A Cold Mind is set in Houston in the early 1980s when the city was known as the homicide capital of the nation. It was a period of boom years for the city's exploding growth and the head-spinning homicide rate was a reflection of those chaotic years.This is the first novel in a quintet of books featuring Stuart Haydon, a homicide detective like no other. Independently wealthy, and faithfully married to an architect he adores, he spends more time alone in his library than in after-hour bars with his fellow detectives. His best friend is his old, wine-slurping collie. Haydon's attraction to his work as a homicide detective is psychological, and it isn't easy to explain. Which is part of the reason why he won't walk away from it. The novel begins when three of the most beautiful calls girls who circulate in Houston's exclusive haute monde die in bizarre, violent, but seemingly unrelated incidents, Haydon suspects they are separate pieces of the same deadly puzzle....

"Scenes of homicide, Haydon thought as he stood over the reposing body, were contradictory affairs. The minimal constants, by definition, never varied: a criminal death; a Cain, an Abel. The variables were infinite: time, space, and circumstance. It was not when or where or why men murdered that made homicide investigations a tedious business. It was the surety of it, the inevitability that during every single day that dawned man could be depended upon to prove again that even after thousands of years of progressing civilization, he was utterly incapable of controlling his earliest criminal impulse. In this one thing man was frighteningly consistent, and incorrigible."At the old abandoned Belgrano estate in a derelict section of the Latin barrio not far from the oil refineries and ship channel in Houston's east side, a neatly dressed dead man is found laying on his back in the wildly overgrown weeds behind the sagging wrought iron gates. In the very center of the man's...

"Nothing on earth can equal the sensation and excitement of violence. The energy it generates is like a fabulous heat from another sun, and the human race is attracted to it like the proverbial moth to the flame."Police detective Stuart Haydon returns in another suspenseful, psychologically-charged mystery, the 2nd volume of five in the Stuart Haydon series. Heat From Another Sun unravels a story of murder and corruption involving both the superrich and the desperately poor during Houston's boom years of the 1980s.When a motion-picture cameraman is found murdered in the darkroom of a Houston ad agency, Haydon begins an investigation that ultimately brings him face to face with the darkest side of human nature. Bit by bit, clue by clue, Haydon comes closer to what his mounting suspicions can only begin to imagine. As the case progresses, the story twists and coils its way from a luxurious mansion in the center of a posh estate, to the seamiest parts of the city's...

Ella Barnes is a veteran war zone photojournalist who has seen way too much senseless violence. Quitting her harrowing assignment in Nigeria, she returns to her peaceful retreat in Austin. But her homecoming spirals into a nightmare when she discovers her husband's chronic infidelities, soon followed by his death in a hotel room. When the pathologist who conducts his autopsy covertly contacts Ella with disturbing revelations, and then mysteriously "commits suicide," Ella vows to uncover the truth behind their deaths and the double life Brady was living.Ella's investigating soon leads to Annalise Steiner who learned to scam and swindle from her deadbeat father. But unlike him, she's good at it. Now she makes millions as an underworld Dark Broker, and has recently moved into to a river-island home in Austin to begin the final stages of her biggest con.In a treacherous gambit of bribes and lies, she has stolen the anticounterfeiting algorithms of a major...

Former intelligence officer Harry Strand learns that a secret agent can never retire--and never surrender. A widower, he has started his life over and fallen in love with Mara Song, a beautiful Asian art collector. But Harry's peaceful world is shattered when he discovers a shocking videotape of his wife's death in Mara's tape collection.From Kirkus ReviewsAn engrossing thriller about autumnal Cold Warriors. Harry Strand, erstwhile super spy, has been in from the cold for five solid years. The art dealer's world, once his cover, is now his reality. Though still in a kind of half mourning for his wifekilled 11 months earlier in an automobile collisionhe is reasonably content, at least as content as melancholy Harry ever expects to be. His routines, his business, and his select company of friends solace and comfort him so that, in all, its a manageable life. But enter Mara Song, a gorgeous Chinese- American divorce with a collection of valuable drawings she wants him to sell for her. Before he knows it, Harry is head over heels. But just who is this remarkably attractive person? Is she at all who she purports to be? The question intensifies when Harry finds a certain shocking videocassette in her room detailing an auto smash-up, the very one that cost him his wife. And, clearly, what Harry had always supposed was an accident was anything but. Harry, though, convinces himself that Mara is true-blue and the cassette a plant. And almost instantly, he realizes who must have planted it. The implications are disruptive and scary: a deadly secret, which hed long felt was safely buried, has been disinterred by a powerful enemy whos no longer a sleeping dog. Once duped by Harry, he now seeks retributionon Harry and on the group of intelligence agents Harry once ran. What it comes down to, Harry grimly decides as one former ally after another is isolated and brutally dealt with, is kill or be killed. Lindsey (Requiem For a Glass Heart, 1996, etc.) is in that army of thriller writers who are regularly measured against le Carr. And hes one of the few who consistently bears up. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.About the AuthorAfter beginning his writing career in 1983 with the publication of two mystery novels in the same year, David Lindsey's tenth suspense novel, The Color of Night, was published by Warner books in April 1999. In the early years of Lindsey's writing career he published five psychological mystery novels featuring Houston homicide detective Stuart Haydon. In 1990 Lindsey began featuring protagonists other than Haydon, including a Latina homicide detective named Carmen Palma in the critically acclaimed Mercy, and Irina Ismaylova (a Russian assassin) and Cate Cuevas (an FBI undercover agent) in 1996's Requiem for a Glass Heart. As Lindsey's popularity has grown so has his international reputation. His books are now translated into 17 languages and in 1992 Body of Truth, set in Houston and Guatemala, won Germany's Bochumer Krimi Archiv award for the best suspense novel of the year. Lindsey's novels have also attracted the attention of Hollywood. Mercy completed filming in late 1998 and will be released as a feature film in 1999, and the several of the Stuart Haydon novels are currently in option negotiation. Lindsey grew up in the ranch country and oil fields of west Texas, studied English literature in university, and was an editor for many years with small publishers in Texas. He lives in Austin with his wife.

Ross Marteau is the toast of the international art world for his sensualsculptures of rich and famous women. But when a long-term relationshipbreaks up badly, he retreats to his Texas hometown -- only to have hisnewfound peace of mind permanently, and profoundly, shattered.One afternoon over lunch, Ross is approached by a woman to whom he feelsan irresistible attraction. She introduces herself as Celeste Lacan andasks him to take on a new commission, a sculpture of her younger sister, Leda, promising that the job will present artistic challenges unlike anyhe has encountered before. Though reluctant, Ross can't help but beintrigued: by Celeste herself and by a photo of Leda's face, a portraitof incomparable beauty.When he meets her, Ross is stunned to discover that Leda's body is asstartlingly unique as her face is beautiful. Just as Celeste predicted, he becomes consumed with portraying the duality of her body... and, perhaps, her soul. At the same time, he become...