Showing results by author "L.T. Vargus" in All Categories

Will Violet Darger agree to a face-to-face meeting with the man who shot her? Still awaiting trial, the infamous serial killer Leonard Stump has hinted at the locations of additional bodies - more desert graves waiting to be uncovered. He wants to talk, but he has one condition. Violet Darger must be present at the interview. Now, the pressure is on. Should Darger head to Vegas and sit down with Stump? Everyone else seems to think so.

A mass-shooter rages through Chicago in the days after Christmas. Brutal. Efficient. He etches a path of destruction through the city. Shooting up the mall. Opening fire in traffic. Rampaging through a movie theater. That's just his opening act. FBI profiler Victor Loshak heads to the windy city to investigate and finds himself swept up in a frenzied manhunt.

Some secrets don’t stay buried. Three elaborately staged victims. No clues. A public verging on panic. FBI profiler Victor Loshak heads to Kansas City to hunt another serial killer. But something about this case is all wrong. The three corpses lie posed. Face up. A glove laid to cover each right eye. The victims seem to be selected at random. Suburban. Upper middle class. Squeaky clean. It doesn’t make sense. A piece is missing from this puzzle.

When Gloria Carmichael’s body is found broken and bleeding on the sidewalk just days after knocking on Detective Charlie Winters’ door begging for help to locate her father’s will, Charlie’s instinct is confirmed: Her latest case is about more than just a simple family feud. The Carmichaels are famous in Salem Island for their large family and charitable work, but, moments before she died, beautiful, trustworthy eldest daughter Gloria called Charlie to say she had uncovered a terrible secret that would break the mystery of her father’s death wide open.

A shocking death launches Special Agent Victor Loshak on a new investigation with an ominous message: They know everything. He heads to Tucson, Arizona, where a recent murder spree seems to be linked to the human trafficking conspiracy he's been working in secret for months. Loshak still has dreams about the Kansas City case. Nightmares about the team of techs peeling up the floorboards in a suburban home. Finding the rotting bodies face down in the muddy earth of the crawlspace. A grisly discovery that ultimately led to more questions than answers.

When 17-year-old Micaela Tolliver goes missing during her beach vacation, FBI profiler Violet Darger heads to Curacao to investigate. The case vexes local law enforcement, with plenty of suspicious characters around and comparisons to Natalee Holloway aplenty. Further complications emerge due to someone else entangled in the case—Darger's old friend and former lover, private investigator Owen Baxter. They're working together for the first time after a bad breakup. The tension is palpable, and Darger begins to question the knot of conflicts in her own heart.

When a popular podcaster receives a disturbing package in the mail, FBI profiler Victor Loshak heads to Denver to investigate. The grisly contents of the bubble mailer are unlike anything he's seen. Somewhere out there is a victim without a face. Feds swarm the scene. The US Postal Inspection Service tracks down the point of the packages origin.

He slips through the unlocked window. Creeps down the hall. A shadow standing in the bedroom doorway. Will you wake when death comes ripping? A string of brutal home invasion murders terrifies Dade County, Florida. The killer strikes in the dead of the night, savages innocent people in their beds, wipes out entire families. He attacks at random. Rich. Poor. Young. Old. No one is safe. When the city sleeps, he comes alive. Stalks the night. Walks among us.

When a search party trawling Salem Island find a girl’s body curled on the damp earth, the hunt for missing waitress Emma Jacobis grinds to a devastating halt. The day before, Emma had come to Detective Charlie Winters convinced someone was watching her. In her trembling hand, she held a sketch of herself sleeping peacefully with the stuffed rabbit she’d had since she was a child. On the back, scrawled in black ink: You will be mine.

Down the beach, she can just make out the rusting hulk of the Ferris wheel through the dawn mist. The hairs prickle on her neck as she drags her focus back to the chestnut hair fanned out in the shallow water at her feet, to the grains of sand decorating the beautiful girl’s white cheeks like freckles.

A family has been massacred in their home, a display of violence both brutal and bizarre. The details prove curious - not only are the bodies savaged way beyond anything found at a normal murder scene, every mirror in the house has been shattered. The spectacle shocks a peaceful island community, and when local police turn to the FBI for assistance, Agent Violet Darger finds herself working another harrowing crime scene. She stares, once more, into the abyss, and mankind's warped reflection stares back.

Her body floats. A bloated thing half atop the river. Naked. Pale. Mouth and eyes open wide. When two fishermen discover a corpse floating in the Clackamas river, profiler Violet Darger heads to rural Oregon to hunt another serial killer. What she discovers in the woods might change the course of her life. What secrets does the water conceal? The girl in the water marks the third such case in the area - all drowned with superficial stab wounds and discovered in a body of water - and Darger feels certain she won't be the last. The corpses are badly decomposed.

With 99.7 percent of the Earth's population dead and gone, the few who remain struggle to survive in an empty world. The scattered. The leftovers. These are their stories. This collection contains the first four volumes of the Scattered and the Dead series, audiobooks 0.5, 1.0, 1.5, and 2.0.

He slips through the unlocked window. Creeps down the hall. A shadow standing in the bedroom doorway. Will you wake when death comes ripping? A string of brutal home invasion murders terrifies Dade County, Florida. The killer strikes in the dead of the night, savages innocent people in their beds, wipes out entire families. He attacks at random. Rich. Poor. Young. Old. No one is safe. When the city sleeps, he comes alive. Stalks the night. Walks among us.

Special Agent Violet Darger must make sense of this savagery - figure out how brutality like this could happen in rural Michigan. The victim had been living the American dream. A small-business owner who built a construction empire. Started a family. Coached youth hockey. He seemed to have it all. But his surface life didn’t tell the full story. He carried dark secrets to the grave. Left clues which offer more questions than answers, clues that seem to lead Darger to Detroit.

Two days. Fourteen dead. The next victim could be you. The first bullet punches through the windshield of an SUV. A head shot. The driver's death is instantaneous. And it's only the beginning. A sniper along I-20 kills eight and causes a 36 car pileup. Brutal. Efficient. The next morning, the same individual stalks through a grocery store parking lot with a handgun. He takes out six innocent shoppers along with the store's front window before fleeing without a trace.

Her body seems to hover above the forest floor. Arms and legs torn away from the trunk. A bloody stump mounted upright on a skewer. Not just a corpse. A warning. The most recent body was discovered in the woods just beyond a logging cabin. Dismembered. Put on display. Ghostly pale skin stark against the forest's green.

When three bodies turn up in a landfill outside of Philadelphia, FBI profiler Violet Darger heads to Pennsylvania to investigate. Right away there's a major complication. The emaciated corpses appear to have been starved to death. Darger arrives in time for the autopsies. As she watches the withered bodies laid out on the stainless steel slabs of the morgue, their faces crusted with sandy soil, skin pulled taut around knobby cheekbones, she thinks: what kind of a person could carry out such harsh acts?

While a hurricane slams the tourist strewn coast, a killer runs amok in the storm. A group of vacationers are pinned down in the midst of the danger. It was supposed to be Kaitlyn and Logan's wedding day. The storm was supposed to hit 90 miles south of here. There's no safety in the storm. The rain pours. The wind rips. The sea crashes up onto the land. Water main? That broke. Now floodwater gushes through the city streets. Gallons and gallons. Engulfing cars and surging up around the buildings. Brickwork crumbles. Roofs get torn off. And a killer walks among the devastation.

Love and danger. Sex and violence. The heart wants what the heart wants. When a couple on a crime spree slashes down the east coast into Florida, the perfect vacation goes horribly wrong. Armed robbery. Kidnapping. Murder. Innocent travelers get swept up in the violent wave. Desire runs from light to dark. Loving thoughts turn to dark fantasies. Ellie is a college student on spring break. After years living under the shadows of controlling parents, this wallflower is finally free — or trying to be. This vacation will be an inflection point in her life, she knows.