Fox River Valley Series

Rudy Schmidt is consumed by thoughts of Nora Hartmann.  Widow of his lifelong friend and business partner, she is everything he has ever desired in a woman.  Neither his pudgy wife nor the many women with whom he has had affairs can match her style, grace, and beauty.  Why can’t she understand the two of them are destined to be together? Rudy schemes to overcome Nora's resistance.  Is she denying her innate attraction to him out of loyalty to his wife, who is Nora's closest friend?  Rudy arranges for his wife to die.  Is she worried about the effect their union would have on her troubled teenaged daughter, who is still in deep mourning for her father?  Rudy uses all his charm to make the girl his ally.  Is Nora too engrossed in her small specialty shop to realize that her rightful place is with Rudy in the family business?  He makes plans to burn the shop down.  A final roadblock to their mutual happiness remains:  Nora's new lover.  Rudy plots to eliminate him. Nora recognizes Rudy for the dangerous predator he has become.  Before she can convince the authorities to take her seriously, however, Rudy makes the final descent into madness.  Continually frustrated by Nora's rejections, he reasons that if he cannot possess her in this life, he will settle for the eternal bonds of the next.  He sets his trap, using Nora's daughter as bait.  Cornered, Nora must summon an arsenal of ingenuity, courage, and fierce resolve to fight for her own life and that of her child.

Beneath its facade of genteel privilege, the Potter family is a snake pit of writhing emotions shadowed by dark secrets. Patriarch Benjamin Potter has managed, through sheer force of personality, to keep scandal at bay and maintain an uneasy truce between his daughters, Abigail and Rona Lee. Now he is dying, and the two women’s long-simmering animosity is about to explode in deadly violence. Rona Lee seeks access to her father’s fortune so she can continue to indulge the hedonism that has been her lifelong trademark. Abigail is determined to deny her, driven by the need to avenge herself for a personal tragedy perpetrated years before by Rona Lee. As the struggle turns ugly, Abigail’s superior intellect and innate decency seem a poor match for Rona Lee’s beauty, unbridled sexuality, cunning, ruthlessness, and lack of moral compass. Indeed, after a final, life-threatening assault, Abigail is ready to admit defeat. Then she discovers Rona Lee’s brutally murdered body and finds herself identified as the primary suspect. In a race against time, she must plunge into Rona Lee’s murky past and sift through the human debris she finds there in order to stop the killer before she herself becomes the final victim.

Best-selling author Leslie Anne Galloway has it all. Professional acclaim. Happy marriage. Secure future. Until . . . without warning, her life falls apart. Her husband Jared dies under supposedly accidental circumstances that generate more questions than answers. Who was he with that fateful night? Why was money missing from his investment account? And how do these events relate to a terrible mistake from his alcoholic past? Meanwhile Leslie suffers more misfortune. Her healthy pregnancy terminates for no apparent reason. A menacing stranger with uncanny knowledge of her life’s minutia begins stalking her. Someone breaks into her house and sabotages her car. Then comes the final blow, a writer’s worst nightmare—an arson fire destroys all traces of her latest manuscript. Is she the victim of a fickle fate? Or is an unknown enemy plotting her ruin from behind the scenes. Before it is too late, Leslie must decide who is her friend, who the foe. There’s Jared’s foster brother Charlie, whose ruthless pursuit of his own self-interest makes him a dangerous man to cross. And Caroline, the ex-wife who hates Leslie for succeeding where she failed. What of the two people who have suddenly surfaced from her past—her old nemesis Marianne, who made Leslie’s teen years a living hell, and Steve, the man whom both women once loved? Can Leslie trust Steve’s current romantic overtures? Or do his mysterious ties to Marianne point to a conspiracy that binds the two in a macabre dance of mutual destruction? The stakes grow larger when Leslie is attacked by a brutal rapist, then by a vicious predator. In a race against time, she struggles to uncover the truth. At last, betrayed and cornered, she must summon every reserve of ingenuity and courage to thwart an opponent determined not only to engineer her downfall, but to rob her of life itself.

Civil engineer Hannah McPherson has fled from a disastrous marriage and resettled in a quaint Illinois river town where she has purchased an engineering and surveying consulting firm. Like her predecessor, she has been appointed as village engineer, a position that puts her into the ebb and flow of local politics. Her resolve to remain above the fray is shattered when a sinister, unidentified source begins to meddle in the village’s decision to annex property for a controversial entertainment complex. The village board is divided into two equal camps on this issue. When a trustee drowns under mysterious circumstances, the fragile balance is broken. Days later, Hannah’s offices are broken into and searched, and her predecessor is savagely murdered. As she struggles to cope with the aftermath of this brutality, she becomes the object of a shadowy stalker who is able to anticipate her every move. A quick succession of events raises the stakes. A former employee of the firm disappears after warning Hannah that she is in danger. A trustee’s wife is murdered before she can pass along what she knows. Hannah and her ally, a man whose return to town is tainted by the cloud of suspicion under which he left years before, are attacked and barely escape with their lives. Together they race against time to expose a conspiracy that threatens the integrity of village government and the very future of the town Hannah has come to love.