Mark de Castrique – författare

"The author offers insights into the political, economic, and cultural ramifications of Indian casinos, along with a large cast of believable characters with a wide emotional range." —Publishers Weekly

When Cherokee burial remains are unearthed on the site expanding a local cemetery, the dual occupations of Barry Clayton, part-time deputy and full-time undertaker, collide. Then, during the interment of the wife of one of Gainesboro, North Carolina''s most prominent citizens, Cherokee activist Jimmy Panther leads a protest. Words and fists fly.

When Panther turns up executed on the grave of the deceased woman, Barry is forced to confront her family as the chief suspects. But the case lurches in a new direction with the arrival of Sheriff Tommy Lee Wadkin''s Army pal, Boston cop Kevin Malone. He''s on the trail of a Boston hit man who arrived at the Cherokee reservation only days before the murder. Malone is convinced his quarry is the triggerman.

The accelerating investigation draws Barry onto the reservation where Panther''s efforts to preserve Cherokee traditions threatened the development of a new casino, a casino bringing millions of dollars of construction plus huge yearly payouts to every member of the tribe. Leading an unlikely team—his childhood nemesis Archie Donovan and his elderly fellow undertaker Uncle Wayne—Barry goes undercover. But the stakes are higher than he realized in this risky undertaking. And the life of a Cherokee boy becomes the wager. Barry must play his cards very carefully...

The Singularity—the looming point of no return when Artificial Intelligence surpasses human cognitive abilities, with consequences no one can foresee, and only a handful of people understand.

Rusty Mullins, ex-Secret Service, has never heard of the Singularity. He only knows that after the deadly challenges of his last job for security firm Prime Protection, he swore he''d stop risking his life on assignments. Then his good friend Ted Lewison, head of Prime Protection, asks him back for a routine mission guarding Chinese scientist Dr. Lisa Li and her seven-year-old nephew, Peter, and Mullins agrees.

The conference on AI bringing Dr. Li to Washington, DC, is barely under way when a team of assassins storms the room. The carnage is great but Mullins saves Dr. Li and Peter while the attackers kill the two other AI experts, along with Lewison.

His widow begs Mullins to uncover the power behind the group claiming credit for the assassinations. Is "Double H" homegrown, or part of a larger international conspiracy? Enter eccentric tech billionaire Robert Brentwood who requests Mullins continue to guard Dr. Li and Peter. Brentwood seeks the Singularity and believes Dr. Li holds the key. Mullins agrees in exchange for running his investigation through Brentwood''s extraordinary computer resources.

The quest leads him on an unexpected path from Naval Intelligence and the Oval Office to a secret research lab in the North Carolina mountains. No one can be trusted—the race for the Singularity is a global winner-takes-all contest.

Yet, terrifyingly, a machine with capacity exceeding human intelligence can outstrip all controls while possessing no moral or ethical brakes. As the AI stakeholders go all out, Mullins must face his own singularity—the point of no return—when not just he but his family and Dr. Li''s will become casualties in what amounts to war.

A river gives up its dead, but not its secrets...

Sam Blackman and Nakayla Robertson, private investigators in Asheville, North Carolina, are hired when a local environmentalist dies while monitoring water quality in the nearby Pigeon River. With no soil or water samples found near the body, his widow doesn''t believe his death was an accident.

In fact, witnesses reported a public altercation between the environmentalist and local mill heir Luke Kirkpatrick just two days prior. Could Luke or his father, Ted, have committed murder to secure their proposed business expansion? Meanwhile, preparations for a local festival suffer violent setbacks, and the investigators worry the events are related. Can Sam and Nakayla identify the killer and serve justice before Asheville is threatened once again?

The eighth book featuring Private Investigators Blackman and Robertson, Fatal Scores, is a timely mystery perfect for fans private eyes and anyone with a taste for regional history.

Blackman Agency Investigations:

Blackman''s Coffin

The Fitzgerald Ruse?

The Sandburg Connection

Murder in Passing

He knows the secret, she knows the truth…

“The list. You’re on the list. God’s chosen Gene.”

When children’s hospital volunteer and high school student Gene Adamson hears the words of the dying man, the gunman who used him as a shield after murdering a prominent geneticist, Gene thinks the man delirious. But then the bodies of killer and victim disappear from the morgue, and a ten-year-old girl desperately needing a heart transplant is mysteriously bumped from her number-one spot on the organ-recipient list. The list. What is the list? Gene, together with Jeanne Everston, the beautiful daughter of the murdered geneticist, appears to have stumbled onto a medical conspiracy so deadly the very knowledge of its existence marks them for death.

As a child’s life hangs in the balance, Gene believes he’s discovered the answer. He thinks he’s cracked the conspiracy wide open. He is so wrong.

A locked-room young adult whodunit in the classic tradition of Sherlock Holmes

June 1860. A new locomotive christened A Southern Breeze steams across the Carolina countryside carrying seventeen-year-old Jeb Bennett and his twin sister, Rachel Leigh, to the exhilarating promise of a summer in Charleston.

While storm clouds gather over the landscape, fiercer storms rage inside the passenger cars. The tensions between North and South rapidly escalate until one traveler’s journey abruptly and brutally ends. Who is the murderer? Was the victim the real target? Amid swirling suspicions and deceptive intrigue, Jeb and Rachel Leigh join Pinkerton detective Jonathan Ward in a race to unmask a killer.

But murder isn’t the only evil Jeb must confront. As motives and suspects abound, Jeb learns what it means to place a price on a human life, not only as a victim of murder but also as property to be traded and sold.

The final showdown means hard choices, a test of loyalties, and a face-to-face encounter with death on A Southern Breeze.

Sam Blackman is an angry man. A chief warrant officer in the criminal investigation detachment of the US military, he lost a leg in Iraq and has been outspoken in his criticism of his medical treatment. Then, ex-marine and fellow amputee Tikima Robertson walks into his hospital room, hinting that she has an opportunity for Sam to use his investigative skills. But before she can return, Tikima is murdered, her body found floating in the French Broad River.

When a journal dating to 1919 is found in Tikima''s home, detailing a ninety-year-old crime that foreshadows Tikima''s death, Sam must delve into the area''s rich history, the legacy of the Vanderbilts at the Biltmore estate, and author Tom Wolfeto uncover the murderous truth.

Former chief warrant officer and amputee Sam Blackman and his partner, Nakayla Robertson, are opening a detective agency. They have high hopes that the thriving mountain region will provide a steady stream of cases.

Their first client, a quirky elderly woman in a retirement community, makes a strange request. She wants Sam to right a wrong she committed over seventy years ago. Her victim: F. Scott Fitzgerald. Her crime: stealing a manuscript when Fitzgerald resided in the stately Grove Park Inn. Sam’s task seems simple enough: retrieve the woman’s lockbox and deliver the manuscript to Fitzgerald’s heirs.

You want to borrow a casket?

Funeral director and part-time sheriff Barry Clayton finds United States Junior Chamber (Jaycee) member Archie Donovan’s request absurd until he learns the casket will be the centerpiece of the Jaycees’ haunted house, a charity event with all proceeds going to the children’s hospital.

But when the president of the Jaycees is murdered in the casket on Halloween, the national press descends upon Gainesboro to cover the bizarre crime. Sheriff Tommy Lee Wadkins assigns Barry to be the lead investigator of a case that presents no motive and no suspects. Then someone fires a shot at Archie Donovan, and Barry wonders whether the victim in the casket had even been the intended target.

Barry finds his police work and personal life on a collision course as his ex-wife Rachel comes to town with high hopes of using the story to launch her TV-network career. She begins prying into the lives of Gainesboro’s most distinguished citizens and creates a backlash that leaves another body in its wake. Old wounds are ripped open, family rifts exposed, and a criminal enterprise revealed that cuts to the heart of the community.

Barry Clayton must follow a trail of clues as winding as a forest path. The unexpected destination: a mountainside of Christmas trees. Somewhere behind these symbols of peace and goodwill lurks a killer, and unmasking him will be a fatal undertaking.

Russell Mullins has left intelligence work. When his wife died of cancer, Rusty quit the Secret Service to repurpose his life. He joins a private protection company in Washington, DC, and is assigned to guard Paul Luguire, a Federal Reserve executive and chief liaison with the US Treasury. Mullins and Luguire form a strong friendship. So when a police detective calls in the middle of the night with word of Luguire’s suicide, Mullins doesn’t buy it.

His doubts are reinforced by Amanda Church, a former Secret Service colleague now in the Federal Reserve’s cybersecurity unit. She uncovered a suspicious financial transaction initiated by Luguire only days before his death. He authorized the transfer of unrequested funds from the Federal Reserve to a regional bank. Even stranger, after Luguire’s suicide, Amanda finds the transaction has been erased from Federal Reserve records; the regional bank now shows the money wired from an offshore account in the name of Russell Mullins. Someone is setting Rusty up. And when the bank president is murdered, Mullins rockets to the top of the suspect list.

In an age of Wall Street meltdowns and a downgraded US credit rating, the secretive Federal Reserve is compromised. Mullins and Church don’t know whom to trust. Evidence points to an external terrorist attack, but the web of deceit appears woven from within and threatens to destroy the heart of America’s financial system.

Twelve targets are known. The clock is ticking. What, or who, is the thirteenth?

When Barry Clayton’s father developed Alzheimer’s disease, Barry gave up his career in law enforcement to run the family’s funeral home in the North Carolina mountain town of Gainesboro, where he is known as Buryin’ Barry. But even a small town in the Appalachians is not immune to crime. At a summer street dance, Barry’s friend Sheriff Tommy Lee Wadkins is shot at by an old man distraught over the death of his wife. The hospitalized Tommy Lee appoints Barry as the deputy in charge of the investigation, to the dismay of Deputy Reece Hutchins.

Who was the old man stalking? Why was a young woman, who was also wounded at the scene, traveling with the intended victim? What at first appears to be a case of a mentally unstable summer tourist develops into a case in which someone is preying on senior citizens. Barry discovers a tangled web of deceit stretching from western North Carolina to the Florida coast.

Barry realizes that Deputy Hutchins is undercutting his investigation. And as potential witnesses and informants begin to die under mysterious circumstances, Barry confronts a conspiracy that runs so deep that he no longer knows whom to trust. One false step, one betrayal, would make this case Buryin’ Barry’s final undertaking.

It was only a simple, routine assignment for private investigator Sam Blackman and his partner, Nakayla Robertson: follow a history professor, who is suing a spinal surgeon for malpractice, and catch her in physical activities that undercut her claim.

When the professor, Janice Wainwright, visits Connemara, the home of the poet Carl Sandburg, in Flat Rock, North Carolina, and climbs the arduous trail to the top of Glassy Mountain, Sam believes he has the evidence he needs to wrap up the case—until he finds the woman semiconscious and bleeding on the mountain’s granite outcrop. Her final words were “It’s the Sandburg verses. The Sandburg verses.”

As the first person to discover the dying woman, Sam becomes the prime suspect. Now the case is personal. An autopsy reveals painkillers in her blood and solid proof of the surgeon’s errors, and Sam is left with haunting questions: Why did this suffering woman endure the climb to the mountaintop? Did she stumble and fall or did someone cause her death?

Then a break-in at the Wainwright farmhouse and the theft of Sandburg volumes convince Sam that someone is seeking information worth killing for. But what did Pulitzer Prize winner Sandburg have in his literary collection that could lead to multiple murders? And who will be targeted next?

Sam and Nakayla must navigate a convoluted trail of historical facts and mountain legends to arrive at the truth—a truth that Carl Sandburg never knew he possessed—and a treasure to be had for a song.

In Asheville, North Carolina, the Blackman & Robertson Detective Agency faces a disturbing reality: no clients. Sam Blackman finds inactivity intolerable, so when partner Nakayla Robertson suggests a mushroom hunt on the site of a historic freed-slave commune called the Kingdom of the Happy Land, Sam reluctantly agrees. When he stumbles across a skeleton, his adventure mushrooms into a case of murder. But it isn''t his case—he has no client—and the local authorities tell him to butt out.

Then Marsha Montgomery comes to the office asking Sam and Nakayla to investigate a burglary at her mother''s home. In 1967 someone stole a rifle and a photograph of Marsha''s mother, grandmother, and great grandmother taken in 1932 by renowned photographer Doris Ulmann. Marsha''s visit is no coincidence: the photograph was taken at the Kingdom of the Happy Land. Sam''s being played, but why?

When Marsha''s eighty-five-year-old mother Lucille is arrested for murder, Sam has his answer and his case. Is the skeleton that of Jimmy Lang—Lucille''s lover and Marsha''s white father—who disappeared in 1967? Jimmy''s brother says no; Jimmy left to seek his fortune after Lucille rejected his marriage proposal. But others stood to gain from Jimmy''s disappearance.

A veil of betrayal and deceit hides a killer desperate to protect a dark secret, and no one—not even Sam—is safe from the deadly consequences.

When Cherokee burial remains are unearthed on the site of a local cemetery''s expansion, Barry Clayton, part-time deputy and full-time undertaker, finds his dual occupations colliding. Then, during the interment of the wife of one of Gainesboro''s most prominent citizens, Cherokee activist Jimmy Panther leads a protest. Words and fists fly.

When Panther turns up executed on the grave of the deceased woman, Barry is forced to confront her family as the chief suspects. But the case lurches in a new direction with the arrival of Sheriff Tommy Lee Wadkins'' army pal, Boston detective Kevin Malone. Malone is on the trail of a Boston hit man who arrived at the Cherokee reservation only days before the murder. Malone is convinced his quarry is the man who pulled the trigger. But who paid him? And why?

The investigation draws Barry onto the reservation where Jimmy Panther''s efforts to preserve Cherokee traditions threatened the development of a new casino, a casino bringing millions of dollars of construction and substantial yearly payouts to every member of the tribe. With the unlikely team of his childhood nemesis Archie Donovan and his elderly Uncle Wayne, Barry goes undercover in an effort to draw out the truth. But the stakes are higher than he realized—and the life of a Cherokee boy becomes the wager. Barry must play his cards very carefully in his riskiest undertaking yet.

In this unusual spin on the classic spy novel, murder strikes from our wartime pasts…

Iraq War veteran Sam Blackman with his prosthetic leg and his no-nonsense private eye partner Nakayla Robertson love their investigations which always carry a thread from the past—and they love each other. An interracial couple in the new South, the Asheville, NC, pair has surrounded themselves with a terrific support team including an unorthodox lawyer and a veteran cop. They deploy humor both to bind them together and to deflect insults. Plus, it helps deal with the tragedies their work uncovers.

Such a tragedy interrupts a meeting between the PIs and the neighboring law office when a body is unearthed from the grounds of the nearby Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute. During the Cold War it monitored developing space programs. Today it plays a vital role gathering weather and climate data. The body has been in the ground a long time. Why would its discovery spark off a new murder in Asheville''s mountain music scene, the victim found amid the garbage of dark, dank Rat Alley?

She was the fiancée of the man murdered long ago. But surely this case is more than a domestic drama playing out over time….

The Blackman Agency Investigations excel at merging past and present, bringing little-known history to light, and are perfect for fans of James Lee Burke, Stephen Mack Jones, Margaret Maron, and Robert B. Parker.

When private detective Sam Blackman agrees to help his partner and lover, Nakayla Robertson, conduct a fundraiser for orphaned twins, he does so to ease his conscience. The boys’ parents were killed in a courtroom shootout where Sam was the key witness against the twins’ father. The charity event, a nighttime ghost tour of the legendary haunted sites of Asheville, North Carolina, seems harmless enough. Sam only has to tell the story of a grief-stricken woman who hanged herself from an old, arched stone bridge. “Helen, come forth,” he cries. Sam and his tourgoers expect the actress playing Helen’s ghost to walk toward them from the bridge’s dark recesses. Instead, her body tumbles from overhead and dangles at the end of a noose. Someone has reenacted the legend with deadly authenticity.

When a second murder mimics another old ghost tale, the police fear a macabre serial killer is on the prowl. But the case isn’t Sam’s to solve. Then, a tidal wave of evidence begins to point to one man—Sam’s friend, defense attorney Hewitt Donaldson. Sam and Nakayla, firmly believing in Donaldson’s innocence, must not only prove it but halt a murderer seemingly bent on retribution. Does the killer’s motivation rise from the present, or is Team Donaldson dealing with some specter from the past?

2023 EDGAR AWARD NOMINEE, SUE GRAFTON MEMORIAL AWARD * APPLE BOOK OF THE MONTH SELECTION

"A high energy foray into cryptocurrency and government corruption."—First Clue

"This light and lively series launch introduces 75-year-old Ethel Fiona Crestwater...an elderly Nancy Drew: sure of herself and her convictions, and ready to bend a few rules to achieve her goal of seeing justice done." —Publishers Weekly

For fans of unexpected-yet-badass female sleuths, meet former FBI agent-turned-boardinghouse landlady Ethel Fiona Crestwater. Her age affords her precious invisibility. She can outthink and outshoot most men—and women—half her age.

When someone murders one of her boarders, Ethel springs into action—much to the surprise of her double-first-cousin-twice-removed, Jesse, who has recently come to stay with her while he attends university. As he watches her photograph the crime scene, conceal evidence, and speed-dial the Secret Service Director, Jesse realizes that there''s much more to Ethel than appearances suggest.

When Jesse is assaulted and the gym bag full of cash Ethel had hidden is stolen from the basement, the pair decides it''s time to launch their own unofficial investigation. With no one to trust but each other, this unlikely duo learns that the only thing truly worth risking your life for is family.

"A bewitching political thriller."—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

"Ethel looks like Marple but acts like Marlow." —Kirkus Reviews?

In a case deciding the future of clean energy, everything hinges on how the chief justice of Supreme Court will lean. DANGEROUS WOMEN stirs up the perfect cocktail of ingenious spy-craft and political intrigue of Thomas Perry''s The Old Man brightened with the charming, uncanny energy of Killers of a Certain Age. This urgent, cleverly plotted high stakes thriller is set in motion by botched attack on two law clerks leaving one dead and the other in a coma. The ensuing cover up leaves a string of bodies and too many players at cross-purposes. It also leaves Chief Justice Clarissa Baxter with a target on her back.

We''ll need an off the grid hero with friends in high places: enter retired FBI agent-turned-boardinghouse landlady, Ethel Fiona Crestwater (legend) and her double-first-cousin-twice-removed Jesse Cooper (sidekick). Although in her mid-seventies, Ethel is no bumbling amateur sleuth; she''s a seasoned pro with razor-sharp instincts and Bond-worthy skills. College-aged Jesse brings tech savvy and boundless enthusiasm, along with an innate talent for intrigue. Together, the unlikely duo will face malicious back-stabbing political sycophants, conniving lobbyists, and a motivated assassin bent on removing the Chief Justice from the equation—along with Ethel, who stands defiantly between the hitman and his payday.