Gregor Demarkian mysteries

Edgar Award Finalist: The patriarch of a wealthy, notoriously unpleasant Philadelphia family is murdered, and a former FBI agent must figure out whodunit.
 The Hannaford who made the family fortune called himself a tycoon. The newspapers called him a robber baron. Since the days of Robert Hannaford I, the family has infested Philadelphia society like a disease. The current Hannafords are a clan of embezzlers, gamblers,...

At a Fourth of July charity fundraiser, politics turns deadly. Stephen Fox may be a moron, but he may also be America's next president. The dimwitted legislator is just smart enough to know when to smile for the camera. But two women stand in the way of his campaign: his mistress and his wife, who has never recovered from the death of their daughter, a pain she manages by devoting herself to fundraising for children with Down syndrome. During a weekend-long...

Winter is thawing, but in a small-town convent there lurks an ice-cold killer Her childhood friends wanted careers, but Brigit Ann Reilly spent her youth looking forward to her wedding-her wedding to God. When she finally gets to don the habit, her new order sends her to Maryville, where a former sister is poised to become Rome's first Irish-American saint. Brigit has no time to worry about Vatican politics. She's about to become a martyr herself....

In a small New England town, a Christmas controversy is grounds to kill. Bethlehem, Vermont, is a sleepy little town, distinguished from the neighboring hamlets by its Christmas pageant. The holiday spectacular dates back generations; as the village's only tourist attraction, it brings in much of the money that keeps Bethlehem afloat. The festivities are held on publicly owned land, which might be a slight violation of the separation of church and...

A media kingpin is dead and the chief suspect is a modern-day saint. Michael Pride could have been a world-class surgeon, but his good intentions got the best of him. He opened a clinic in one of New York's roughest neighborhoods, and stuck around when gangs, drugs, and guns turned it into a war zone. Supporting his mission is Charles van Straadt, a media titan with a knack for incendiary headlines and a soft spot for good works. When a sex scandal...

Demarkian attempts a good deed on Valentine's Day: saving a neighbor from jail. Psychiatrist Paul Hazzard was renowned for his insights into the human mind, until his wife was savagely murdered. She was stabbed to death with an ornamental dagger, a grisly crime for which Paul was tried but never convicted. Four years later, to escape his greedy family and his former mistress, Paul takes an unlikely lover: the homely, middle-aged Hannah Krekorian....

At an aging starlet's birthday, a Hollywood murder mystery debuts. Actress Tasheba Kent was famous before movies could talk, and stayed that way well after the silent era died. When her sister took a mysterious plunge off a cliff, the silver-screen beauty turned tragedy into scandal by running off with her bereaved brother-in-law. To escape the outraged press, they retreated to a rocky island off the coast of Maine. Decades later, Tash remains a symbol...

A desperate housewife kills her husband and disappears, drawing Demarkian to suburbia. Fox Run Hill is the kind of place that men move to with their second wives, but Patsy MacLaren Willis has been married to Stephen, her first husband, for twenty-two years. Though outwardly happy, Patsy feels disconnected, hating their empty life. To wrench herself free, she shoots Stephen three times and leaves him dead in their bed. Calmly, she drives away and...

In Waldorf Pines, ostentation and pretension are the order of the day. But even by local standards, Martha Heydrich is a stone cold pain. She's the stay-at-home wife of a very rich husband, into everybody's business and rumored to be having an affair with a local teenager. One morning she seemingly vanishes, and that night her husband returns home to find the pool house ablaze. Once the fire is extinguished, police discover two bodies - one is presumed...

Gregor Demarkian grew up in the Armenian-American enclave in Philadelphia known as Cavanaugh Street. Even though he left to go to college, and then went on to a storied career, he eventually returned to Cavanaugh Street after an early retirement. There he still retains some of the friends. Among them is Father Tibor Kasparian, probably the most genuinely gentle soul that Demarkian has ever met. When Father Tibor is then arrested on murder charges,...