James W. Hall

Based on true events, Magic City is the powerful story of two people who unwittingly lit the match that burned the community of Greenwood to the ground and erased it from the history books. Jewell Parker Rhodes imagines this tragedy through the eyes of Joe Samuels and Mary Keane, two people fundamentally divided by race but forever joined by fate. When Joe, a young man entranced by Houdini, is falsely accused of rape, he must perform his greatest escape by eluding a bloodthirsty lynch mob. Haunted by the mystery of his brother's death and the dark truth behind his father's success, Joe soon learns that he has been running all his life and that this may actually be the moment to turn and fight. Mary, the motherless daughter of a poor farmer who tries to marry her off to the farmhand who viciously raped her, is barely able to imagine what life could be like outside the prison of her own home. Now, however, she must unlock the courage to help exonerate the man she has accused with her panicked cry. Magic City, a mythic tale of violent revenge, is a portrait of an era, climaxing in the heroic but doomed stand that ultimately pitted the National Guard against a small band of black men determined to defend the town they had built into the "Negro Wall Street." Depicted against a backdrop of jail escapes, ghosts, family betrayal, and lost loves, it is a tale at once harrowing and redemptive.

Years after Thorn's real parents are killed by a drunk driver and he executes his own justice in the form of murder, his foster mother is found brutally murdered, and Thorn edges in among the suspects.

In this, his eleventh outing, Lewis Cole--former Department of Defense research analyst--is "hard aground" at his beachfront home, recovering from major surgery, when threats and danger come right to his front door. Alone at night, hes convinced he's hearing someone breaking and entering into his historical home, and during the day, he's being harassed by genealogy researchers, and then, a local gang involved in the highly lucrative and dangerous heroin business brutally make their appearance known. The unexplained murder of an older woman (who was an antiques dealer and a local historian) then kicks off a long, bloody trail of old history and feuds, bringing Lewis and his historical home right into the center of the violent opioid epidemic, where no one is safe--and no one will be spared.

After her journalist husband and infant son are brutally executed in a fire in their Florida home, photographer Harper McDaniel has nothing left to live for except settling the score. When the local police fail to take the arson seriously, Harper takes the reins and discovers her husband was investigating some mysterious deaths at a cacao plantation on the Ivory Coast. Now she's convinced he was targeted in a corporate conspiracy to silence him. Aided by her former mafioso grandfather and well-connected financier brother, Harper embarks on a global manhunt, flying first to Africa, then Zurich to expose a high-level cover-up inside a powerful chocolate conglomerate. But Harper has a few secrets of her own starting with her lethal martial arts skills and she's not afraid to take on any hired guns or guerrillas standing in her way. In trying to cover their tracks, the conspirators made one fatal miscalculation: they didn't count on Harper McDaniel coming for them. Harper McDaniel's husband was investigating some mysterious deaths at a cacao plantation on the Ivory Coast just before he and their infant son died in a fire in their Florida home. She's convinced he was targeted in a corporate conspiracy to silence him-- and she's determined to settle the score. Aided by her former mafioso grandfather and well-connected financier brother, Harper embarks on a global manhunt to expose a high-level cover-up inside a powerful chocolate conglomerate. In trying to cover their tracks, the conspirators made one fatal miscalculation: they didn't count on Harper McDaniel coming for them.

When his boyhood friend, now an FBI agent, disappears, Thorn, a fisherman in Key Largo, becomes entangled in a web of violence and intrigue that takes him from seamy local bars to fancy ocean villas, and almost costs him his life.

Returning to Key West to investigate the death of his estranged father, Shaw Chandler uncovers evidence linking a twenty-year-old double murder with a father-son team of experts in the art of illegal disposal of biochemical weapons.

"A year ago Thorn's son, Flynn Moss, disappeared into the eco-underground, his only contact with Thorn a series of postcards chronicling his exploits. But a postcard arrives unlike the others, a call for help, Thorn jumps into action, setting off for North Carolina. But before Thorn arrives, he's intercepted by a federal agent who informs him he's too late--Flynn had been acting as an informant for the FBI, and when his traitorous acts were discovered, he was summarily executed. The agent proposes a scheme to catch Flynn's killer using Thorn as bait. Thorn, full of rage, accepts the job if only to get his hands on his son's killer. The mission takes him to a small town where the gang is holed up, planning an attack on a hog farming operation that has been polluting local rivers and spreading illness through the area. Little by little Thorn discovers that nothing he's been told is true, and the trap they're setting isn't for Flynn's killer, but for his partner, a woman who proves more daring and dangerous than any Thorn's ever met. She's on her own crusade of vengeance, and she and Thorn make an uneasy alliance. With her help Thorn uncovers a conspiracy that stretches far beyond this small Carolina town"--