An old flame.A killer on the loose.A crazy cult on the rise.Nearly a year has passed since Garrison Gage became the reluctant guardian of a troubled teenage girl, but neither fatherhood nor the the intervening months has improved his mood. His right knee is still mostly worthless. He still prefers to drink his bourbon alone. And even with a certain blonde bombshell a persistent part of his life, he still can't be bothered to buy a cell phone. Or any p...

"Carter's writing is on target." - Publishers WeeklyA curmudgeon. An iconoclast. A loner. That's how people describe Garrison Gage, and that's when they're being charitable.After his wife's brutal murder in New York, and Gage himself is beaten nearly to death, the crippled private investigator retreats three thousand miles to the quaint coastal town of Barnacle Bluffs, Oregon. He spends the next five years in a convalescent stupor, content to bide ...

Gage might go mad. With most of inland Oregon enduring a record-setting heatwave, the hordes descend on Barnacle Bluffs seeking cooler ocean air, and it's all the curmudgeonly private investigator can do to keep from shooting somebody. What's the harm in one fewer tourist, anyway? Yet when a desperate young woman shows up claiming her depressed husband has gone missing, Gage will need all of his wits to find the man before something terrible happens. His complicated feelings for the beauti...

"Carter's writing is on target."—Publishers WeeklyFormer FBI agent Karen Pantelli lives by a simple philosophy: never, ever care. Three years after a tragic mistake ends her once-stellar career, she drifts from one dead-end job to another, quickly moving on when she finds herself getting too attached. A new city. A new life. A new way of forgetting and being forgotten.Until one chilly night behind a seedy bar, when a frightened girl leaps out of the back of...

They find him on the beach, shooting bullets into the sand.His name? Jeremiah Cooper, the son of the bullheaded high school football coach. Slight of build, soft of voice, he’s got all kinds of torment lurking behind his eyes. But despite Garrison Gage’s best efforts, he can’t pull the kid out of his shell. Then someone turns up dead at the local community college, and Jeremiah’s fragile world shatters.Add a crisis in Gage’s good friend’s life, an ongoing f...

Everybody dies. Nobody leaves ... Award-winning author Scott William Carter returns with his tenth novel, a spellbinding tale of a man who bridges both sides of the great divide.After narrowly surviving a near-fatal shooting, Portland detective Myron Vale wakes with a bullet still lodged in his brain, a headache to end all headaches, and a terrible side effect that radically transforms his world for the worse: He sees ghosts. Lots of them.By some estimates,...

A beached sailboat. A missing man. A distraught woman staggering ashore. There to greet her—Garrison Gage, full-time curmudgeon and part-time private investigator, who quickly finds himself thrust into his familiar role of crusader for the desperate and downtrodden. The woman claims to have no memory, but is she lying?When a body later washes ashore, the mystery deepens and the stakes ratchet up another notch. Dark money and even darker intentions. Violence both threatened and real...

They find his body at the bottom of Heceta Head Lighthouse -- Ed Boone, a longtime volunteer who commits suicide rather than see his grim diagnosis to its bitter end. The strangeness of the old man's death makes the local news, but Garrison Gage thinks little of it until the famous Nora West sneaks into town with an unsettling letter in hand.Professing he wants to go to his grave with a clear conscience, Ed claims to be Nora's biological father. But the revelation stirs up all kind...

Never mess with a woman with nothing left to lose.Another state. Another city. Another dead-end job. A stellar FBI agent until tragedy set her adrift, Karen Pantelli finds herself working at a pizza joint in Billings, Montana, trying to ignore the increasing global unrest dominating the news, when three armed men walk through the door. Soon a shocking turn of events launches her on a cross-country quest for a former college classmate, an alluring but manip...

Win the lottery? Congrats! You get to fight the dragon—to the death!* * *Each summer, the kingdom of Dunbury holds a lottery. The prize? The right to face the Black Dragon in a fight to the death.Nobody ever returns.Widespread hunger. Banned Books. Harsh royal decrees to keep the citizens in line. After nearly fifty years, the poor, downtrodden people in the isolated country between the mountains and the sea have lo...

They called him Goon. Not the Goon. Just Goon, as if it was his name, which it sort of was …During a mafia hit with his sharpshooting partner, a thug named Goon finds a little girl hiding in a closet. Until now, Goon has been content playing the part of the dumb sidekick, but how far will he go when the little girl's life is on the line?This riveting tale of redemption and sacrifice kicks off Carter's latest collection, six stories of crime, revenge, lost l...

Years after his wife dies in a mafia hit gone wrong, Garrison Gage finally pieces together a life for himself in the Oregon coastal town of Barnacle Bluffs. Some days the cranky private investigator with the bum knee and the caustic wit could even call himself content. Maybe even happy. But marrying again? Never.Yet not long after quirky Rita Rodriguez enters the scene, Gage can't imagine life without her. Unfortunately, when dark secrets violently emerge—involving first loves, tra...