New Orleans in the 1990s--dirty, corrupt, and violent, the murder capital of the United States, with a scandal-plagued police department that was collapsing under the weight of its own corruption. No one could imagine that things could get much worse for this once-great American city. Then Antoinette Frank joined the New Orleans Police Department, and things got much, much worse. Before long, Officer Antoinette Frank would commit a crime so bloody and so shocking that it brought international attention to the Crescent City and left many wondering if New Orleans was not an American city after all, but some displaced third-world banana republic where the rules of civilized society no longer applied.

Two days before the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, rookie FBI agent Jake Miller is on his way to meet some friends at a football game at RFK Stadium. But Jake has one stop to make first. A quick meeting with a crackpot who called the FBI claiming to know who really killed JFK.

The caller turns out to be a 70-year-old Frenchman who says he fired the fatal shot from the grassy knoll. Now sure that the man is crazy, Jake is trying to ditch him when four guys in dark suits--real Men in Black types--show up to take the old guy into custody.

What happens next will turn Jake, the crazy Frenchman, a beautiful FBI intelligence analyst, and a kook conspiracy writer into the targets of a massive federal manhunt--and the only people who can stop another high-profile assassination.

Genore Guillory was one of the nicest people anyone in the small town of Clinton, Louisiana, had ever known. Then she was found dead--shot, stabbed, and beaten. Investigators had few clues. A policeman was the primary suspect. But there were rumors...whispers of a burgeoning group of white supremacists who sold meth, fought pit bulls, and robbed graves.

What unfolded over the course of the four-year investigation was a twisted and sordid tale of small-town evil that shocked even hardened investigators and exposed the worst side of human nature.

Based on the true story...

Detective Colin Fitzgerald, only recently returned from World War I, with scars inside and out, is back in New Orleans and chasing the killer the newspapers call The Axman, a ruthless predator who has plagued the city for years, breaking into people's homes in the middle of the night and murdering them in their beds.

The killer even writes a letter to a local newspaper--echoing Jack the Ripper from three decades earlier--and claims to be a demon from hell.

The top brass at the Police Department says the killer is a madman, but Colin suspects there is more to these brutal killings than madness, perhaps much more.

Yet even Colin is shocked when he discovers the murders are linked to City Hall and a vast corruption scheme, with roots that reach back decades, to the assassination of a legendary police chief and to the murder of Colin's own father, the former chief of detectives.

A gruesome serial killer calling himself the Lamb of God is stalking the streets of New Orleans and leaving a trail of blood and terror, but city officials, still reeling from the effects of a devastating hurricane the year before and desperate to reboot the tourism business that is the lifeblood of the city, refuse to acknowledge that the murders are connected and deny homicide detective Sean Murphy the resources he needs for a proper investigation.

So Murphy sets out to stop the killer the best way he knows how, by getting inside the killer's head, by thinking the way the killer thinks, and by anticipating the killer's next move. But thinking like a madman is a dangerous game that can have unintended and deadly consequences.

In the war zone that is the U.S./Mexico border, DEA Special Agent Scott Greene wants justice for a murdered fellow agent, but the killers are outside of his reach, on the other side of the imaginary line that separates one country from another. So he crosses that line and inadvertently unleashes a storm so violent and so stunning that it turns Scott and his only ally, a Mexican cop named Benny Alvarez, into fugitives on both sides of the border as they fight to expose a scheme so corrupt that it could bring down both the U.S. and Mexican governments.

(Previously published as CARTEL)

RAY SHANE is an ex-New Orleans vice cop who just finished a five-year stretch in federal prison. Now he's back home in the Big Easy and looking to stay out of trouble.

But trouble is exactly what he gets when four masked gunmen rob the House of the Rising Sun, the mob-owned illegal casino and brothel where Shane is in charge of security. On their way out the door, the gunmen also kill the nephew of the New Orleans Mafia boss.

Now Shane has to find the killers, but as he tracks them down one by one he relearns a painful lesson--in New Orleans nothing is ever what it seems.