The Jacob Lomax Mysteries Series

After a colleague dies, Lomax get roped into a deadly search for missing gems Four gunmen storm a jewelry store in downtown Denver, wounding a guard and killing a child. They leave with $2.1 million in gems and one hostage: the store manager, who turns out to be in on the job. Most of the gang winds up dead, but the manager lands in jail. Two decades later, he’s up for release, the gems are still missing, and a whole lot of dangerous men will be watching to see if he knows where they’re hidden. Private investigator Jacob Lomax is one of them. Lloyd Fontaine, an acquaintance who worked the case back in the 1960s, tells him the manager knows where the gems are stashed—a theory Lomax doesn’t buy until Fontaine gets killed for his suspicions. Lomax didn’t like the man, but he will do what it takes to avenge his colleague—and he doesn’t mind if he finds a few gems along the way.

Weary of his work, Lomax reluctantly takes a case defending a man he believes is guilty of murder When Samuel Butler, a cruelly arrogant titan of industry, learns his wife is cheating again, he expresses his feelings with a punch to her face. She is bruised when he leaves the house, but still alive. After a few hours’ drinking, he comes home to apologize, flowers in hand, and finds his wife bludgeoned to death on the floor. Or at least that’s what he tells the police. The cops don’t believe him, and neither do the people of Denver, who write Butler off as a murderer even before his trial starts. In desperation, Butler’s lawyer hires private detective Jacob Lomax to prove his client’s alibi. Fresh off a Mexican vacation and thinking of quitting the business, Jake hates himself for defending a man who is so obviously guilty. But as he digs into the victim’s past, he reconsiders. There are plenty of men who wanted this woman dead.

In frigid Denver, Lomax braves the mob to find a bookie’s missing daughter Joe Bellano never hurt nobody. A gentle barber who takes bets on the side, he’s muddling through life when his world comes crashing down around him. First he’s arrested by an overzealous police force hoping for dirt on the local mob. Released after convincing the police that he’s strictly small time, Bellano is trying to get back to normal when his teenage daughter vanishes. After years of keeping a low profile, Bellano finds himself with enemies on both sides of the law. Which one snatched his daughter? Hemmed in by the feds and the mob, Bellano turns to Jacob Lomax, a private detective with a soft spot for bookies. The case seems routine until Bellano is killed by a car bomb meant for the missing girl. The barber may have been a crook, but his daughter is innocent, and Lomax will risk death to save her from her father’s fate.

Hired to investigate a seemingly accidental death, a PI discovers a perverse secret Denver oilman Phillip Townsend is alone in his Jaguar when he drives off the cliff. The police call it an accident, but his widow, half mad with grief, insists it was murder. Her husband was quiet, cautious, boring—so what was he doing on the outskirts of Denver, driving drunk down a lonely mountain road? The Townsends’ lawyer hires Jacob Lomax to look into the matter, letting him know that it would be best if the official version of the story were quietly confirmed. An ex-cop who became a detective in the wake of his wife’s murder, Lomax is too dedicated to his work to simply parrot a police report. Digging through the dead man’s office, he finds a tape that shows Townsend and an accomplice binding, gagging, and raping a teenage girl. The most boring millionaire in Denver, it seems, had a secret that was worth killing for.

Lomax chases an accountant who has come back from the dead to blackmail his widow The plane went down outside Tucson, and all aboard were burned beyond recognition. The sole passenger was Martin Blyleven, an accountant employed by a Colorado televangelist with shady business partners, but the death was ruled an accident, and $400,000 in insurance money went to the widow. Four years later, she begins getting phone calls from a man claiming to be Martin. He has risen from the dead, but unlike the saints in his old boss’s sermons, he has come back demanding cash. Private investigator Jacob Lomax is hired to find out who is impersonating Blyleven, and how he learned the private details that make his act so convincing. But when the TV preacher’s criminal backers get wind of the investigation, they come down hard on Lomax. If he can’t wrap this up quickly, he may be in need of a resurrection of his own.