William E Butterworth

The Camilla Rose that Morgan Philadelphia Homicide Sergeant Matt Payne had known as a teenager was beautiful and brilliant -- how was it possible she'd jumped to her death from her own balcony? Her brother tells Payne she'd tragically been battling a lifetime of mental demons, and there is plenty of evidence of it, but still -- something just doesn't sit right. The more Payne digs, the more complications he discovers. Reputations are on the line here,...

"When Jim Cronley hears he's just won the Legion of Merit, he figures there's another shoe to drop, and it's a big one: he's out as Chief, DCI-Europe. His new assignments, however, couldn't be bigger: to protect the U.S. chief prosecutor in the Nuremberg trials from a rumored Soviet NKGB kidnapping, and to hunt down and dismantle the infamous Odessa, an organization dedicated to helping Nazi war criminals escape to South America. It doesn't take long...

"In Philadelphia--suffering among the country's highest murder rates--the tension between the Philadelphia Police Department and its Citizens Oversight Committee has long been reaching a boiling point. That turmoil turns from bad to worse shortly after the committee begins targeting police shootings--especially those of twenty-seven-year-old Homicide Sergeant Matt Payne, the 'Wyatt Earp of the Main Line'--and then the committee's combative leader...

Charlie Castillo's secret unit has been disbanded--but that doesn't mean he's out of business. As experience has painfully shown him, there are many things the intelligence community can't do, won't do, or doesn't do well, and he has the men and assets to help set things straight. But the first opportunity, when it comes, is shocking: a FedEx package arrives, bearing photos of barrels containing some of the most dangerous biohazard materials on earth,...

In the first weeks after World War II, a squeaky-clean new second lieutenant named James D. Cronley Jr. is spotted and recruited for a new enterprise that will eventually be transformed into something called the CIA. One war may have ended, but another one has already begun, against an enemy that is bigger, smarter, and more vicious: the Soviet Union. The Soviets have hit the ground running, and Cronley's job is to help frustrate them, harass them,...

January 1946: Two WACs leave an officers' club in Munich, and four Soviet NKGB agents kidnap them at knifepoint in the parking lot and shove them in the back of an ambulance. That is the agents' first mistake, and their last. One of the WACs, a blond woman improbably named Claudette Colbert, works for the new Directorate of Central Intelligence, and three of the men end up dead and the fourth wounded. The "incident," however, will send shock waves...

August 6, 1943: In his brief career in the Office of Strategic Services, twenty-four-year-old Cletus Frade has already been involved in a lot of unusual situations, but nothing like the one he's in now, standing with a German lieutenant colonel named Wilhelm Frogger in a Mississippi prisoner-of-war detention facility. Frade's job? To help Frogger escape so the OSS can use Frogger's knowledge and connections to kill Adolf Hitler.

Homicide Sergeant Matthew Payne is used to murder, but lately there's been an awful lot of it in Philadelphia. A gangland shooting in a popular tourist location has left six dead, most of them innocent bystanders, and days later the body of a headless Latina turns up in the Schuykill River. Everybody assumes they're not related, but Payne can't shake the hunch that there's something more to it--and that hunch leads him far from the City of Brotherly...