Butchers Hill

Tess Monaghan has finally made the move and hung out her shingle as a p.i.-for-hire, complete with an office in Butchers Hill. Maybe it's not the best address in Baltimore, but you gotta start somewhere, and Tess's greyhound Esskay has no trouble taking marathon naps anywhere there's a roof. Then in walks Luther Beale, the notorious vigilante who five years ago shot a boy for vandalizing his car. Just out of prison, he says he wants to make reparations to the kids who witnessed his crime, so he needs Tess to find them. But once she starts snooping, the witnesses start dying. Is the "Butcher of Butchers Hill" at it again? Like it or not, Tess is embroiled in a case that encompasses the powers that-be, a heartless system that has destroyed the lives of children, and a nasty trail of money and lies leading all the way back to Butchers Hill.

All PI Tess Monaghan has to do is find some witnesses - that is, until the witnesses start dying . . . Tess Monaghan has finally made the move and hung out her sign as a private investigator for hire, complete with an office in Butchers Hill. Maybe it's not the greatest address in Baltimore, but you've got to start somewhere. Then in walks Luther Beale, the notorious vigilante who five years ago shot a boy for vandalising his car. Just out of prison, he wants to make reparations to the kids who witnessed his crime, so he needs Tess to find them. But once she starts snooping, the witnesses start dying. Is the 'Butcher of Butchers Hill' at it again? Like it or not, Tess is embroiled in a case that encompasses the powers-that-be, a heartless system that has destroyed the lives of children, and a nasty trail of money and lies leading all the way back to Butchers Hill.

Tess Monaghan, die junge Ex-Reporterin mit jüdisch-irischer Verwandtschaft, Windhund und großer Liebe zum Ausdauersport, hat sich nun endgültig als Privatdetektivin niedergelassen. Ihr Büro liegt in Butchers Hill, einer der weniger feinen Adressen in Baltimore, und ihr erster Klient ist ausgerechnet Luther Beale, besser bekannt als der "Schlachter von Butchers Hill": Beale hat vier Jahre zuvor in einem Akt der Lynchjustiz einen Jungen erschossen. Nun will er sein schlechtes Gewissen beruhigen und die Kinder, die damals Zeugen waren, finanziell entschädigen. Aber kaum hat Tess die Suche aufgenommen, kommen die Jugendlichen einer nach dem anderen ums Leben. Schlägt der "Schlachter" wieder zu? Tess ermittelt nicht nur in den heruntergekommenen Stadtvierteln Baltimores, in denen Kinder ohne Zukunft inmitten von Drogen, Gewalt und Kriminalität vegetieren, ihre Recherchen führen sie auch zum Versagen der Jugendfürsorge und zu einem dunklen Kapitel in der eigenen Familiengeschichte...

From the acclaimed author of Creep and Freak whom #1 bestselling author Jeffery Deaver praised as a “top-of-the-line thriller writer,” a high-octane novel about lethal secrets that refuse to die—until they kill again. A rash of grisly serial murders plagued Seattle until the infamous “Beacon Hill Butcher” was finally hunted down and killed by police chief Edward Shank in 1985. Now, some thirty years later, Shank, retired and widowed, is giving up his large rambling Victorian house to his grandson Matt, whom he helped raise. Settling back into his childhood home and doing some renovations in the backyard to make the house feel like his own, Matt, a young up-and-coming chef and restaurateur, stumbles upon a locked crate he’s never seen before. Curious, he picks the padlock and makes a discovery so gruesome it will forever haunt him… Faced with this deep, dark family secret, Matt must decide whether to keep what he knows buried in the past, go to the police, or take matters into his own hands. Meanwhile Matt’s girlfriend, Sam, has always suspected that her mother was murdered by the Beacon Hill Butcher—two years after the supposed Butcher was gunned down. As she pursues leads that will prove her right, Sam heads right into the path of Matt’s terrible secret. “A tense, suspenseful, thoroughly creepy thriller” (Booklist), The Butcher will keep you guessing until the bitter, bloody end. Don’t miss this “thrill ride that will have your attention from start to finish” (Suspense Magazine).

Now a major motion picture starring Nicolas Cage and directed by Gabe Polsky. In his National Book Award–winning novel Augustus, John Williams uncovered the secrets of ancient Rome. With Butcher’s Crossing, his fiercely intelligent, beautifully written western, Williams dismantles the myths of modern America. It is the 1870s, and Will Andrews, fired up by Emerson to seek “an original relation to nature,” drops out of Harvard and heads west. He washes up in Butcher’s Crossing, a small Kansas town on the outskirts of nowhere. Butcher’s Crossing is full of restless men looking for ways to make money and ways to waste it. Before long Andrews strikes up a friendship with one of them, a man who regales Andrews with tales of immense herds of buffalo, ready for the taking, hidden away in a beautiful valley deep in the Colorado Rockies. He convinces Andrews to join in an expedition to track the animals down. The journey out is grueling, but at the end is a place of paradisal richness. Once there, however, the three men abandon themselves to an orgy of slaughter, so caught up in killing buffalo that they lose all sense of time. Winter soon overtakes them: they are snowed in. Next spring, half-insane with cabin fever, cold, and hunger, they stagger back to Butcher’s Crossing to find a world as irremediably changed as they have been.