BOOKS BY DENI
Best Seller
MURDER BY THE SEA
While BJ McKay is incarcerated, her sister Cindy is murdered near her home in a small town on the Oregon coast. When BJ is finally released from prison nine months later, she heads to the beach for answers. She finds the sheriff has made no arrests and has no suspects or leads. He’s also hostile and unhelpful.
BJ begins to investigate on her own and learns that before her death, Cindy had changed her locks and bought a gun, actions that didn’t square up with BJ’s knowledge of how Cindy would act. BJ also discovers the outside phone line had been cut. To make it all more confusing, Cindy was owed money from customers, and antiques she was selling through her business were mysteriously missing. No one could locate her car either.
After making friends with some of the quirky locals, BJ gets a little help with her inquiries, but then another inexplicable murder occurs and someone breaks in to search Cindy’s house. Suddenly BJ is getting too close to figuring things out for a killer’s comfort. Will BJ put the pieces of the puzzle together in time? Or will she be the next victim of a malicious murderer?
AWARD WINNER
Hungry Like A Wolf
He was getting that itch again. He always thought of it that way. Compulsion sounded far too clinical. As if he might be psycho. No, it was an itch. And it usually came this time of year, late October after a long summer season. It also came near the time of the full moon, something he had noticed several years ago. Whatever. He didn’t get it every season. Sometimes years went by. Although he had to admit, it had been close to nearly every year for the last decade or something around there. He didn’t keep track. He didn’t think of it liar except when he itched…
Coming Soon
MURDER BY THE BAY
This is the first novel in the series and introduces the two co-protagonists: Sean O’Conner retired boxer and Cindy Matasar, a criminal investigator with the public defender’s office who also free-lances for the private bar. Sean is asked to look into a new boxing gym in Portland that his friend, Maybelle Preacher, has doubts about after her grandson joins it.
DOWN FOR THE COUNT
It seems to Sean that he can’t open a newspaper without seeing another article about a lawsuit against the Catholic Church for protecting child abusers. As a devout Catholic, the subject upsets him, and he would prefer to simply not have to deal with it. That is not an option after Sean’s eldest brother, Father John, asks for Sean’s help in Seattle.
STANDING EIGHT COUNT
Sean had only been married for a week when his second wife was killed in a convenience store hold-up. Or that’s what he had been told by the police. Now, decades later, an ex-con has tracked Sean down to tell him that the robbery had been a fake, it was a paid hit on a man who was not going along with local police corruption, and Sean’s wife had just been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The Boxer Series
BELOW THE BELT
This is the first novel in the series and introduces the two co-protagonists: Sean O’Conner retired boxer and Cindy Matasar, a criminal investigator with the public defender’s office who also free-lances for the private bar. Sean is asked to look into a new boxing gym in Portland that his friend, Maybelle Preacher, has doubts about after her grandson joins it.
SUCKER PUNCHED
Cindy is assigned as the investigator to what would appear to be an open and shut case of a wife-beater killing his wife, but Cindy and the public defender lawyer assigned to it, Janet Bowers, find odd facts that point to their client being framed for a crime he didn’t commit. Since their client is a retired professional boxer, they ask Sean to look into his past to see if there is anything in it which would point to someone with a motive for framing their client for murder.
THROWING IN THE TOWEL
Sean is asked by a boxing trainer to find out why a promising teenage boxer has suddenly become morose and depressed. Before Sean gets around to doing so, the young man is found dead; an apparent suicide after having jumped off a building. Motivated by guilt, Sean convinces Cindy to leave the public defender’s office and join him in a private investigation agency with the death of Damiyun Walker as their first case.
SAVED BY THE BELL
Sean’s impression of their potential client is that he is a spoiled only child of an overly protective mother, both given to exaggeration and hyperbole. The young man in question had been fired from his job as a night janitor with a cleaning firm and after insisting on talking to his manager about it, ends up facing criminal charges for making threats. His mother wants Sean and Cindy to check with some witnesses that her son had not acted the way his ex-employer had described, and they were just out to get him because they were all a bunch of Nazis.