Dorothy Salisbury Davis

Following the national success of Sisters in Crime 1 and 2, this third anthology features today's top storytellers. Included are twenty-one tales to chill the blood, tickle the fancy, and challenge the skills of criminal detection!

An engrossing crime novel set in New York's Little Italy from Grand Master of crime fiction Dorothy Salisbury Davis. They are a secret society in New York's Little Italy. The Little Brothers swear to a strict code. While they carry out good works, they believe in using "the Killing Eye" on evildoers. When 16-year-old Angelo is put up for membership, he is not sure he wants to join. But the assignment the society demands of him sounds easy - to put "the Eye" on an old shopkeeper named Grossman who is suspected of dealing heroin. Then Grossman is stabbed to death and the police have only one suspect: the Italian boy who spent the week outside his shop, watching and waiting for a stranger to die. Alongside Angelo's story, a police investigation unfolds, led by Lieutenant Marks, a cop with a heart and a brain, who is willing to take risks in tracing a series of complicated Mafia connections to catch the true killer.

Coronation year / Michael Gilbert Appointment with the governor / John Ball The locked-room cipher / Edward D. Hoch The cow and the jackrabbit / Janwillem van de Wetering Connoisseur / Bill Pronzini The lily pond / Rachael Cosgrove Payes Past tense / Elizabeth Gresham A dark blue perfume / Ruth Rendell The Arabella plot / Lawrence Treat The last party / Dorothy Salisbury Davis Who killed Father Christmas? / Patricia Moyes Widow / Joe L. Henseley Almost perfect / R.A. Lafferty The legend of Dirty Dick / Robert Bloch Revelation / Rosemary Gatenby The accomplice / John D. MacDonald Mama and the bastard / Florence Mayberry

"This... novel tells a story of intrigue in Greece--The story of a dangerous search for justice"--Book jacket.

General Ransom Jarvis is writing his memoirs about a distinguished career that spanned five continents and three wars. Along the way, he stumbles upon a scandal about a philandering ancestor—America’s ambassador to England who went on to become president of the United States. But a very clear and present danger embroils the irascible retired general in a deepening quagmire of deceit, fraud, and murder. Enter Mrs. Norris, the housekeeper who has been almost a mother to Ransom’s son since he was a boy. Jimmie is currently running for governor of New York and enjoying his budding relationship with sculptor Helene Joyce. A sudden death changes everything, plunging Jimmie and Mrs. Norris into a bizarre case headed up by Jasper Tully, chief investigator for the Manhattan district attorney’s office. With more lives at stake, the trio follows lead after lead into a web of crime that only the canny housekeeper can clean up in the nick of time.

Publication Date: December 1, 1958 Three of Davis' most endearing and enduring characters return to delight and thrill mystery and suspense fans. This time, Jimmie Jarvis finds himself involved in a threatened paternity suit against a dapper little man named Teddy Adkins, whose wealthy family are old clients of Jarvis' law firm. At the same time, Jasper Tally is embroiled in the investigation into the strangulation of a woman -- crime which appears tied to several other unsolved mysteries. At the center of the two storm fronts, Mrs. Norris, the redoubtable housekeeper, must fend off the attentions of the dapper client and an unseen, sinister threat to her life.

From true-crime legend Ann Rule comes this riveting story of a young woman whose life ended too soon -- and a determined mother's eleven-year crusade to clear her daughter's name. It was nine days before Christmas 1998, and thirty-two-year-old Ronda Reynolds was getting ready to travel from Seattle to Spokane to visit her mother and brother and grandmother before the holidays. Ronda's second marriage was dissolving after less than a year, her career as a pioneering female Washington State Trooper had ended, but she was optimistic about starting over again. "I'm actually looking forward to getting on with my life," she told her mother earlier the night before. "I just need a few days with you guys." Barb Thompson, Ronda's mother, who had met her daughter's second husband only once before, was just happy that Rhonda was coming home. At 6:20 that morning, Ron Reynolds called 911 and told the dispatcher his wife was dead. She had committed suicide, he said, although he hadn't heard the gunshot and he didn't know if she had a pulse. EMTs arrived, detectives arrived, the coroner's deputy arrived, and a postmortem was conducted. Lewis County Coroner Terry Wilson, who neither visited the death scene nor attended the autopsy, declared the manner of Ronda's death as "undetermined." Over the next eleven years, Coroner Wilson would change that manner of death from "undetermined" to "suicide," back to "undetermined" -- and then back to "suicide" again. But Barb Thompson never for one moment believed her daughter committed suicide. Neither did Detective Jerry Berry or ballistics expert Marty Hayes or attorney Royce Ferguson or dozens of Ronda's friends. For eleven grueling years, through the ups and downs of the legal system and its endless delays, these people and others helped Barb Thompson fight to strike that painful word from her daughter's death certificate. On November 9, 2009, a precedent-setting hearing was held to determine whether Coroner Wilson's office had been derelict in its duty in investigating the death of Ronda Reynolds. Veteran true-crime writer Ann Rule was present at that hearing, hoping to unbraid the tangled strands of conflicting statements and mishandled evidence and present all sides of this haunting case and to determine, perhaps, what happened to Ronda Reynolds, in the chill still of that tragic December night. - Jacket flap.

One afternoon in Manhattan’s Washington Square Park, Eric Mather is approached by two men, Tom and Jerry, with a business proposal: a bit of light espionage that may be considered treason. Eric’s friend and colleague, physics professor Peter Bradley, is on his way back from an international conference in Athens. In his briefcase is a roll of film that must be confiscated to keep the Cold War from turning hot. Bradley won’t miss this little roll of film, they say, and nobody will get hurt. When Bradley is stabbed to death in an apartment on East Tenth Street, Eric realizes he has made a bargain with the wrong people. Desperate to make up for betraying his friend, he ventures into a shadowy world of danger and intrigue as he sets out to learn everything he can about Tom and Jerry—two foreign agents engaged in an atomic game of cat and mouse.

A frightening confession leads a priest to hunt down a murderer in Grand Master of crime fiction Dorothy Salisbury Davis's bestselling novel, which critic Anthony Boucher called "one of the best detective stories of modern times." On a hot Saturday night in Manhattan, Father Duffy sits in a confessional, growing alarmed as he listens to the voice of a distraught young man who speaks of bloody hair and a dead woman and a compulsion to do things with a hammer that he does not understand. Before the priest can persuade the man to confess to the police, the killer flees, still clutching the hammer. The next day, Father Duffy learns that a high-class call girl on the East Side has been savagely murdered, and no suspect has been found. As he searches for the disturbed young man who he fears will kill again, cerebral New York Police detective Sergeant Ben Goldsmith takes the lead in the investigation of the call-girl murder, racing against the clock to catch a very clever killer who, when enraged, cannot control his need to swing a hammer.

From Publishers Weekly Veteran crime-fiction author Davis's newest is a multifaceted novel that addresses timely issues. Young Julie Hayes, gossip columnist for a New York newspaper, is suddenly sued for divorce by her husband, pedantic gourmet columnist Geoffrey Hayes. Stunned, she walks from their apartment through the streets of Manhattan and is lured by the feigned cries of a child to a trailer in an empty lot, where she is raped and sodomized by a pair of masked men. To recover her equilibrium, Julie takes a leave from the paper and departs for Ireland, in the hope of finally finding her father, whom she has never known. There she discovers new family and friends: sweet-tempered playwright Seamus McNally, brilliant artist Edna O'Shea, her father's new wife and assumed widow. Julie later learns of Edna's political associations and links to Irish terrorism. In the meantime, her rapists havecoincidentallysurfaced in Ireland, and the strands of the plot come together. No simple mystery, this novel offers violence, romance, intrigue and a dash of politics, all contributing to a tale chockful of action that leads to a heartening, if bittersweet, conclusion. --Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Determined to rid her home of all vestiges of her husband's first wife, Julie Hayes begins hunting in the galleries of SoHo for a painting and becomes involved in a mystery involving the theft of a priceless painting

Julie Hayes is looking for excitement when she sets herself up as a tarot-reader in Manhattan's seamier side. But she hasn't gambled for murder, which thrusts her into a role she isn't ready for - playing between the Mafia and the NYPD in a show-stopper whose climax is terror.

"An entertaining combination of a police procedural and a comedic romp that will have readers laughing on the edges of their seats...Step aside, Carl Hiaasen...there's a new sheriff in town!"-Chicago Sun-TimesFlorida Department of Law Enforcement agent Bill Tasker is still smarting from a near-lethal run-in with the FBI. But he reluctantly helps the Bureau track down a stolen Stinger missile. As usual, the Feds take all the credit-but something about this whole setup doesn't feel right. Tasker decides to poke around, and stirs up trouble with his boss, the FBI, the ATF, and, worst of all, a gentleman who loves to blow things up-the bigger, the better. The bomber hasn't killed anyone yet, but if Tasker keeps snooping around-well, there's a first time for everything...