Disturbance: An Irene Kelly Novel (Irene Kelly Mysteries)

Description

Irene Kelly fights for her life in this blood-chilling sequel to the Edgar Award–winning smash hit Bones.

Despite her reporter’s nose for trouble, Irene Kelly’s life has almost returned to normal—the Las Piernas News Express wobbles along in defiance of its financial woes, and with the help of her husband, Frank, and a good therapist, she’s recovered from the debilitating post-traumatic stress disorder that haunted her after her near-fatal encounter with notorious serial killer Nick Parrish. Until she receives some unwelcome news: Parrish, once thought permanently paralyzed by the injuries he sustained fleeing recapture, is walking again. And the rumor among the Moths, Parrish’s online fan club, is that he’s coming after Irene.

Suddenly Irene is on the other end of the microphone, being hounded by the media for interviews and plied with questions she’d hoped never to have to answer again. She tries to believe that she is safe from Parrish, who is imprisoned in a maximum security facility, and that the growing stream of threats from the Moths is all just talk. But an unnerving prank soon lets her know that someone, at least, wants her to be afraid. And when a young woman’s body turns up in the trunk of a car near her home—naked, frozen solid, and decorated from head to toe in elaborately painted moths—it becomes clear that Irene will once again find herself pitted against a brutal murderer. She knows the twisted hunter who is stalking her all too well . . . or does she?

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Liar: An Irene Kelly Mystery

Description

Investigative reporting has its hazards, but trouble hits home for Irene Kelly when her estranged aunt is murdered--and Irene becomes the leading suspect. With the police hot on her trail, Irene sets out to find cousin Travis, her dead aunt's son, convinced he's the next target.

But when Irene finds Travis, a camper-driving children's storyteller with suspiciously deep pockets, things blow up--literally. It takes several brushes with death, staying one step ahead of the law, and a few not-so-sweet reunions for Irene to untangle a complex web of family secrets and long-held grudges, and discover just who is killing off the Kelly clan--and why.

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As reporter Irene Kelly investigates her Aunt Briana's death, she learns all about the longstanding feuds between several branches of her extended family and becomes the number one suspect in a murder case. Kelly's part of the family split with her Aunt Briana and her husband decades ago for reasons that Kelly has never really understood, but which involve bigamy, murder,illiteracy, and of course, money. Kelly's first task is to locate her cousin Travis, who she hasn't seen since childhood, and inform him of his mother's untimely death. Next, Kelly has to protect him from whoever murdered his mother. While investigating the case, Kelly encounters a violent man in a wet suit, a slightly unhinged inventor, a storyteller named Cosmo, and some unsavory residents of a trailer park - and learns that she is distantly related to most of these odd characters.

This is Jan Burke's sixth book about the adventures of Irene Kelly, a sassy journalist who lives in sunny southern California with her husband (a police detective), drives a Karmann Ghia, and seems to be a magnet for trouble. In this case, the trouble is that everyone is lying, even people with good intentions. Kelly's cousin is a capable and seasoned liar, a skill that comes in handy in several sticky situations. When deceit isn't enough, Kelly's best friend Rachel leaps to their aid with flying fists and tough talk. Fans of mysteries by Sue Grafton and Sara Paretsky are likely to enjoy Jan Burke's writing. Irene Kelly is a likeable, approachable heroine - an ordinary middle-aged woman who manages to get the best of the bad guys by relying on her wits and her friends. -Jill Marquis

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Bones: An Irene Kelly Mystery (Irene Kelly Mysteries)

Description

Jan Burke’s Edgar Allen Poe award-winning Irene Kelly novel returns to Pocket Books in mass market.

For four long years, no one has known what became of Julia Sayre. On the morning after this mother of two disappeared, her family sought the help of reporter Irene Kelly. But despite Irene’s best efforts, until now only one person has known where to find Sayre: her killer. From death row, the brilliant and sadistic Nick Parrish wants life imprisonment in exchange for directing police to the isolated mountain grave where he buried Julia. But Nick Parrish’s deadly plan to regain his freedom is already in motion, and Irene will need all her courage and ingenuity to remain the reporter—not the victim—in tomorrow’s headlines.

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Nobody writes better than Jan Burke about the real world of print journalism, and that aspect of her latest Irene Kelly mystery is as strong as ever. The tensions of being the wife of a cop and continuing to work as a crime reporter in the Southern California desert city of Las Piernas have increased with each big story Irene covers: it's almost as though her associates are waiting for her to make some mistake, to fumble a story. When an edgy, rebellious teenage girl asks her to look for her missing mother, Irene crosses the path of a very dangerous serial killer--Nicholas Parrish. He is one of those totally anonymous but enormously gifted and resourceful villains found only in fiction. Parrish kills women who happen to look like Irene (and his abusive mother), and attracts devoted disciples to his grisly cause. Because of Irene's involvement, several more lives are damaged or endangered, and the strain takes its toll on the reporter's mental stability.

Burke is such a fine, realistic writer that she can tread her way carefully across territory already well covered by Patricia Cornwell, Jeffery Deaver, Thomas Harris, et al. and still find something new to say about ritual murder and forensic science. But her real talent is bringing to full, instant life a remarkable woman--and the city she lives and works in. --Dick Adler

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Goodnight, Irene

Description

For thirty-five years the identity of the dismembered woman found under the Las Piernas pier has remained a mystery. What secret did she take to her grave? Southern California reporter Irene Kelly has uncovered a maze of forensic records and confidential files that suggest a motive far more sinister than anyone imagined. The discovery has brought her close to Detective Frank Harriman, and closer still to exposing a killer who will resort to anything to keep his secrets buried -- and Irene silenced forever.

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Kidnapped: An Irene Kelly Novel (Irene Kelly Mysteries)

Description

News reporter Irene Kelly untangles the threads of a past crime and a haunting disappearance while trying to survive the present -- in this suspense-charged bestseller from Edgar® Award winner Jan Burke.

Not long after the Las Piernas Express publishes Irene Kelly's articles profiling missing children cases, bones turn up at a California estate -- and a notorious murder-kidnapping is churned up once more. When artist Richard Fletcher was found bludgeoned in his studio years ago, his stepson was quickly apprehended with the murder weapon and ultimately convicted. But Richard's young daughter, Jenny, who went missing at the time of the murder, was never found. Now Irene has joined Richard's son Caleb, a graduate student of forensic anthropology, in the fight to prove his stepbrother's innocence and solve Jenny's disappearance. But digging up the tragedies of the sprawling and powerful Fletcher family isabout to set off a murderous chain reaction -- and put Irene's own life in peril.

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Bloodlines: An Irene Kelly Novel (Irene Kelly Mysteries)

Description

Edgar® Award winner Jan Burke continues her USA Today bestselling Irene Kelly series with a suspense-laced novel of buried secrets, old friends, and new dangers -- in "a brilliant exhibition of what the crime genre can offer" (The Baltimore Sun). Sweeping across decades, Burke masterfully unearths a cold case that is far from closed while introducing an intrepid novice reporter, Irene Kelly, learning the ropes from her mentor, Conn O'Connor. From the late fifties, when a bloodstained car is buried on a farm and a wealthy family disappears at sea . . . to the seventies, when Irene makes shocking connections and brashly tracks a killer from the past . . . to today, when new threats and deadly surprises are closing in on the veteran journalist and her husband, Frank Harriman, Bloodlines follows a fascinating labyrinth of lives, loves, sins, and secrets -- with the irrepressible Irene Kelly at its core.

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Best-selling author Jan Burke's heroine, reporter Irene Kelly (Bones) returns in a novel that in less capable hands might seem like just another ho-hum story about the kidnapping of an infant who might or might not have been the child of a wealthy couple found dead under somewhat clouded circumstances. But it's really an intricate and involving story about hero worship--the affection of a cub reporter for his mentor, and the efforts of a young woman journalist who does them both proud by getting to the bottom of a two-decades old mystery; a bloodstained car buried on a farm and unearthed twenty years later, a dead nursemaid, and the missing heir to a fortune left by a couple who disappeared at sea the same weekend reporter Jack Corrigan was beaten and left for dead. Neither Corrigan nor young Conn O'Connor, his protégé, has ever unraveled the connection between those events, but with the discovery of the buried car that Corrigan believed to his dying day he witnessed disappearing under tons of dirt the night he was attacked, Irene finds herself following an old trail that may lead her right into harm's way herself. Bloodlines is one of Burke's best, a well-paced, deftly plotted mystery that will delight her many fans. --Jane Adams

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