HOMICIDE 69
Chicago, the long, hot summer of 1969.
Apollo 11, Woodstock, Chappaquiddick, the Manson murders.
And the war in Vietnam, grinding on.
Chicago homicide detective Mike Dooley catches the brutal murder of a young woman, a mobster’s girlfriend. When a dubious confession closes the case, Dooley refuses to let it go. His dogged suspicion that this is more than a sex killing leads him into the deep waters of mob intrigue and political corruption. Dooley has no illusions about the quality of justice; all he has is his integrity. With his son in the thick of the fighting in Vietnam and the world he grew up in coming down around his ears, Dooley does the only thing he knows how to do— get to work and dig till he finds the truth, even if nobody wants to hear it.
“I just finished Homicide 69. What a great book. . . . It's nice to read a Chicago mystery that I can honestly say I loved front to back. The cops were right. The corruption was spot on. The geography was perfect, which is almost unheard of.”
—Jack Clark
“Homicide 69 is much more than a conventional crime novel. . . . It is, at heart, the story of one lone man, struggling against seemingly impossible odds, to do the right thing and to achieve one very small measure of justice in a world gone mad.
It’s a story brilliantly told. Reaves has captured perfectly the tenor of the time in which the story is set and he has created an absolutely riveting protagonist in Mike Dooley.”
—James L. Thane
DOOLEY’S BACK
Dooley’s back in town after eight years in Mexico, and he doesn’t like what he sees. Dooley used to be a cop, but the system failed him; after taking the law into his own hands, Dooley had to take off. Now he wants to come home, but things have changed. Dooley’s old partner Roy has a gambling problem, and a cop with a gambling problem means a cop with a mob problem. Dooley’s going to try to make everything right again, but he’s going to find that playing God is not as easy as it seems.
FREEZE
The Dooleys are back!
In this sequel to Homicide 69 and Dooley’s Back, CPD cold case squad boss Kevin Dooley and South Side detective Linda Washington take on a 17-year-old cop killing, with the coldest of trails to follow. As they stir the ashes, a cold case becomes a heater case that will test their professional and personal relationship.
“Freeze sounds like Chicago, feels like Chicago, is Chicago. The world-weary cops, the cold case, and the uneasy partnership between Dooley and Washington just puts the yellow mustard on top of the hotdog. Solid read. Check it out.”
—Tracy Clark, award-winning author of the Cass Raines and Det. Harriet Foster series.
“No one writes a better police procedural than Sam Reaves. Reaves’s knowledge of Chicago and the police department are first rate and the characters are so real they jump off the pages. Don’t miss Freeze. You won’t be able to put it down.”
—Michael A. Black, award winning author of Where Legends Lie, Legends of the West, Retribution Trail, and the Executioner series (Writing as Don Pendleton).
COLD BLACK EARTH
Illinois farm girl Rachel Lindstrom joined the State Department to see the world. Now, worn down by service in a war zone and a painful divorce, all she wants is to come home and rest.
At home, however, there is little comfort. Her brother struggles to run the family farm and handle a hell-raising son. Meanwhile, Rachel’s arrival draws a pair of rival suitors: her brother’s handsome friend and a rough-hewn sheriff’s deputy who pined for her in high school.
When a deranged killer escapes from a local prison, the far-flung farmsteads go on high alert—especially when the bodies start turning up. And in a county where the miles outnumber the people, it soon becomes clear that the madman is close behind Rachel.
RUNNING IN THE DARK
Self-exiled from Manhattan after a personal tragedy, Abby Markstein takes a teaching job at a small college in the heart of darkest Indiana. While out for a pre-dawn jog, she comes upon a car consumed by flames. The only thing more horrifying than the dead man at the wheel is the live one smiling at her in the livid glow of the fire.
More killings follow, as Abby realizes that somebody is watching her. She’s going to learn more than she wants to know about small-town secrets while coming to grips with her own personal demons.
MEAN TOWN BLUES
Survivor of a sad family history in Kentucky and bitter fighting in Iraq, Tommy McLain places his faith in a beat-up blue Chevy and his future in the city of Chicago.
There’s work there, and there’s also Lisa DiPietro. She’s pretty, openhearted, with dark eyes you could drown in. She’s also being stalked, by a creep who sticks to the shadows except when he’s inside her apartment.
Tommy figures he’ll scare the creep off. Only he does more than that, and he inadvertently sets off a gangland war that will catch him in the crossfire between two mob bosses and tangle him in the operations of an FBI special task force.
Everyone wants a piece of Tommy, and to survive he’s going to need all the resources that got him through the bad times in Iraq. Because everyone in this mean town, it seems, wants to take Tommy’s future away from him.
Cooper MacLeish
Originally published in the early nineties, Sam’s five novels featuring Chicago cabbie Cooper MacLeish, a Vietnam vet with a nose for trouble, put Sam on the map as a crime writer.
MOB COP
Mob Cop details the decline of traditional organized crime in the United States, and reveals information about the inner workings of the Outfit that has never been publicly released. Fred Pascente’s colorful stories of crooked cops and dangerous criminals make his memoir a matchless tell-all.
See the Books page for details.
