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Thomas Kies

It’s a crime scene worthy of Hieronymus Bosch, so shocking and so senseless that it challenges the local law and intrigues veteran reporter Geneva Chase, whose career may be dying alongside that of her small-town newspaper.

The Sheffield Post headline shouts, “Cops Call Murder Scene ‘Slaughterhouse.’” On the scene, Genie spurs the deputy police chief to tell her quietly, “Six bodies … all nude … hacked to pieces.” Even tough Geneva shivers. How could such a slaughter happen on Connecticut’s moneyed Gold Coast, to privileged couples inside a historic 1898 Queen Anne mansion on the shoreline of Long Island Sound? Where is the protection afforded by the gated community and the security technology in place?

For Geneva, battling alcoholism and bad choices, writing this story is the last chance to redeem herself. She’s lost every other major news job she’s had. Working at her hometown newspaper is the end of the line—there will be nowhere else to go.

But ink still flows thick in her veins. Her story on Sheffield’s unlikely killing field is the Post’s lead, soon picked up by metro papers, and she keeps it, exposing the turbulence beneath the secrets of the rich and entitled and their ability to buy off embarrassments. She is also tracking community connections, watching a hit-and-run case disappear through a large donation, interviewing dangerous suspects, visiting a swingers club, joining cops for a burglary bust, and taking a guided tour to spot history’s underwater ghost.

All this is despite the distractions of the married man she can’t quite ditch and the sweet, shaky love affair she starts with an old high-school sweetheart. Can she keep her drinking under control and do her job well enough to keep from getting fired, finish the story, not further screw up her life—and not get killed?

Thomas Kies’ gripping first novel with its corkscrew of a plot asks, “Do things happen for a reason, or is everything random?”

Rebecca Gibel

Blackstone Publishing

Geneva Chase Mysteries

Random Road: Introducing Geneva Chase

Random Road introduced Geneva Chase—“a reporter with a compelling voice, a damaged woman who recounts her own bittersweet story as she hunts down clues,” says Library Journal—to murders straight out of a nightmare—six bodies found naked and cut to ribbons in a posh Connecticut home.

Having survived this and a personal tragedy, Geneva’s story still includes alcoholism and career challenges compounded by the rocky finances of her newspaper employer. But she’s working. She’s fighting the urge to reconnect with a magnetic yet married lover. And she’s raising a rebellious young lady who is not her daughter but a cherished legacy.

Nevertheless the newshound in Geneva spurs her to bad if not downright dangerous choices as two unrelated crimes unexpectedly collide. A fifteen-year-old-girl at her ward’s high school has vanished along with her English teacher. Is this same-old, same-old, or something more? And then there’s the abused woman who torched her sadistic husband, and how to keep her out of the clutches of powerful mobsters—and thus, out of the news.

Out on the crime beat, Geneva works to unravel the connection, if any, between these two disparate stories while her newspaper is put up for sale, a high-flying Hollywood production lights up the town, and her personal battles accelerate. Jarring twists and turns include charming movie stars, treacherous diamond merchants, adultery, sex traffickers, and murder. While the clock ticks and Geneva works desperately to find the missing student, she comes to the horrible realization that she’s in over her head.

Darkness Lane, the second novel in the Geneva Chase Mystery Series, hurtles along at a breakneck speed where nothing is what it seems, and where art and reality collide in a terrifying climax.

Darkness Lane: A Geneva Chase Mystery

Time is running out …

The nude bodies of a corrupt judge and a Jane Doe are found under the icy, black waters at Groward Bay Marina, chained to the prongs of a mammoth fork lift. A videotape points to Merlin Finn, a ruthless gang leader with a proclivity for bondage and S&M who had recently broken out of prison. In the videotape, he’s wearing a black leather bondage mask.

With the newspaper she works for about to be sold and her job in jeopardy, journalist Geneva Chase investigates pill mills, crooked doctors, and a massive money laundering scheme in an attempt to identify the murdered woman and find the killer. Along the way, she finds herself working with a disgraced New York cop and a host of other unlikely characters with ties to the criminal underworld.

Geneva is clearly hot on the killer’s trail, but when she is kidnapped and held at the mercy of the criminals she hoped to stop, it looks like her chance to uncover the darkness that has seeped through her hometown may be lost forever.

Graveyard Bay

How far would someone go to protect corporate profits?

Just days before Morris Cutter, a retired powerful oil executive, is scheduled to give a pseudo-scientific report to Congress that will delay crucial action on climate change for decades, he and his wife are found shot to death in their Greenwich, Connecticut, home. The police call it murder-suicide. The couple’s son refuses to accept the official conclusion and hires Geneva Chase, crime reporter turned private detective, to prove otherwise.

Genie soon learns that there are suspects everywhere, including within the deceased’s immediate family. Morris Cutter’s own daughter hadn’t spoken with him in years, and his nephew is a climate activist with a radical organization. But Cutter’s former company has a vested interest in keeping a low profile until it is able to present its mock-science on Capitol Hill. Genie is bribed, then threatened, to wrap up her investigation before the scheduled hearing date—and to concur with the police findings.

When the lead scientist of the study goes missing, followed by Cutter’s daughter, Genie begins to piece together what actually may have happened to Morris and Julia Cutter, putting herself in harm’s way as she races to find the truth.