The John Cuddy Mysteries Series

This “outstanding” novel featuring a Boston detective searching for a judge’s missing son is a Shamus Award finalist and the first in a series (The New York Times). John Cuddy’s heart is buried in a cemetery overlooking Boston harbor. His wife, Beth, fought her cancer for nearly a year, and when she died Cuddy gave up his morning runs in favor of nightly benders. Two months after her death, he is forced out of his job as an insurance investigator for refusing to sign his name to a phony claim. Now he is filing for unemployment, cutting back on his drinking, and attempting to become a private eye. His first real case comes in the form of Valerie Jacobs, a junior high teacher who was friends with Beth. Her star pupil, the son of a Massachusetts judge, has vanished, and the local police have no leads. To make his name as a detective, Cuddy searches for a boy who’s too smart to be found, and whose father would prefer his son never return.

A model’s murder takes Cuddy into the jaws of the Boston mobShe was born Tina Danucci, but modeled as Mau Tim Dani., Her friends find the slender beauty strangled to death in her apartment, a priceless necklace of hers nowhere in sight. The police dismiss the murder as an impossible-to-solve botched robbery, so the insurance company hires John Francis Cuddy to do what the homicide detectives can’t. But there’s something the cops know that Cuddy doesn’t: Tina’s murder isn’t just hard to solve, it could be deadly. Tina was the granddaughter of Tommy “the Temper” Danucci, the invisible face of the Boston mafia. She turned her back on him to become a model, but hers is the kind of family that never forgets a child. Once Danucci learns that the police have lost interest in the case, he puts the screws to Cuddy. This is one murder Cuddy has no choice but to crack.

While guarding an activist from an assassin, Cuddy makes himself the targetTo impress his girlfriend and remind himself of his long-neglected athleticism, John Francis Cuddy is training to run the Boston marathon. But the private detective’s fitness regimen goes on the back burner when an old friend approaches him with a dangerous assignment. Euthanasia advocate Maisy Andrus has been receiving death threats, and the police are helpless to protect her. As he tries to keep the crusading lawyer alive, Cuddy realizes that the question isn’t who wants Andrus dead, but who doesn’t. Protecting the right-to-die advocate dredges up painful memories of Cuddy’s wife, who died a slow death from brain cancer. The closer he gets to unmasking the would-be assassin, the more his old wounds open. When the killer starts taking potshots at him, as well as his client, Cuddy’s marathon training will come in handy.

A friend’s murder takes Cuddy back to the dark days of VietnamAs military policemen, John Francis Cuddy and Al Sachs bonded while patrolling the wild streets of American-occupied Saigon. Over a decade later, Cuddy is a private detective making a living in Boston’s back alleys. Awoken by a ringing phone at seven a.m., Cuddy is shocked to hear Sachs asking to meet for a drink that night. His old friend’s voice reminds him of the time a Cagney movie inspired Sachs to say that, if ever captured by enemy agents, he would break his pinkie finger to signal to Cuddy that his death was not an accident. Sachs never shows for the drink, and the next morning he is found naked in a park, his body mangled and his pinkie broken. To avenge his friend, Cuddy confronts a dark military cover-up, and travels back to the war zone he thought he left behind years ago.

Cuddy attempts to exonerate a boy who confessed to murder under hypnosisWilliam Daniels nearly didn’t make it to college. A black student raised in one of Boston’s roughest suburbs, he once barely skirted time in juvenile hall for gang activities. Pressure from his mother convinced William to straighten out, and he went on to study at a prestigious university. Years after his first brush with the law, William is in trouble again, and it will take more than a mother’s love to keep him free. While hypnotized by his psychiatrist, William admits to shooting his girlfriend, producing the murder weapon and telling the doctor where to find the body. When he comes out of his state, William is in handcuffs and thinks he killed the girl. But private eye John Francis Cuddy doesn’t trust the psychiatrist, and risks everything to save this bright young man whose mind has been turned against him.

Cuddy travels to Maine to investigate a gruesome lakeside murderSteve always forgets to buy groceries on the way to the lake house. Every time he and his wife make a pilgrimage to Maine, his first task is to drive into town and pick up essentials. Today he leaves his wife at home with their two friends and returns from the store to find a crossbow on the lawn and arrows embedded in the chests of the three people he loves most. During a twenty-minute shopping trip, he has become the chief suspect in a triple murder. The case against him is airtight—fingerprints on the weapon, blood on his shoes—so Steve’s lawyer hires Boston PI John Francis Cuddy to crack it. Steve’s lakeside neighbors had no love for his yuppie pals, but did they hate the city slickers enough to frame him for murder? Cuddy learns quickly that in Maine, even the killers are awfully polite.

A stint as a bodyguard sucks Cuddy into a vicious divorce caseDivorce will not be easy for Hanna Marsh. Her drug-dealing husband, Roy, is a cruel man, whose greed makes him unwilling to part with anything he owns—including his money, wife, and daughter. Hanna’s lawyer is terrified of Roy, but has the sense to hire John Francis Cuddy, private detective, to protect Hanna during the negotiations. Cuddy doesn’t wait to get mean with Roy, and the result of his tough talk is clear as soon as they return to Hanna’s temporary residence: her daughter’s kitten slaughtered on the floor. Cuddy makes Roy pay for his vile behavior, humiliating the drug pusher in an attempt to set his wife free. But when Roy takes a headfirst dive out a hotel window, leaving behind a murdered prostitute and a missing shipment of cocaine, suspicion falls on Cuddy. To save his client’s life, Cuddy must put his own on the line.

A reporter hires Cuddy to investigate her source’s suspicious deathAccording to its daily paper, Nasharbor is an idyllic seaside hamlet. But reporter Jane Rust knows better. Investigating a raid on a child pornography ring, she uncovers a web of police corruption built to protect the sickos behind the camera. She writes a story that should blow the lid off the Nasharbor police, but her editors scrub it clean of any reference to corruption, calling her accusations unfounded. Soon after, the cop who tipped her off to the story is dead. Rust hires Boston PI John Francis Cuddy to look into the murder and the cover-up. But prodding small-town cops is like kicking a hornet’s nest. By the end of his investigation, more good people will die, and Cuddy will wish he had never heard of sunny, tranquil Nasharbor.

Cuddy looks for the link between a disappearance and a robbery gone wrongJohn Francis Cuddy almost never gets walk-in clients, but today he has two. Although William Proft and Pearl Rivkind enter his office together, they could not have less in common. Proft is a pharmacist with greedy eyes, who relates too calmly the facts of his sister’s disappearance. Mrs. Rivkind is a recent widow whose husband was killed during an attempted robbery. Her fear that her husband may have been cheating endears her to Cuddy. The odd couple think there may be a connection between the missing sister and late husband, and ask Cuddy to find it. Cuddy does not like joint cases, but the hard sorrow in Mrs. Rivkind’s eyes makes him say yes. He quickly finds that, although Mrs. Rivkind’s grief for her husband was genuine, Proft has no interest in seeing his sister return. As Cuddy searches for answers to these strange intertwined cases, he can only pray that no more corpses appear before he finds the truth.

Cuddy looks for the link between a disappearance and a robbery gone wrongJohn Francis Cuddy almost never gets walk-in clients, but today he has two. Although William Proft and Pearl Rivkind enter his office together, they could not have less in common. Proft is a pharmacist with greedy eyes, who relates too calmly the facts of his sister’s disappearance. Mrs. Rivkind is a recent widow whose husband was killed during an attempted robbery. Her fear that her husband may have been cheating endears her to Cuddy. The odd couple think there may be a connection between the missing sister and late husband, and ask Cuddy to find it. Cuddy does not like joint cases, but the hard sorrow in Mrs. Rivkind’s eyes makes him say yes. He quickly finds that, although Mrs. Rivkind’s grief for her husband was genuine, Proft has no interest in seeing his sister return. As Cuddy searches for answers to these strange intertwined cases, he can only pray that no more corpses appear before he finds the truth.