won the Private Eye Writers of America/St. Martin's Press Award for Best First Private Eye Novel of 1997." - Publishers Weekly
Marked by tragedy, traumatized at the age of eight, Michael, now eighteen, is no ordinary young man. Besides not uttering a single word in ten years, he discovers the one thing he can somehow do better than anyone else. Whether it's a locked door without a key, a padlock with no combination, or even an eight hundred-pound safe...he can open them all. It's an unforgivable talent. A talent that will make young Michael a hot commodity with the wrong people and, whether he likes it or not, push him ever closer to a life of crime. Until he finally sees his chance to escape, and with one desperate gamble risks everything to come back home to the only person he ever loved, and to unlock the secret that has kept him silent for so long. Steve Hamilton steps away from his Edgar Award-winning Alex McKnight series to introduce a unique new character, unlike anyone you've ever seen in the world of crime fiction.
Ex-cop and sometime-P.I. Alex McKnight endures the bitter winter of Michigan's Upper Peninsula in his log cabin with warm fires and cold Molsons. When Dorothy Parrish, a young Ojibwa woman, asks him for shelter from her violent boyfriend, McKnight agrees. But after secreting her in one of his cabins, he finds her gone the next morning. McKnight suspects vicious, hockey-playing Lonnie Bruckman of abducting the woman, but his search for her brings on more suspects, bruising encounters and a thickening web of crime, all obscured by the relentless whiplash of brutal snow storms. From the secret world of the Ojibwa reservation to the Canadian border and deep into the silent woods, someone is out to kill - and McKnight is driving right into the line of fire... "An excellent mystery...The kind of book you climb inside and, when you're forced to leave, you wish you could stay a little longer." - Booklist
