Audiobooks by William Wells

The Now-and-Then Detective: A Jack Starkey Mystery

Retired Chicago homicide detective Jack Starkey is living his retirement dream in Fort Myers Beach, a little town on Florida’s Southwest Gulf Coast, where he owns a bar called the Drunken Parrot and resides on a houseboat named Phoenix. Jack’s friend, Chicago Tribune police reporter William Stevens, writes a series of bestselling crime novels based upon Jack’s career and pays Jack to edit them to make certain all the cop stuff is right. But, every now and then, life in paradise can get a bit boring, so Jack agrees to help local police departments with murder investigations. When Henry Wilberforce, an eighty-two-year-old Chicago billionaire, is murdered execution-style in his winter home in nearby Naples, Jack takes on the case. He finds that Henry had recently been behaving strangely, dressing in costumes and giving away large amounts of his money randomly. Henry’s wife and son are deceased. His only living relatives are a nephew, Scooter Lowrey, a trust-fund slacker in Santa Monica, California, and two nieces, June Dumont, who is married to a prominent Washington, DC, attorney, and Libby Leverton, the wife of a prominent Boston real estate developer. Henry hasn’t been in touch with them for many years. A prime rule of a murder investigation is to ask: Who benefits? With no other suspects in sight, Jack wonders if any one of the cousins, or all of them acting in concert, and who must assume they are their uncle’s heirs, need his money badly enough to hire a hit man to stop Henry from giving away “their” money. Jack’s investigation takes him to Santa Monica, Washington, and Boston, where dead ends and false leads make this case one of the most challenging Jack Starkey has ever faced.

William Wells (Author), Donald Corren (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Dollar-A-Year Detective: A Jack Starkey Mystery

Retired Chicago homicide detective Jack Starkey is living what he calls every cop's retirement dream by owning a successful bar, the Drunken Parrot, and residing on a houseboat in Fort Myers Beach on Florida's Southwest Gulf Coast.Mostly, it's been working out just fine. Starkey's drink of choice these days is diet root beer and not the hard stuff that ended his marriage and sent him into rehab. He's dating the lovely Marisa Fernandez, who owns a real estate agency and supplements his usual diet of Pop-Tarts and diner food with gourmet Cuban cooking.But long-term serenity has never been Jack Starkey's destiny. One evening, Starkey's pal Cubby Cullen, the Fort Myers Beach police chief, comes into the Drunken Parrot to ask a favor. The Coast Guard found a sailboat drifting in Pine Island Sound with two dead bodies aboard, a bank president and his wife, both shot once in the forehead execution style. Murders are rare in town; Cubby asks Jack, who has more homicide experience than anyone in the local police department, to take a look at the crime scene just to offer an opinion.Starkey agrees, not realizing that this will draw him into an investigation involving offshore oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, corrupt state politicians, a Russian oligarch, and the angry father of a boy who's not getting much playing time on his Little League team. Even in his prime, Starkey would be hard-pressed to find a connection, and his prime is in his rearview mirror. This mystery follows in the tradition of John D. MacDonald, Carl Hiaasen, Lawrence Sanders, and other masters of crime fiction marked by compelling characters, stories with completely unexpected twists and turns, and a strong comic element that will keep a reader thoroughly amused while wondering what could possibly happen next.

William Wells (Author), Donald Corren (Narrator)

Audiobook

Detective Fiction

A serial killer is on the loose in Naples, Florida, an enclave of wealth and privilege on the Southwest Gulf Coast. The murders have been disguised as accidents, but when police chief Wade Hansen becomes suspicious, mayor Charles Beaumont orders him to apprehend the killer before the truth becomes public knowledge. Hansen reaches out to retired Chicago homicide detective Jack Starkey. Starkey, who has been shot three times-twice on the job and once in the army-is enjoying every cop's retirement dream. But at the same time, he misses the thrill of the hunt, so he accepts the job. As the bodies stack up like cordwood, Starkey searches for anything that the victims might have in common. He decides to go undercover as a member of the Naples elite in an attempt to get himself noticed by the killer, drawing the attention of Count Vasily Petrovich, who operates a hedge fund named for the Atocha, a Spanish galleon that sank in a hurricane off the Florida Keys in 1622. When Starkey discovers that all of the victims so far had been investors in that fund, and that the count is actually a member of the Russian Mafia, he suspects that the Atocha Fund might have a substantial penalty for early withdrawal. Meanwhile, William Stevens, a Chicago Tribune police reporter, has been writing a series of bestselling crime novels based on his pal Starkey's career. Starkey's alter-ego is Chicago homicide detective Jack Stoney. Things are not what they seem, plot twists abound, and the bullets begin to fly. Starkey, in desperation, reaches out to the fictional Stoney to help him catch the killer. "[A] delightfully quirky crime novel...Crammed with fascinating asides on topics ranging from haute cuisine to high-tech weaponry."-Publishers Weekly (starred review)

William Wells (Author), Donald Corren (Narrator)

Audiobook