Bøger af Dustin Stevens

Knife fights are never what they look like in the movies. They aren't a match between two men both lowered into crouches, each jabbing tentatively at the other.In an actual confrontation, people get cut. There was no way to avoid it. A war of attrition predicated on trading shots. Calculated real-time risk assessment.A maxim I learned many times over the years, bearing more than a few scars to prove as much. One I was all too happy to embrace again now. For the past year, Hawk Tate lived in a perpetual state of dread over when the phone might ring. A call stemming from his actions just north of the border many months before, resulting in a marker owed to a certain government agency. An organization that will not be refused, and always comes to collect their debts.A message from an unknown sender arrives on his work answering machine one Sunday morning. An individual with shared history needing help of a vastly different nature, and Hawk can't say no.Not to Lake Pawlak, someone he first met when he was tasked with protecting her from an international cartel three years prior. Certainly not to Savanah Vinson, Lake's friend and neighbor, and the reason Lake comes to seek Hawk's help. Savanah, while fighting to provide for her and her young sister after the death of their parents, went missing two nights prior with nothing but a fraudulent text message to explain her sudden disappearance.Despite a litany of concerns, Hawk agrees to return to Los Angeles with his friend, embarking on a hunt that plunges him into a world he barely knew existed. Full immersion into social media influencing and launch parties. Southern California nightlife, online message boards, and international politics.A growing web far surpassing anything he understands, forcing him to rely on contacts and acquaintances new and old-including the very people he fought to avoid for so long...

Fifty-four minutes after Kris Hopkins was born, his father snuck into the hospital nursery and slid a miniature football into his hands. It has been there ever since, helping him through the death of his mother, through a childhood with a single parent that was always working, even getting him a college education.Now thirty-seven and the aging star quarterback for the Portland Warriors, Kris suffers his fifth concussion and for the first time is forced to take stock of the life around him. Of the son that abhors football and goes out of his way to avoid games. Of the college sweetheart and mother of his child he never did right by. Of the fancy car and posh home that all lend themselves to an image he never intended to create.More than that though, it forces him to take stock of his own mortality and trying to determine how someone that has always identified himself as a football player comes to grips with that part of his life ending.

In occupied Germany in 1942, the young son of a Russian diplomat is picked up by the SS police, never to be seen again.In present day Washington, D.C., an employee stands before the controlling board of his company and makes a pitch that will either make or end his career. In Boston Harbor, shipments of high-end automobiles bound for Italy and containers of refugees inbound from Cuba continue to go missing.At the center of everything stands Thorn Byrd, a recent college graduate just twenty-two years old. Plucked away from the life he had planned and thrust into one he never knew existed, he is forced to decipher who is behind the sinister plot unfolding around him and the global implications it holds.Aiding in his journey are the combined forces of the Cuban and Irish cartels, both of which have lost a great deal of face and are seeking revenge, along with a brother/sister pair desperate to find a lost family member. Opposing them are a conglomerate with ties reaching back to the Second World War and bent on righting wrongs seventy years in the making.Armed only with his instincts and the help of those around him, Thorn must determine who to trust and what to do before it is too late.

The night was supposed to be a celebration. The culmination of another successful season for the guide service Hawk Tate and his business partner, Kaylan Quick, run together. A joyous occasion that saw them eat, drink, and toast the passing of another year.And ultimately ended with one of them in the hospital, both only narrowly escaping with their lives.At the same time, five hundred miles to the west, Hawk's former DEA teammate Shawn Martin and his wife are feeling equally festive. Back from a weeklong business trip, they put the children to bed and slip outside, hoping to enjoy some champagne and time together in the hot tub.A plan that ends in ways neither of them could have ever imagined.After years of working throughout Central and South America, targeting some of the largest drug runners in the world, the coordination of the events is too much to be coincidence. Someone is coming after their team, looking to right some perceived wrong.Shocked and confused, Hawk is forced to plunge back into the life he left six years before. Relying on friends new and old, he begins to unravel what is happening, his hunt taking him across the western half of the United States in search of an answer that is much, much closer to home that he would have ever thought possible...

I go to trial in two days and my star witness is nowhere to be found!When Joe Don Burrell shows up at the front door of Peeping Thoms Investigations, he reeks of fear and desperation, two things Kerrin Thoms has made a career out of avoiding in her clients. Not until he begins to outline the backstory behind the case, and why it is imperative that she help him, does she pause to reconsider.Three months prior, a tourist was murdered in Waikiki. On the surface, the case is as simple as they come, but as Thoms continues to dig, she discovers the man was actually an investor visiting Oahu from the mainland, and the last place he was seen alive was outside a nightclub in dire financial.Working with her adult twin children, Thoms begins to piece her way back through what happened that fateful night, a search that sends her bouncing from the bright lights of the strip to the tranquil sands of the North Shore.In between, she uncovers so much more than she ever realized existed in her island home, all in the name of ensuring that justice is finally served...

An ugly name for an even uglier practice...Bargain Mart, a fixture in the Missoula economic structure, has fallen on hard times. The situation is dire, they're on the phone daily with corporate, and if a financial windfall doesn't arrive soon, their doors will close.Across town, Drake Bell has settled back into his life as a third-year law student. Behind him are the events of the past fall; the scars for him, his partner Ava, and his friends the Zoo Crew are just now beginning to heal.All appears normal until a case arrives in the form of Alice Galt. Recently widowed, she was attempting to put her life back in order when a call arrived informing her of a sizable life insurance policy in her late husband's name. A policy she never knew a thing about from a company on the opposite coast she's never heard of.Despite growing trepidation, Drake agrees to look into the matter, fast finding the situation facing Galt is far from the only one in town. With each one he examines, the number of inconsistencies grows.The sole thing they have in common is their ties to a industrial giant desperate to remain that way...