Linda Barnes Books In Order

Michael Spraggue Mystery Books In Publication Order

  1. Blood Will Have Blood (1982)
  2. Bitter Finish (1983)
  3. Dead Heat (1984)
  4. Cities of the Dead (1986)

Carlotta Carlyle Books In Publication Order

  1. A Trouble of Fools (1987)
  2. The Snake Tattoo (1989)
  3. Coyote (1990)
  4. Steel Guitar (1991)
  5. Snapshot (1993)
  6. Hardware (1995)
  7. Cold Case (1997)
  8. Flashpoint (1999)
  9. The Big Dig (2002)
  10. Deep Pockets (2004)
  11. Heart of the World (2006)
  12. Lie Down with the Devil (2008)
  13. Lucky Penny (2013)
  14. Miss Gibson (2013)
  15. Stealing First (2013)
  16. Further Adventures of Carlotta Carlyle (2015)

Harold Middleton Books In Publication Order

  1. The Chopin Manuscript (2007)
  2. The Copper Bracelet (2009)
  3. The Starling Project: An Audible Drama (2014)

Standalone Novels In Publication Order

  1. The Perfect Ghost (2013)

Anthologies In Publication Order

  1. Boston Noir 2 (2012)

Michael Spraggue Mystery Book Covers

Carlotta Carlyle Book Covers

Harold Middleton Book Covers

Standalone Novels Book Covers

Anthologies Book Covers

Linda Barnes Books Overview

Bitter Finish

‘A fine job expertly written, with an ingenious wine caper set in the Napa Valley.’ The New York Times Book Review.A Michael Spraggue Mystery by the author of ‘Dead Heat.’ Michael Spraggue, a wealthy private eye turned movie actor, is in the middle of making a trashy Hollywood movie about what else? a private eye, when he gets a phone call from his sometime lover and current business partner in a California winery, Kate Holloway. Kate has troubling news. Not only has Lenny Brent, their volatile winemaker, vanished, but an unidentifiable corpse has appeared and Kate’s the prime suspect!Spraggue hurries over in time to discover a second dead body that of Lenny. Can Spraggue solve this vintage mystery before he finds himself corked ?

Dead Heat

He was dead tired, gasping for breath, with aching muscles, blistered feet, and the anonymous note clutched in his sweaty hand. At thirty five, Michael Spraggue thought he d put sleuthing behind him to pursue an acting career at the Harvard Rep. Until ex cop turned bodyguard Pete Collatos summons him into the race to track down death threats to his charismatic client, Senator Brian Donagher. The senator is determined to run in the Boston Marathon with Pete at his side. Until Pete dies on the killer course…
Suddenly Spraggue’s off and running on a track teeming with contenders, up to his jogging shorts in dirty politics and deadly passions. But the closer he gets, the sooner each of his prime suspects hits a dead end. Add a mysterious beauty with a motive for murder, a political kingpin with Mafia connections, and enough hot cash to grease the race to justice, and you have Linda Barnes at her cold blooded best…
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A Trouble of Fools

The first book in the Carlotta Carlyle series!Linda Barnes’s A Trouble of Fools is the book that introduced readers to ex Boston cop and PI Carlotta Carlyle, who knows trouble when she sees it like the old Irish lady offering a grand in cash to find her brother…
TROUBLE Since being bounced from the Boston police for insubordination after six years of service, Carlotta Carlyle has set up shop as a private investigator ready to deal with anything from lost pets to substantially grander larcenies. Though Carlotta, a six foot tall, redheaded ex cop, part time cabbie, and neophyte private eye, works out of her home, it’s rare that clients stop by unannounced. Especially clients like the genteel, reserved, elderly spinster Miss Margaret Devens. ALWAYS COMES With cash flow problems and a caseload so light that she’s taken to reading her cat’s mail, Carlotta accepts the case of Miss Devens’s missing brother Eugene. Oddly enough, Carlotta knew Eugene when they worked together back at Green and White Cab. As far as Carlotta sees it, this case should be a pinch until two thugs looking for money send her client to the hospital. WHEN YOU LEAST EXPECT IT The old lady’s missing brother seems to have been involved in something much more dangerous than simply driving a cab. Carlotta is determined to do whatever it takes?work the cops, pose as a hooker, and even drive a cab again to find Eugene before it’s too late.’She is one of the most sparkling, most irresistible hero*ines ever to grace the pages of a whodunit.’?Chicago Sun Times’All elements are skillfully woven together in a book that has just about everything.’ Denver Post

The Snake Tattoo

Carlotta Carlyle, ex cop, struggling private eye, and 6’1′ of long tall redhead, takes any case that walks through the door. This time the door opens twice. First in is her old partner, Lieutenant Mooney of the Boston police, unfairly charged with brutality, suspended, and desperate. The witness who can clear him is a hooker with a snake tattoo…
and she’s vanished. The second client is a teenager with a missing wallet and a split lip. He’s been roughed up on the Boston streets while searching for his runaway girlfriend. He’s too young to be a client, and Carlotta should have turned him down. Shoulda, woulda, coulda…
didn’t. Both investigation send Carlotta into Boston’s Combat Zone and the dark alleys of the human heart. Hookers don’t disappear and kids don’t take off with good reason. Now Carlotta is coming face to face with the evil that men do, and what is she going to do about it? Tackle it head on…
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Coyote

When a mysterious woman asks Carlotta to help locate her missing immigration card, it looks to be a pretty straightforward assignment. That is, until the lady disappears, and the card turns up in the possession of another woman…
who just happens to be dead. Suddenly the case is far too intriguing for Carlotta to drop and when her investigation indicates that her client was somehow connected to her inner city ‘little sister’ Paolina, Carlotta’s got an even bigger stake in seeing it through. Alongside a handsome immigration agent with some secrets of his own, she follows her leads into the treacherous underground world of illegal aliens and those who mercilessly prey upon them. It’s a lawless, dangerous territory: a place where the only thing Carlotta can rely on is her own wits, and where nothing from innocence to life itself is sacred…

Steel Guitar

They say you meet all kinds when you’re driving a hack. That’s certainly the case for Boston PI Carlotta Carlyle, who gets an unexpected fare while moonlighting behind the wheel. It’s singer Dee Willis, Carlotta’s ex friend and former band mate, who stole Carlotta’s man before clawing her way up the charts. Dee’s made the leap from Southie’s barrooms to the cover of People magazine, but now she’s back in Carlotta’s life, bringing with her a load of trouble. She hires Carlotta to track down a mutual friend who’s fallen on hard times, but Carlotta soon finds that there’s a far more menacing tune being played. Someone is blackmailing Dee, claiming she stole songwriting credits and the money and fame that came with them. As the spotlight’s glare turns as cold as the corpse that turns up in Dee’s hotel room, Carlotta’s past is about to catch up to her…
with a vengeance.

Snapshot

Every Friday a child’s Snapshot arrives at the Boston office of P.I. Carlotta Carlyle. There’s no note. No return address. Just pictures of the child as a newborn, as a toddler, as a preschooler. Maybe Carlotta should have tossed them all in the trash. Maybe then she wouldn’t have gotten mixed up again…
in murder. Discovering what happened to the child in the photos draws Carlotta into a shattered picture of private lives sadly out of focus and big shots mixed up with deadly conspiracy that stretches from a New England hospital to the Third World. And when she finds her own ‘little sister’ from the Boston Big Sisters program in a different kind of danger, the truth jumps out in harsh black and white. In a world filled with killers and innocence, Carlotta Carlyle may be the only avenging angel left…
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Hardware

In her sixth spellbinding adventure, Carlotta Carlyle, the 6’1′ redheaded P.I. from Boston, takes on a case that draws her into the mysterious shadova and of computer technology, where information is cheap, and privacy may be a thing of the past. Part time cabbie Carlotta is entering the modern age of investigation. With the help of her sometime lover, mafioso, and computer hobbyist Sam Gianelli, she invests in her first ‘Hardware,’ a cheap personal computer. And at the urging of her ex boss, Boston Police Lt. Mooney, who decries the stopping power of her . 38 S&W, she decides to upgrade her arsenal. Both types of Hardware come in handy when Carlotta is hired by Gloria, owner of G&W Cab, to investigate the brutal robberies that are causing her cabbies to quit in record numbers, and the violence and unanswered questions escalate. An explosion rocks G&W, killing Gloria’s brother and seriously wounding co owner Sam Gianelli. Is someone out to bankrupt G&W to acquire its invaluable cab medallions? Is the company a pawn in a Mafia vendetta, with Sam, the underboss’s son, the target? And who put that tiny microphone near G&W’s bathroom? Aided by a mysterious databank expert, Carlotta learns far more than she thought possible about ‘private’ transactions. And she finds herself digging into Sam’s past, exposing secrets he’s kept hidden for years secrets that begin to pull them further apart. As the investigation reaches its climax, Carlotta realizes, almost too late, that the mob may be just a fall guy in a very intimate crime.

Cold Case

Cold hearts…
. Boston at night ebbs and flows with shadows of things deadly: A hit man with a gun…
a new client with old money telling lies in P.I. Carlotta Carlyle’s office…
the searing truth behind the long ago disappearance of a brilliant young writer. Cold blood…
. Thea Janis vanished twenty four years ago, but her Cold Case steals into Carlotta’s life like an illicit lover. The new manuscript pages a sad eyed man lays on Carlotta’s desk are mesmerizing, written in Thea’s unmistakable voice, and the story he tells draws Carlotta in as surely as the notes of a haunting blues riff just beyond her grasp. Cold Case
. Is Thea alive or dead? Who is sending the new manuscript piecemeal to Thea’s family, demanding chapter by chapter blackmail? Is the author a victim, a plagiarist…
or a killer? In Carlotta’s business, blind spots lead to blind sides and looking over her shoulder can keep her from seeing where she’s going…
into a past as dark and evil as they come, where old secrets turn lethal and the words of a poet can kill.

Flashpoint

When six foot redhead ex cop and Boston based private investigator Carlotta Carlyle agrees to help an elderly recluse burglar proof her apartment, the last thing she expected was that the woman would turn up dead. Now Carlotta must find out why the eccentric yet seemingly harmless Valentine Phipps isolated herself and needed protection. Who would want to hurt Valentine? What was she hiding behind closed doors? Is there a connection between her murder and an age old mystery that the city’s top brass and its real estate moguls want to keep buried? But the most troubling question of all involves the victim s home health aide, Gwen: Why did she introduce Valentine to Carlotta in the first place? The race to catch one of Boston s most ruthless and ambiguous criminals has just begun .

The Big Dig

Carlotta Carlyle, the six foot tall redheaded private investigator, thought that working undercover searching out fraud on Boston’s Big Dig would be a challenging assignment. After all, The Big Dig, the creation of a central artery tunnel running beneath crowded downtown Boston is an engineering marvel, the largest urban construction project in modern history, a fourteen billion dollar boondoggle in the eyes of protesters. Playing a mild mannered secretary working out of a construction trailer is not quite the thrill ride she had in mind. Carlotta decides to moonlight, taking on a missing persons case, but the search for Veronica James turns up one dead end after another. So do her fraud investigations on the Dig, and soon it looks like Carlotta has dug herself one big hole. But then a break in at Veronica’s coupled with the mysterious death of a construction worker on one of the sites stirs up a storm, and soon enough Carlotta is in over her head in more ways than one. Suspenseful, unpredictable, and vivid, The Big Dig is a startling return to form for one of the masters of the crime genre.

Deep Pockets

Harvard professor Wilson Chaney’s position in life is hanging by a thread; his marriage, his reputation, not to mention his tenure at Harvard are in the hands of a blackmailer, someone threatening to sell Chaney’s secrets at very high prices. His enviable life could disappear into thin air should the blackmailer’s evidence proof of his affair with a young student become public knowledge. So he hires Boston private investigator Carlotta Carlyle to track down the blackmailer and put a stop to the scheme. Can she do it? Of course, but should she? The professor doesn’t inspire much loyalty after all, he did commit adultery with one of his own students but Carlotta agrees. Digging into the case, nosing around Harvard and the possible suspects from the rest of Dr. Chaney’s life, she uncovers a suspicious death as part of the backstory to Dr. Chaney’s situation. Suddenly Carlotta’s sixth sense is telling her the case might be more complicated and more dangerous than it first seemed. Fresh from the success of The Big Dig, the masterful Linda Barnes delivers a bold and engaging novel infused with the deft touch and intricate suspense that have become her trademarks.

Heart of the World

When private investigator Carlotta Carlyle is wakened by a late night phone call, she discovers that her ‘little sister,’ Paolina, the child with whom she was paired years ago by a local mentoring program, is missing. Carlotta combs the Boston streets looking for Paolina, torn between anger at the thoughtless teenage runaway and anxiety that something has really happened to her. Paolina is more than a sister to Carlotta. She’s the daughter she never had, or never owned up to having. She’s the one constant in Carlotta’s life, more reliable than Sam Gianelli, her mob boss lover, a man whose always unpredictable behavior has become increasingly mysterious. Heart of the World, Linda Barnes’s most intense, personal, and suspenseful Carlotta Carlyle novel yet, follows Carlotta’s trail from New England to Miami to Bogot and beyond as she probes the connection between Paolina’s disappearance and the corresponding disappearance of the Colombian drug lord father Paolina has never met. A breathless and shocking read, Heart of the World is perhaps Barnes’s best.

Lie Down with the Devil

Bestseller and multiple award winning author Linda Barnes returns with the most personal case to date for her popular Boston PI, Carlotta Carlyle. Carlotta, in unfamiliar territory working on her own behalf, finds herself in the middle of a complicated case that has as much to do with the people she loves as the backstreets of Boston, and beyond. For starters, Carlotta wants to know what her on again, off again boyfriend Sam Gianelli did to earn himself a secret indictment for murder that’s keeping him out of the country. A man with plenty of secrets, he won t tell her anything, much less let her help, and she isn t having any more luck with her old friends at the Boston PD. Sam s exile could be connected to the mob he is in the family but she s not buying it. It couldn t be that simple. Nothing involving Sam ever is. Faced with nothing but dead ends, Carlotta goes back to basics and takes a case for a nervous bride to be who wants to make sure her fianc is being faithful. Simple enough, but when her client turns up dead, Carlotta catches the kind of break she wished she hadn t. While nothing is as it seems in Lie Down with the Devil, one thing is clear: Readers know that when they re reading Linda Barnes, they re in the hands of a maestro.

The Chopin Manuscript

2008 Audie Award Winner of Audiobook of the Year. Former war crimes investigator Harold Middleton possesses a previously unknown score by Frederic Chopin. But he is unaware that, locked within its handwritten notes, lies a secret that now threatens the lives of thousands of Americans. As he races from Poland to America to uncover the mystery of the manuscript, Middleton will be accused of murder, pursued by federal agents, and targeted by assassins. But the greatest threat will come from a shadowy figure out of his past: the man known only as Faust. The Chopin Manuscript is a unique collaboration by 15 of the world’s greatest thriller writers. Jeffery Deaver conceived the characters and set the plot in motion; the other authors each wrote a chapter in turn. Deaver then completed what he started, bringing The Chopin Manuscript to its explosive conclusion. ‘Innovative and unique, The Chopin Manuscript, written by masters in the field of thrillers, is far more than the sum of its parts. Here each author shines, blending individual skill and energy, into a riveting, crackling-paced tapestry of murder, mystery, and mayhem. Not to be missed!’ — James Rollins, author of The Judas Strain ‘A GREAT story, written by one GREAT author after another, in one GREAT chapter after another. A stellar achievement of collectivity that blows from the starting gate at 100 mph and never slows down. A thrill-a-page from 15 GREAT thriller masters. Don’t miss this one.’ — Steve Berry, author of The Venetian Betrayal

The Copper Bracelet

Harold Middleton returns in this explosive sequel to The Chopin Manuscript as he’s drawn into an international terror plot that threatens to send India and Pakistan into full-scale nuclear war. Careening from Nice to London and Moscow to Kashmir to prevent nuclear disaster, Middleton is unaware his prey has changed and the act of terror is far more diabolical than he knows. Will he discover the identity of the Scorpion in time to halt an event that will pit the United States, China, and Russia against each other at the brink of World War III? A follow-up to the award-winning The Chopin Manuscript, The Copper Bracelet brings together 16 of the world’s most celebrated thriller writers including Lee Child, Joseph Finder, David Hewson, David Liss, and Lisa Scottoline to each write a chapter of this pulsing tale. Once again, Jeffery Deaver set the story in motion, and brings it to its shocking finale.

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