The Gabe Wager Novels Series

An unidentified body points Wager to a radical religious sect A year ago, homicide detective Gabe Wager had a man killed. Though Wager feels no guilt at doing away with an evil man, his partner, Max Axton, is disgusted, and has hardly spoken to him for a year. Now Wager and Axton have to work together to solve a baffling crime that takes them to the border of Colorado—and the limits of human faith. They find the body on Denver’s outskirts, stripped of identifying marks and clutching a drawing of a sword-bearing angel. The picture is a clue: the calling card of a boastful killer. It leads Wager and Axton to the state’s desolate fringe, where a radical Mormon group refuses to follow its church into the modern world, killing to protect their way of life.

Winner of the Edgar Award: A letter tips off a Denver narcotics detective to a colossal smuggling ring Once, Denver’s small-time pushers sold nothing harder than dime bags of bad California grass. But in the last year, heroin has appeared on the streets of the Mile High City, and the police department has responded by forming a narcotics division. Detective Gabe Wager and his rookie partner spend their nights trailing dealers, making buys, and acquiring informants, in the hope that a small arrest could turn into a major case. After months picking up scraps, a stray piece of information is about to put Wager on to the biggest bust of his career. A letter from the Seattle DEA says that an informant has named Denver’s Rare Thing Import Shop as a front for nearly a thousand pounds a week of smuggled marijuana. The case could make Wager’s career—if the smugglers don’t kill him first.

The FBI asks Wager to clean up a mess on an Indian reservation Pressure is rising at Colorado’s Squaw Point Reservation, and the area is about to explode. After a federal agent is murdered and several park rangers are attacked, a mess of federal agencies descends on the area, hopelessly muddying the situation. To put a local face on the investigation, the FBI recruits Denver homicide detective Gabe Wager. When he arrives on the reservation, he finds a local populace that’s too frightened to talk to the police. A survivalist militia called the Constitutional Posse has taken control of the area, and threatens harm to anyone stupid enough to question its agenda. When Wager pushes against the Posse, they push back, giving him a savage thrashing. To beat them, he’ll have to remind the locals that no militia is as terrifying as a determined cop.

When gang warfare claims his cousin, Detective Wager seeks justice There was a time in Denver when a child’s murder was a tragedy, but now that gangs have taken hold of the city, teenage deaths are sickeningly routine. As far as homicide detective Gabriel Wager can tell, the latest victim, a thirteen-year-old boy, was a good kid, with no affiliation to any local gang. But in gangland, even innocents have a way of becoming targets. As he investigates the boy’s murder, Wager’s aunt asks him to speak to her son Julio, a teenager who’s been cutting class and quit his after-school construction job. They fail to connect, and a few days later Julio is found executed in the same style as the previous boy, shot in the back of the head. As he tries to unravel the dual mystery, Wager finds himself deep in a callous world, where even children can be killers.

Now working homicide, Wager lands a gruesome case in the botanic garden Homicide cops are always suspicious of the drug enforcement division, so when ex-narcotics detective Gabe Wager arrives on the murder squad, his first assignment is the graveyard shift. His new commanding officer hopes that the late shift will keep Wager out of trouble, and give him a chance to learn the byzantine regulations that govern murder investigations. But two days later, a call comes in just after dawn reporting a death at Denver’s botanic gardens. Wager could leave it for the morning shift, but he is hungry to prove himself, and legs it over to the scene of the horrid crime. The young woman’s head has been left inside the gardens, her body nowhere to be found. Without any way of identifying her, Wager is stuck without a lead. But when her torso surfaces in a junkyard, he begins the slow grind of finding the murderer who dismembered this once beautiful model.

A tip about a murdered mob boss forces Gabe Wager to reopen a cold case A year ago, Marco Scorvelli was murdered while picking up his morning paper. A sawed-off shotgun put a hole in his stomach, and streaked the inside of his sports coat with the mob boss’s innards. As Scorvelli crawled towards his front door, the killer left the shotgun angled neatly on the sidewalk. No prints were recovered, and no headway was ever made on the case. Now a reliable underworld source passes a message to homicide detective Gabe Wager. The killing wasn’t ordered by a rival family, but by Scorvelli’s brother, in an attempt to take control of the organization. After a year of peace, a war is about to erupt between Denver’s Italian and Hispanic crime syndicates, and Gabe Wager will be in the middle, trying to keep the city from burning to the ground.

An old cowboy asks Gabe for help with his estranged sons When he was a teenager, Gabe Wager and his friends in the Denver barrio had no greater idol than Vaquero Tommy Sanchez. One of the rare Mexicans to break through into professional rodeo, Sanchez was a hero to every Hispanic boy with dreams of making it in a white man’s world. By the time Sanchez’s star faded, Wager was away with the Marine Corps, enduring terrors but supported by his memories of hot, dusty rodeo days. Now the old barrio has been bulldozed, Wager is a homicide detective, and Sanchez is little more than a memory of faded glory. The retired cowboy’s estranged sons are following in his footsteps, and he fears they may have fallen in with a bad crowd. He asks Wager to find them and keep them out of trouble. Wager agrees, even though rogue police work could cost him his badge. What man could ever refuse his boyhood hero?

A botched coke bust forces Wager to go undercover for the first time in years For six months, the Denver narcotics team and the DEA have built a case against a cocaine-dealing heavy named Farnsworth. When Detective Reitman makes the final buy, he runs a field test to make sure the package of powder he’s just purchased is really cocaine. The test is positive, and the bust goes down. Afterwards, the DEA’s lab says that Reitman was wrong—he’d just bought two and a half pounds of harmless, legal lactose. The case is thrown out, Reitman is busted down to uniform work, and Gabe Wager has to pick up the pieces. The department asks Detective Wager to go undercover and build a new case against Farnsworth. It has been years since Wager impersonated a drug addict, and undercover work’s heady mix of lies and fear has ceased to hold any appeal. Reluctantly, he dons his new identity, and hopes that his colleague’s screw-up doesn’t cost him his life.

When a woman burns to death, Gabe Wager uncovers a nest of short-fuse fanatics The fire department finds her in the closet, knees clutched to her chest, body charred beyond recognition. At first they can’t even tell that the corpse was a woman. Although the death appears accidental, they call in homicide detective Gabe Wager to make sure. Forensics identifies her as Pauline Tillotson, an FBI informant working from inside an environmentalist group with terrorist leanings. Her cover had been blown, and the extremists killed her to protect a sinister plan to annihilate Denver. As Wager races to save his town, two policemen are killed and a teenager falls victim to an escalating drug war. Denver is coming apart at the seams, but if Gabe Wager can’t stop the eco-terrorist plot, there won’t be anyone left in the Mile High City to care.

An unidentified body points Wager to a radical religious sect A year ago, homicide detective Gabe Wager had a man killed. Though Wager feels no guilt at doing away with an evil man, his partner, Max Axton, is disgusted, and has hardly spoken to him for a year. Now Wager and Axton have to work together to solve a baffling crime that takes them to the border of Colorado—and the limits of human faith. They find the body on Denver’s outskirts, stripped of identifying marks and clutching a drawing of a sword-bearing angel. The picture is a clue: the calling card of a boastful killer. It leads Wager and Axton to the state’s desolate fringe, where a radical Mormon group refuses to follow its church into the modern world, killing to protect their way of life.

When a stripper is murdered, Gabe Wager turns the red-light district inside out More than any other establishment on Denver’s red-light strip, the Cinnamon Club has taken advantage of the new law allowing all-nude dancing. What was once confined to back rooms now takes center stage, and the activities in the club’s private section grow ever more depraved. Annette Sheldon is the Cinnamon Club’s rising star until her body is found dumped in an alley, eyes pecked out by scavenging magpies. Homicide detective Gabe Wager and his partner pull Annette’s husband in for questioning, and though they don’t think he killed her, they do think he’s lying about something. When a second dancer is murdered, Wager goes undercover on the strip, searching for the man with the violent fetish. The more questions he asks, though, the more he risks becoming the killer’s next target.

Wager hunts for the killer of a black councilman, as the city threatens to riot Gabe’s girlfriend Jo is drowning. She stares up at him, eyes wide with terror, as he fights to grab her hand. In a moment, the frothing river swallows her up, and Jo is gone. Nine months have passed since Jo’s death, and Detective Wager cannot get the image out of his mind. Rather than fight the urge to blame himself, he embraces the guilt, punishing himself for it every day. Only his work on the homicide squad can distract him, and he has just landed a case fraught with political implications. A crusading black city councilman is found murdered in an abandoned lot, and the city teeters on the edge of a riot. As Wager investigates the politician’s secret past, he must balance his own pain with a burning need to see justice done.

An old cowboy asks Gabe for help with his estranged sons When he was a teenager, Gabe Wager and his friends in the Denver barrio had no greater idol than Vaquero Tommy Sanchez. One of the rare Mexicans to break through into professional rodeo, Sanchez was a hero to every Hispanic boy with dreams of making it in a white man’s world. By the time Sanchez’s star faded, Wager was away with the Marine Corps, enduring terrors but supported by his memories of hot, dusty rodeo days. Now the old barrio has been bulldozed, Wager is a homicide detective, and Sanchez is little more than a memory of faded glory. The retired cowboy’s estranged sons are following in his footsteps, and he fears they may have fallen in with a bad crowd. He asks Wager to find them and keep them out of trouble. Wager agrees, even though rogue police work could cost him his badge. What man could ever refuse his boyhood hero?

When a woman burns to death, Gabe Wager uncovers a nest of short-fuse fanatics The fire department finds her in the closet, knees clutched to her chest, body charred beyond recognition. At first they can’t even tell that the corpse was a woman. Although the death appears accidental, they call in homicide detective Gabe Wager to make sure. Forensics identifies her as Pauline Tillotson, an FBI informant working from inside an environmentalist group with terrorist leanings. Her cover had been blown, and the extremists killed her to protect a sinister plan to annihilate Denver. As Wager races to save his town, two policemen are killed and a teenager falls victim to an escalating drug war. Denver is coming apart at the seams, but if Gabe Wager can’t stop the eco-terrorist plot, there won’t be anyone left in the Mile High City to care.

A tip about a murdered mob boss forces Gabe Wager to reopen a cold case A year ago, Marco Scorvelli was murdered while picking up his morning paper. A sawed-off shotgun put a hole in his stomach, and streaked the inside of his sports coat with the mob boss’s innards. As Scorvelli crawled towards his front door, the killer left the shotgun angled neatly on the sidewalk. No prints were recovered, and no headway was ever made on the case. Now a reliable underworld source passes a message to homicide detective Gabe Wager. The killing wasn’t ordered by a rival family, but by Scorvelli’s brother, in an attempt to take control of the organization. After a year of peace, a war is about to erupt between Denver’s Italian and Hispanic crime syndicates, and Gabe Wager will be in the middle, trying to keep the city from burning to the ground.