Showing results by author "Al Lamanda" in All Categories

On the night of the full moon in Wyoming Territory, somebody dies a horrible and ghastly death by being scalped. For months, the territory is held by the grip of fear and Governor Hale turns to Charles Porter, founder of the Illinois Detective Agency, for help. Porter's two top agents, James Duffy and Jack Cavill, are on holiday with their lady friends, so Porter assigns Joe Charles and Tom Adcock and scout/tracker Joseph Goodluck, a Mexican Comanche, to the assignment. Charles, Adcock, and Goodluck report to Governor Hale in Wyoming Territory. The most recent full-moon killing took place ...

Before he can retire to work his Montana ranch full-time, he has one more important task to perform. A junior marshal who Tillman appointed in Laramie, Wyoming, a few years earlier has taken a wrong path and Tillman must remove him from office. Tillman leaves his two grown sons and his sister, Alice, on the ranch and sets out for Wyoming by railroad. Along the way, Tillman makes a few detours and stops to visit old friends and colleagues. As he travels south to Laramie, Tillman relives his life in flashbacks. From the Big Woods of Wisconsin, where he was born and met his wife, Tillman's ...

Book three, The Case of Duffy’s Revenge, picks up where book two leaves off, with the murder of James Duffy’s future wife in the town of Miles City, Montana. The Agency is naturally outraged and Agency Director Charles Porter sends James Duffy, Jack Cavill, and Joseph Goodluck to Miles City to investigate. Porter and his personal assistant, Miss Potts, also make the trip. In Miles City they meet with Sheriff Bates, who provides details of what happened. During the Miles City founding day celebration, Duffy’s future wife, Sylvia Trent, attended the dance with a family friend. Sometime ...

Police Detective John Bekker had it all: a beautiful wife, a five-year old daughter, and a job he loved. Assigned to a special task force investigating organized crime, Bekker got a little too close to mob boss Eddie Crist. As a message to back off, Bekker's home was invaded and his daughter witnessed the brutal murder of her mother. A decade later, Bekker is a drunk, living in a run-down trailer on the beach.

After the Invasion at Normandy Beach in June of 1944, Allied intelligence reports indicated a desperate push by the German Army to turn the tide of the war. Reports of a new chemical weapon developed by German scientists could be unleashed if not stopped. Special Forces 1st Sergeant John Ray and his squad of twelve are selected to perform a reconnaissance mission across the French countryside to seek out locations where the German Army may be hiding their new chemical weapon. As Ray and his squad advance closer to the German front they encounter an explosion in the distance and suddenly a ...

The exploits of an inept and hard luck band of New York City criminals. Led by master thief Lee Gavin and his trusty sidekick Ian Nelson, the group sets out to steal the set of nine 1894S dimes, the most valuable dimes in the world worth fifteen million dollars. With Murphy’s Law in full effect, one catastrophe after another befalls the group as the dimes always seem just inches from their grasp, providing close encounters and side splitting laughs along the way.

Emmet Lang is a very unique type of outlaw. A veteran of the Civil War, he returned home to find his family murdered and the family farm destroyed. Bitter and disillusioned, he wandered the south and west and struck upon an ideal way to make a living, to steal from criminals.

A dying mob boss skips over his son and leaves his fortune to his daughter, a Catholic Nun assigned to Central Africa. After his death, the nun, Jenna Costello, flies to New York City to hear the terms of her father’s will. To her shock and the church’s dismay, Jenna’s father has cut his son Vincent out of the will and left his entire estate to Jenna, who plans to use the fortune to build a church and hospital in Africa. Outraged at being cutoff, Vincent has his mob lawyers hire a retired CIA mole to plan the accidental death of Jenna so he can claim his father’s fortune. The mole ...

Tales of the West: A Western Anthology is a collection of six western short storied filled with action and adventure, including Little Dodge, The Bounty Hunter, The Driver, The Stable Boy, The Orphan and The Road to Laramie.

The zombie apocalypse comes to the old west when in 1879, a US Marshal travels from Wyoming to Montana to search for a missing federal agent. The Marshal and his posse get far more than they bargained for when instead of finding the missing agent they find they countryside filled with mysterious blood thirsty ghoul’s hell bent on feasting on live human flesh. There is nowhere to run, nowhere to hide and it’s all out war between the living and the dead.

In 1926 Indiana, when newspaper reporter James Chase receives a telegram informing him his estranged father passed away in Los Angeles, James is surprised to receive a personal invitation to the funeral. In his forty-five years, James has no memory of his father, John Chase and no idea why he was invited to the funeral. However, out of respect and curiosity, James flies to Los Angeles to attend the funeral. James is met by a Hollywood reporter who takes him to his father’s farm house and orange groves in the countryside in Orange County. His father’s butler, a black man named Cyrus, ...

Michael and Michele Dunn, twelve-year-old twins, are wealthy orphans living with their socialite businesswoman aunt, Angela Dunn, in Chicago. Angela is too committed to running the family business to raise the twins and she makes arrangements with the Illinois Detective Agency to send them to California to live with distant relatives. The detective agency is run by the son of its founder, Frank Miller. He contracts to take the twins to California and they leave with a team of his men. On the journey, the twins overhear a plot by Miller to kidnap them and hold them for a very high ransom ...

Jack is a little boy with a big secret. He’s a true telekinetic. Guarded by the US Secret Service round the clock, Jack lives alone with his mother Jennifer in a secret location known only to a few. So it was thought. A leak puts Jack and Jennifer, in grave danger, and aided by Secret Service Agent Ryan Dunn, they are forced to flee and go into hiding. With unknown killers stalking their every move, Dunn is willing to risk his life to save Jack and his mother, but Jack has other ideas. This is a page turner with an ending that will shock you and leave you breathless.

When Bekker's old friend and state prosecutor Carly Simms wakes up next to a murdered young man in a motel room after a night of drinking, she doesn't remember a thing, especially stabbing the young man in the heart. Although all the evidence points to her guilt, Simms hires Bekker to prove her innocence. Bekker soon finds himself ensnared in a deadly game of cat and mouse.

It’s 1887 and The Illinois Detective Agency now has a new branch in San Francisco to support the existing office in Springfield, Illinois. A gruesome string of murders gives the Justice Department cause to contact The Illinois Detective Agency. Five men, seemingly unrelated have been found murdered with a Bowie Knife in their chest and the Justice Department doesn’t know what to make of it. Two additional men in Canada were found murdered in the same fashion. The entire agency, plus a disheveled, funny, little detective from Scotland Yard named Alfie Birdwhistle goes to work on the case...

Imagine waking up in a hospital on a small tourist island off the coast of Southern Maine. You have no knowledge of the boating accident that claimed two lives and almost your own. In fact you remember nothing at all. You have full-blown amnesia.

The Big Woods traces the history of the Boyd Family beginning in the 1850’s, through The Civil War and ending in 1871. It is a fast-paced, action and adventure western, laced wit history, humor, family and love.

Beyond The Big Woods continues the saga of the Boyd family from the years 1874 through 1877. As the country grows, so does the Boyd family as they face new challenges with each passing year.

When counterfeit money is reported in large amounts from thirteen towns and cities across the country and the U.S. Secret Service is at a loss as to its origin, President Cleveland turns to The Illinois Detective Agency for help. Old friends with Charles Porter, founded of the Illinois Detective Agency, Cleveland brings James Duffy and Jack Cavill, principal owners of the agency to Washington DC, where they accept the assignment. Duffy, Cavill and the rest of the agency members, Miss Potts, Quill, Harvey, Joseph Goodluck and Lester Holt start the investigation by visiting the thirteen ...

Former US Marine, sometimes private investigator, oftentimes hit man for hire, Kellerman is as hard core as they come. Peppered into his life, Kellerman’s closest friend from the Corps and sometimes backup man is gay, his business associate is a Cuban mobster in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen and his girlfriend is a cop. When the three college boys who raped and left a young girl for dead are found innocent on a technicality, the girl’s father comes to Kellerman for justice. He gets it, Kellerman style. From first page to last, Kellerman’s seedy world in Hell’s Kitchen will leave you...