EXPRESS MALICE
Private Investigator Dan Ballantine, driving in the California desert before dawn, spots a body draped over the roadside berm. He finds a naked, badly beaten young woman bound at ankles and wrists. Mindy Weller begs him to hide her. Dan pulls his travel trailer into the desert where he cares for the young woman and…
INTENT TO DEFRAUD
6400 gallons of water per second tear at Jennifer Posey’s young body forced against a screen at the bottom of the Monticello Dam overflow drain. A deputy sheriff found the suicide note she left in her Mercedes sedan. Brian Posey, Jennifer’s husband, has a solid alibi. The Poseys’ life insurance company will pay Brian five…
CRASH AND BURN
Private investigator Dan Ballantine visits a Piper Cherokee crashed into Coyote Lake, a dry desert lake near the Oregon-Nevada border. Sacramento physician Steven Reynolds left a widow who is not only happy her cheating husband is dead, she wants her million dollars in life insurance money now. But the FAA crew investigating the crash could…
COLD LEG
Albert Romano is an avid hiker, bicyclist, and snow skier, but he should have avoided that last hike before winter. Several miles into the Desolation Wilderness above Lake Tahoe, Albert’s misstep caused a rock slide which trapped his left leg to the knee. He could not dig himself free nor could he bring himself to…
SPLIT-DOLLAR MURDER
Martha Stewart, Ralph Lauren, and Ted Turner enjoy life insurance policies in excess of $25 million purchased by their corporations as an executive perk. When three other famous and wealthy men with similar policies from the Jupiter-Saturn Insurance Corporation are murdered by a killer who gets up close and personal and uses unusual weapons, private…
PAYBACK
Steven Reynolds and Linda Coleman work a scam for $1.6 million in cash. The day before private investigator Dan Ballantine causes Reynolds’ arrest, Coleman drugs her partner and absconds with the cash. She stops in Las Vegas, buys a new identity, stashes the cash, and meets a handsome and wealthy cattle rancher, Max Tucker. Two…
DEVIL’S DROP
Heather Wright smashes her brain on a pointed rock that stops her fall from the Devil’s Postpile National Monument near Mammoth Lakes, California. A Park Ranger questions witnesses and all agree Heather’s husband, Tom Wright, was nowhere near her before her fall. Tom, an out-of-work electrician, chooses a monthly annuity payment instead of a lump…
DEAD PEASANTS
At noon, the rainy Saturday after Thanksgiving Day, twenty-eight employees of Littmann’s Janitorial Service climb onto a luxury tour bus reserved by their boss. As they mix cocktails and open beers, they think about the annual weekend party they will enjoy in South Lake Tahoe. The bus soon leaves Sacramento on Highway 50 and is…
THE BEST OF PALS
Nick, Bob, and John were born within days of each other and grew up on the same street. They went to the same schools, played on the same teams, were Cub and Boy Scouts together, enjoyed a lawn mowing business, rode bicycles and motorcycles together, and, upon graduation from high school, worked together at the…
A HURT FOR A HURT
On Jeff Sanford’s 21st birthday, his Sigma Pi fraternity brother, Tyler Thompson, offers to buy the first round at Sacramento’s Overtime Sports Bar. Four other brothers join them in the celebration. Several beers later a group of rowdy young men are beating the fraternity brothers at a pool table. When hard words are exchanged after…
SUCKED UP
On Sunday afternoon, May 22, 2011, a Category Five tornado touches earth west of Joplin, Missouri, and rips twenty-two miles easterly through the town. It kills 162 people and does $2.2 billion dollars damage. Brad Carson rides his motorcycle on the east side of Joplin when he sees the twister coming his way. He tries…
SLICKROCK
The thirty-one member Young family gathers every year to spend spring break camping and riding the mountain bike trails around Moab, Utah. In the spring of 2012 twenty-six-year-old David stops his mountain bike for a water break on a single-track section of the Slickrock Bike Trail. Several family members stop in a single file line…
DESTROYING ANGEL
Private investigator Dan Ballantine found life insurance fraud in his last case and caused a man who helped murder a young woman go to prison for the rest of his life. Malachi, a suspected co-conspirator in that murder, got away clean. Just before Ballantine left Utah, Robert Kroll, wife-beater and all-around jerk, died an accidental…
COLD WATER DEATH
Six years and fifty weeks ago David Dobson and his partner, Morley Clayton, SCUBA dive in Lake Tahoe’s Crystal Bay. Suddenly Dobson clutches his chest, pushes his mouthpiece from his lips, and starts to sink. Morley tries to reach David, but he sinks to the bottom sixteen hundred feet below. Now David’s wife, Michelle, has…
AMBUSH
In the fall of 1861, 18-year-old Pony Express rider Jedidiah Burns saddles up and leaves the Maverick Springs Station headed east toward the Butte Station twelve miles away. Though he does not know it, his mochila contains $20,000 in Comstock Silver Mine bearer bonds and $5000 in Pony Express stamps. Outlaw Jesse Nedlander and his…
DEADMAN CREEK
US Forest Service Ranger Robert Dawson leads Boy Scout Troop 370, Mammoth Lakes, California, on a snowshoe hike along Deadman Creek the second Saturday in December every year. Last year he led them to their first corpse. A snowmobile had crashed into a tree eight feet from the water. An unconscious man with a bloody…
UP AND GONE
Avid young balloonist, Eric Rafferty, and twenty-four others lift their hot air machines at the annual Montague Balloon Festival. Eric’s pregnant wife, Dacey, waves and expects to receive a ‘pick up’ call an hour later. Eric never calls. A family taking a break in an Interstate 5 rest area northwest of Montague, spots a hot…
WEST, TEXAS, MURDER
On April 17, 2013, an explosion during a fire at the West Fertilizer Company storage and distribution facility in West, Texas, killed 15 people, injured more than 160, and damaged or destroyed more than 150 town buildings. Investigators later confirmed that ammonium nitrate was the trigger for the explosion, but the cause of the initial…
ROBBERS
They should not have robbed Horatio. They should not have come to his camp site after dark wearing black jeans, black hoodies, black ski masks, and tan combat boots. They should not have threatened Horatio and his son with sawed-off shotguns. They should not have stolen their money and stuff. Horatio’s motto is: Don’t be…
LONE ROCK
The Great Coastal Gale of 2007 hammered the west from British Columbia to northern Oregon beginning Saturday, December 1. During three days of continuous storms, hurricane force winds and record level rains caused serious flooding and eighteen deaths. Sunday morning, while cougar hunting along the Little Nestucca River with his nephew, Zachary Taylor Brannigan slipped,…
HAMMER MAN
William Miller, assistant building director, drowns in Lake Coeur d’Alene, and his wife, Stephanie, receives $2 million on his life insurance policy. But she knows her husband feared water and would never go near it. Stephanie tries to hire a private detective to investigate, but none within a hundred miles will take the case. James…
MURDER MUD
On March 22, 2014, a mud slide engulfed 49 homes and other structures in a neighborhood a few miles east of Oso, Washington. 43 people were killed. Twenty-two-year-old Jordan McFadden’s husband, Kyle, died in his sleep that morning when the slide covered their small home with mud eighteen feet deep. During the following weeks, Jordan…
CAVEMEN
Carlsbad Caverns National Park in southeastern New Mexico contains 119 caves, but only three are open to the public. Exploration of the Lechuguilla Cave, discovered in 1986, has revealed it is the seventh largest cave in the world and the deepest in the United States. It contains 138 miles of tunnels and rooms filled with…
WHITNEY
Three summers ago university students Dianne McKinley and her boyfriend, Clinton Hanson, hike a section of the Pacific Crest Trail. When they reach the Red’s Meadow Resort below Mammoth Mountain, they shower, eat hamburgers with fries and chocolate shakes, and then make camp next to Sotcher Lake a short hike north of the resort. The…
THE LOST COAST
California’s Lost Coast stretches from Fort Bragg north to Eureka. It is the most remote coastal area in the state where mountains seem to rise from the sea leaving only wild, narrow strips of beach. Steep terrain and a hundred inches of rain each year made building major roads too much of a challenge. A…
MOHAVE MURDER
The California Department of Fish and Wildlife runs an annual lottery for bighorn sheep hunting tags in the Kelso Zone which is within the Mohave National Preserve. Arizona rancher Jesse Holland wins a tag and begins hunting when the season opens on December 5, 2015. On the morning of December 22, a bullet tears through…
THREE FOR BALLANTINE
THE HORSE KILLER finds Dan Ballantine and his friend, Horatio, riding their dual purpose motorcycles on unpaved Buffalo Meadows Road in northwestern Nevada. They hope to spot wild mustangs known to roam the sparsely populated area. When a sniper-fired bullet tears through Horatio’s seat, the riders take cover behind a large boulder. Bullets continue to…
FIND DAVEY
Braxton Lee Bragg and Scarlett Longstreet Bragg placed their two-year-old son, Davey, in the Livingston Residential School for Severely Autistic Children when their marriage died. Lieutenant Braxton, US Army, had a career going, and Scarlett did not want a child that God had cursed. Mildred Longstreet, a woman of wealth and Southern status, soon moved…
KIDNAP JENNIFER
Private investigator Dan Ballantine attends an upscale Reno wedding with his lady friend, Kyra Simmons. They run into Dan’s friend, FBI agent Brad Gunn and his wife, Melanie. After the ceremony the foursome and other invitees stand on the sidewalk at the bottom of a flight of steps leading to the church door. As the…
RESCUE RUTH
A man from one of private investigator Dan Ballantine’s previous cases tells twenty-something Henrietta ‘Ren’ Wohlman how to contact him. Dan refuses to talk with her until she offers him a drink of Pappy Van Winkle’s Family Reserve 23 bourbon. Ren lets Dan read a letter she received from a former roommate who fell in…
BROTHER HUNTER
After wealthy Alexander Karkazis, Sr., has a fatal heart attack, his wife, Eva, calls their two sons to his office. She declares the era of being coddled by their father is over. She has closed their credit card accounts and will no longer pay the bills their father paid. She gives each son his birth…
GUARDING RUTH
Two months ago Ren Wohlman hired private investigator Dan Ballantine to help her rescue her partner, Kathy, and her partner’s six-teen-year-old friend, Ruth Hudson, from a religious cult. Ruth had been raised and home schooled there since birth. Ren finds a ‘normal’ home for Ruth where she learns to be a ‘regular’ teen from two…
BALLANTINE AND SMITH
In HORATIO’S COMA private investigator Dan Ballantine learns that his best friend was the victim of a brutal attack and lies unconscious in a Reno hospital. Someone left Horatio in his truck in the parking lot outside the Emergency Room. Dan’s investigation leads to a suspect who is a Doomsday Prepper with a secret desert…
CAMP FIRE
Northern California’s Camp Fire of November, 2018, was the deadliest and most destructive in the state’s history. It covered an area of 240 square miles, destroyed 18,800 structures including the towns of Paradise and Magalia, and caused 85 fatalities. One person remains unaccounted for. Ex-convict Vincent Fairchild lived with his wife in a primitive cabin…
LOCKDOWN
Part 1: The SLEEPING BAG RAPIST drugs his victims and leaves them zipped in one at the edges of dark parking lots. When Sissy’s and Whizzer’s friend, Dixie Hatcher, is a victim, they call insurance investigator Dan Ballantine to help them find the rapist. While visiting his university history professor, Dan learns something bad is…
DAN AND HARKER
In WYOMING private investigator Dan Ballantine is tasked with finding Gary Miller, a fifty-something oil executive who happened to be close to the Beirut, Lebanon, harbor explosion of August 4, 2020. The government there declares Miller dead along with twenty other people whose body parts cannot be found. Jupiter-Saturn insured Miller’s life for five million…
IS KELLY DEAD?
Landscape photographer Kelly Thayer spent a June summer morning hiking a trail on the east side of Mount Wrightson about forty miles south of Tucson, Arizona. The fifty-two-year-old fitness nut took dozens of photos of the mountain with her Nikon camera. She planned a freelance article for a travel magazine. While on a steep trail,…
LAKE MOHAVE
HAILEY floated toward Dan Ballantine’s fishing spot on Lake Mohave early in the morning on April first. When she called for help, he went to her and discovered she had been beaten. One eye was swollen closed, her lips were puffy, and her body was bruised in several places. She described an angry and drunk…
SUMMER OF ’21
In the late spring of 2021, Dan Ballantine is second in line in a Reno gasoline station mini-mart when two armed men enter. One stands by the door while the other robs the clerk. When they leave, Dan pulls his Smith & Wesson, which he calls his WYATT (With You All The Time) pistol, from…
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