Frederick Ramsay Books In Order

Artscape

Ike Schwartz thought he could return to his hometown and ditch the demons that pursue him. More than anything, he wanted to blot out the pain and anger that came when his wife of less than a month was gunned down in a CIA foul up. So he buried himself as sheriff in rural Picketsville, Virginia, a community indistinguishable from any of the hundreds of small towns that hang like beads on Interstate 81 running from Pennsylvania down to Georgia.

Aside from its Civil War history, Picketsville’s only real claim to fame is Callend College, a private women’s school located just within its corporate limits. The college is notable, in turn, for housing one half of the billion dollar Dillon art collection, carefully secured in an underground bunker originally built in the late 1950s as a super bomb shelter.

It’s bad news for both Dr. Ruth Harris, the newly hired president of the college, and for a shadowy group whose services have been contracted by Middle Eastern fanatics The New Jihad when the collection is scheduled to be removed to New York. The plan is to steal the half billion dollars worth of fine art and statuary, and ransom it back for millions.

With the closure of the facility imminent, the operation must be moved forward, which, in turn, creates unanticipated risks and problems. And everyone dismisses Ike Schwartz as a stereotypical rural sheriff. He is, however, a man with uncommon skills, a tough hide, and a notable past all of which make an arresting first novel.

Secrets

Waldo Templeton was, at best, a mediocre organist. He was also careless, so his killer was able to follow him to the sanctuary of Stonewall Jackson Memorial Church in Picketsville, VA, and dispatch him. Then the Vicar’s secretary follows Waldo to an early grave.

The Vicar, the Reverend Blake Fisher, sent to Picketsville when his ambition overcame his common sense, had had enough trouble in Philadelphia. He did not need a corpse behind his altar. He did not need his gun to be stolen, and he definitely did not need the local police breathing down his back as a suspect in a double murder.

Aided by the computer wizardry of his newest deputy, Sam Samantha Ryder and the country wisdom of Billy Sutherlin, Sheriff Ike Schwartz must sort through false leads, the unsolicited helpfulness of a politically connected parishioner and missing counseling files belonging to Blake’s predecessor. Then the Vicar himself becomes the killer’s third target…
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Secrets is the sequel to Ramsay’s first novel, Artscape, featuring Sheriff Ike Schwartz.

Buffalo Mountain

It’s the bleak midwinter and the Shenandoah Valley is poised on the brink of an unusually icy and snowy season. Alexei Kamarov’s body is discovered in a forest within the Picketsville town limits. His driver’s license identifies him as Randall Harris. The last Sheriff Ike Schwartz heard of Kamarov, he was reported missing, presumed dead, in Russia, the victim of intelligence game-playing.
Ike is not happy with this piece of his past. Ike’s former CIA colleague and friend Charlie Garland asks Ike to keep a lid on the investigation.
Slowly, interagency rivalries surface as local petty criminals vie with international assassins and plotters for attention. All the while, Buffalo Mountain looms in the background. Does the community’s violent history have something do with this recent murder? Or is Kamarov’s death part of some greater political plot?

Stranger Room

The elderly Jonathan Lydell III is proud of his family history. He is related to the Virginia Lees both Light Horse Harry and Robert E. Lee and to the Custis family and thus to George Washington. But these connections don t seem to matter to the current generation. In fact, they seem utterly disinterested in family, history, or position. But for Lydell, family history is the only real thing left that and his antebellum house.

Lydell is committed to restoring the home to its antebellum configuration, complete with a Stranger Room an attached room with its own entrance, separately locked and kept for use by unknown travelers. Found in many family homes in the 1800s, the room was intended to protect the family from unsavory guests.

Nearly 150 years ago, an inexplicable murder took place in the locked Stranger Room of the Lydell house. The murderer was never caught. As far as Lydell is concerned, this brutal history just adds to the rich character of the house. But when a new, identical murder is committed in the same room, not even sheriff Ike Schwartz and FBI agent Karl Hedrick can explain it. Why would history repeat itself? What could explain these identical murders? Could the Lydell family history hold the key? The fourth novel in the Ike Schwartz series.

Choker

His pilot’s rating barely a month old, Nick Reynolds drops off the radar at night over the Chesapeake Bay. Investigating agencies call it another tragic pilot error accident. No trace of the plane is found in the Bay s murky waters.
Ike Schwartz, erstwhile sheriff of Picketsville, on vacation, is approached by Charlie Garland, an old CIA friend, to look into the disappearance. The missing pilot was engaged to Charlie s niece and the family is not dealing well with the lack of closure. More importantly, Nick, just before his disappearance, had placed a call to Charlie. Was something other than pilot error invovled in Nick’s disappearance?
Ike accepts the assignment as a favor to Charlie and also because vacations do not work for him. Ike s wide eyed entry into a simple missing persons case catapults him into an international thriller la Robert Ludlum with intimations of terrorism that might threaten the nation and its leaders. Clandestine operations, angry watermen and out of place dredging spoil complicate Ike s efforts to unravel the mystery.
While this activity thrusts a reluctant Ike into harm s way, back in Picketsville, The Rev. Blake Fisher and Acting Sheriff Frank Sutherlin sort out the mystery of the missing communion silver and a possible occult group operating in the high school.

The Eye of the Virgin

On the same evening that a body is found in Picketsville’s urgent care clinic, a mysterious break in occurs at the house of one of Callend University s faculty. Both seem to be connected to an icon, The Virgin of Tenderness, in the faculty member s possession. The fact that the body is that of the faculty member s ex wife s lover who, more interestingly seems to have entered the country under an assumed name only complicates things for Sherriff Ike Schwartz. In the search for killers and thieves, what appears to be outdated spycraft, a microdot, is found on the icon. In an era of sophisticated cyber encrypted information transfer, the presence of this bit of CIA nostalgia brings in Charlie Garland and the forces from Langley. Ike has no wish to engage with them or their problems. He has killers to apprehend and sets out to do his job in spite of the meddling by government agencies. That the bit of spycraft is something more than old time microphotography and it carried information that implicates the involvement of Israel s super secret Mossad only complicates an already messy set of problems. A dead CIA agent, a rogue handler, and a potential international incident are avoided outside the faculty member s house as the good, the bad, and the ugly are neatly sorted and carted away. During the course of all this, Ruth s mother arrives for an extended visit, Ike and Ruth are officially engaged, and the Sutherlins, Billy, Frank, and Essie, like Dilsey Gibson, endure.

Judas

Questions about Judas ISCARIOT tantalized scholars, clergy, and laypersons. Why did he betray JESUS, then no more than an obscure itinerant rabbi? Why did Jesus select him to be one of his closest and most trusted associates in the first place? Jesus claimed a special relationship with God. Should he not have anticipated his betrayal? Is it possible, then, that the two were co conspirators in Jesus martyrdom?Unlike the many recent ‘Gospels of Judas‘ which appeared after the release of the National Geographic special, this book tells a plausible and compelling story a story of a boy turned man but whose loyalty will be compromised by zealotry on the one hand and vanity on the other. The child Judas, the illegitimate offspring of a Jewish woman and a Roman soldier, struggles to understand his mother’s god, a god who allows terrible things to happen to him and his family. Despairing, he abandons any hope of ever finding that god and becomes a survivor in the brutal streets that characterized the Roman Empire in the first century. Later, as a young man determined to avenge the wrongs committed against his mother and sister, he returns to the land of his birth hoping to join the rebels led by Barabbas, only to be betrayed by them as well. Beaten and broken he is brought to the community of Zealots at Qumran and eventually to the one forming around Rabbi Jesus. During this journey he discovers God and is baptized into messianic anticipation. His enthusiasm for revolution lead him to out guess God. He proceeds down a path that will result in a difficult, and for him and others, fateful choice. In the end, faced with the consequences of that decision, friendless and without his master, he retreats to the outskirts of Jerusalem there to bring an end to his journey, perhaps to start another. Audience: Readers of religious fiction, historical fiction believers and non believers alike. Iscariot will appeal to all segments of society. It is primarily an unraveling of a mystery, not

Predators

Leo Painter is the CEO of Earth Global, a large energy, mining and real-estate development firm. He and his party of company executives are traveling in Botswana to consult with the government of Botswana about accessing their extractable resources. Sekoa is a male lion who shares with his bipedal enemies, the misfortune to be the bearer of HIV/AIDs. Weakened by the disease, he loses his place as the alpha male in his pride and now, dying and harassed by a pack of hyenas, seeks only a place to rest in peace. Painter, pursued by his own ‘hyenas,’ only wishes to find a last resting place where he can further his dream: to build a resort/casino on Botswana’s Chobe River. Their paths cross with tragic consequences as police, a plucky woman game warden, and myriad local authorities, hoteliers, and tribesmen, vie over what happened and to whom.

Reapers

The World Cup, which arrives in June, has ripple effects on all South Africa’s neighbors. The arrival of soccer fans, team owners, sponsors, and world dignitaries makes southern Africa, particularly Botswana, ripe for all sorts of intrigue and illicit activities. The American Secretary of State will visit the Chobe. The North Koreans, the Okavango, Arabs, French, Chinese, and Russians are scattered among the various lodges and hotels in the country before, during and after the games. And all will be watching and waiting on the others.

Orgonise Africa, derived from Wilhelm Reich’s popularization of orgone energy and transmogrified by bad science and wishful thinking, is an effort by fanatics to push forward a plan to seed Africa with orgone, which they believe will purify the continent, rid it of drought, poverty, and HIV/AIDs.

To the north, Patriarche, a silverback mountain gorilla, is forced to share his habitat with coltan miners led by General Le Grande, one of the Congo’s many bloody war lords. The profits from the sale of coltan, so prized by electronics manufacturers, help fuel the seemingly endless civil wars that plague that poor country.

Sanderson, the Game Ranger in the Chobe National Park, finds a body. Tracking down the murderer opens doors that lead her and Inspector Kgabo Modise first to evidence of local bribery, then to smuggling, and finally to what could well provoke an international incident, except for the shrewd action of Modise and Botswana’s intelligence community.

Impulse

Frank Smith, famed writer of murder mysteries, boards Southwest Airlines heading from Phoenix to Baltimore. His goal is his 50th class reunion at Scott Academy, but behind him he leaves the highly suspicious disappearance of his wife into apparent thin air four years ago and the relentless quest of Officer Ledezma whose Impulse is that Smith has killed her and buried the body.

But another mystery awaits Frank at Scott–a mystery 25 years old. A group of young boys walked from the campus into the woods-and disappeared. What could have happened to them? Who better than he to probe the mystery? In doing so, he not only relives his own boyhood when his father was the upright head of Scott’s English Department, but that of the classmates of the missing boys, some of whom are back at Scott now for their 25th.

Warm yet suspenseful, rich with a floodtide of emotions and packed with little nuggets of pure gold characterizations, Ramsay explores the role of Impulse on many levels.