Steve Hamilton books in order

Joe Trumbull is not a man who scares easily. But tonight he is scared to death.

It's been two years since Joe's fiancée, Laurel, was murdered. Two years of grief and loneliness. On this hot summer night, he's finally going on a blind date, his first since Laurel's death. He's not looking for love, just testing the waters to see if it's possible to live a normal life again. And after the first awkward minutes, Joe starts to think this date wasn't such a bad idea after all. In fact, maybe it will turn out to be one of the best things that ever happened to him.

He couldn't be more wrong. Because somehow, for reasons Joe doesn't yet understand, this one evening will mark the beginning of a new nightmare. A nightmare that will lead him to realize that the past is never past. And the worst is yet to come.

"I was the Miracle Boy, once upon a time. Later on, the Milford Mute. The Golden Boy. The Young Ghost. The Kid. The Boxman. The Lock Artist. That was all me. But you can call me Mike."

Marked by tragedy, traumatized at the age of eight, Michael, now eighteen, is no ordinary young man. Besides not uttering a single word in ten years, he discovers the one thing he can somehow do better than anyone else. Whether it's a locked door without a key, a padlock with no combination, or even an eight-hundred pound safe...he can open them all.

It's an unforgivable talent. A talent that will make young Michael a hot commodity with the wrong people and, whether he likes it or not, push him ever close to a life of crime. Until he finally sees his chance to escape, and with one desperate gamble risks everything to come back home to the only person he ever loved, and to unlock the secret that has kept him silent for so long.

Steve Hamilton steps away from his Edgar Award-winning Alex McKnight series to introduce a unique new character, unlike anyone you've ever seen in the world of crime fiction.

When first published, A Cold Day in Paradise won both the Edgar and Shamus awards for Best First Novel, launching Steve Hamilton into the top ranks of today's crime writers. Now, see for yourself why this extraordinary novel has galvanized the literary and mystery community as no other book before it....

Other than the bullet lodged near his heart, former Detroit cop Alex McKnight thought he had put the nightmare of his partner's death and his own near-fatal injury behind him. After all, the man convicted of the crimes has been locked away for years. But in the small town of Paradise, Michigan, where McKnight has traded his badge for a cabin in the woods, a murderer with the same unmistakable trademarks appears to be back.

McKnight can't understand who else would know the intimate details of the old murders. And it seems like it'll be a frozen day in Hell before McKnight can unravel truth from deception in a town that's anything but Paradise.

When a young woman from the Ojibwa tribe asks McKnight for shelter from her violent boyfriend, McKnight agrees. But after letting her stay in one of his cabins, he finds her gone the next morning.

His search for her brings on a host of suspects, bruising encounters, and a thickening web of crime, all obscured by the relentless whiplash of brutal snowstorms.

From the secret world of the Ojibwa reservation to the Canadian border and deep into the silent woods, someone is out to kill—and McKnight is heading right into the line of fire.

Before he became a private investigator, before he served in the Detroit police, and long before he retreated to the wintry reaches of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, Alex McKnight played ball in the minor leagues. He doesn't spend much time thinking about those days, at least not until a former teammate comes looking for him...

The man's here to ask a favor. He wants Alex to help him find the woman with whom he had a brief, passionate affair three decades ago. Who is Alex to deny his friend a chance to ward off a classic midlife chill by rekindling an old flame? But as the search deepens, McKnight begins to suspect that he hasn't been told the full story. And there might just be a reason why this mysterious woman is so hard to find.

After a game of cards turns into a professional heist, Alex McKnight finds himself lying facedown on the floor with a gun to the back of his head.

When the dust settles, McKnight is one of the police chief's lead suspects. Worse, one of the other card players has the same idea, and he has no qualms about exercising some vigilante justice of his own.

Now, Alex knows he is the only one who can uncover the truth. But he's about to discover how dark this conspiracy truly is―or how close to guilt he actually stands...

Alex McKnight isn't a man with many friends, but the few he has know they're never alone in a fix. So when Vinnie LeBlanc asks for his help in taking a trip deep into Canada in search of his missing brother, he knows he can count on Alex. His brother had taken a job as a hunting guide for a rough crew of Detroit "businessmen." 

The group was due back days ago, yet there's been no sign of them, and there's mounting evidence of something odd about their disappearing act. The trackless forests of northern Ontario keep many secrets, but none more shocking than the one that Alex is about to uncover. And the more closely Alex looks for answers, the more questions there become.

Alex McKnight is happier than he can remember being in a long time. And it's all because of a woman―Natalie Reynaud, a Canadian police officer. When they take a romantic weekend together at an old luxury hotel, however, they receive an unexpected message―someone has left a hat filled with snow, and a note that reads, "I know who you are."

As Alex searches for an explanation, he must face up against a terrible Reynaud family secret, a secret that to this day still drives men to kill.

On a freezing night in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, a night that wouldn't feel so unusual if it weren't the Fourth of July, a boat plows full speed into a line of old railroad pilings in the shallow water of Waishkey Bay.

After Alex helps rescue the passengers, he figures he'll never see them again. He couldn't be more wrong. The men he saved are connected to a deadly drug-smuggling syndicate and it's up to Alex to do damage control―and protect the woman he loves―before the cycle of violence comes around full circle.

Before the tragic event that made him seek refuge in a remote corner of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, Alex McKnight was a Detroit police officer. It's a warm summer night, and Alex is out riding the night shift with his partner Franklin. There's no shortage of trouble to be found on the dark streets of Motown. But on this particular night, Franklin has his own agenda.

From Edgar Award-Winning Author Steve Hamilton, Beneath the Book Tower is the first ever short story featuring Alex McKnight, showing a different side of the man readers have come to love.

On a frozen January night, a young man hangs himself in a lonely corner of the Upper Peninsula, in a place they call Misery Bay. Alex McKnight does not know this young man, and he won't even hear about the suicide until two months later, when the last person Alex would ever expect comes to him for help.

What seems like a simple quest to find a few answers will turn into a nightmare of sudden violence and bloody revenge, and a race against time to catch a ruthless and methodical killer. McKnight knows all about evil. Mobsters, drug dealers, hit men―he's seen them all, and they've taken away almost everything he's ever loved. But none of them could have ever prepared him for the darkness he's about to face.

Late one night, a plane lands on a deserted airstrip. Five dead bodies are found there the next morning. And now Vinnie LeBlanc is missing.

Vinnie is a member of the Ojibwa Indian tribe and he just might be Alex McKnight's best friend. So Alex can't help but be worried when he disappears. There's a deadly crime war creeping into Michigan's Upper Peninsula, and Alex never would have thought that his friend could be involved.

But after an unexpected stranger arrives in town, Alex will soon find out that the stakes are higher than he ever could have imagined.

Alex McKnight swore to serve and protect Detroit as a police officer, but a trip to Motown these days is a trip to a past he'd just as soon forget. The city will forever remind him of his partner's death and of the bullet still lodged in his own chest.

Then he gets a call from his old sergeant. A young man Alex helped put away―in the one big case that marked the high point of his career―will be getting out of prison. When the sergeant invites Alex downstate to have a drink for old times' sake, it's an offer he would normally refuse. However, there's a certain female FBI agent he can't stop thinking about, so he gets in his truck and he goes back to Detroit.

While there, he's reminded of something about that young man's case, a seemingly small piece of the puzzle that he never got to share. It's not something anyone wants to hear, but Alex can't let go of the feeling that they arrested the wrong man. And that the real killer not only got away, but went on to kill again.

On the Mediterranean Sea, a vacationer logs on to the security-camera feed from his home in Scottsdale, Arizona. Something about his living room seems not quite right--the room is bright, when he's certain he'd left the curtains closed. Rewinding through the feed, he sees an intruder. When he shifts to the bedroom camera, he sees the dead body.

Martin T. Livermore is the key suspect in the abduction and murder of at least five women, but he's never been this sloppy before. When the FBI finally catches him in Scottsdale, he declares he'll only talk to one person: a retired police officer from Detroit, now a private investigator living in the tiny town of Paradise, Michigan. A man named Alex McKnight.

Livermore means nothing to McKnight, but it soon becomes clear McKnight means something to Livermore...and that Livermore's capture was only the beginning of an elaborate, twisted plot with McKnight at the center. In a hunt that will take him across the country and to the edge of his limits, McKnight fights to stop a vicious killer before he can exact his ultimate revenge. And his grand finale will cut closer to home than he ever could have imagined.

On the afternoon of July 30, 1975, former Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa left the parking lot of the Machus Red Fox Restaurant in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, never to be seen again. Over two hundred FBI agents have been working the case in the forty-four years since that day—digging up end zones, driveways, hay fields, and horse farms—and yet Hoffa’s body has never been found.

In this story by two-time Edgar Award–winning, New York Times bestselling author Steve Hamilton, Alex McKnight—the former Detroit cop and protagonist of eleven critically acclaimed novels that have sold over a million copies—is sitting at the rail in the Glasgow Inn when a local old-timer tells him an unusual story. It’s the kind of small-town mystery that won’t let Alex sleep at night, but when he goes hunting for answers, he stumbles upon the biggest surprise of his life.

Forty-four years later, the disappearance of James Riddle Hoffa is still the most notorious open case in American crime history …

And Alex McKnight is about to solve it.

Straight as an arrow special agent Kate O’Hare and international criminal Nick Fox have brought down some of the biggest bad guys out there. But now they face their most dangerous foe yet—a vast, shadowy international organization known only as the Brotherhood.

Directly descended from the Vatican Bank priests who served Hitler during World War II, the Brotherhood is on a frantic search for a lost train loaded with $30 billion in Nazi gold, untouched for over seventy-five years somewhere in the mountains of Eastern Europe.

Kate and Nick know that there is only one man who can find the fortune and bring down the Brotherhood—the same man who taught Nick everything he knows—his father, Quentin. As the stakes get higher, they must also rely on Kate’s own father, Jake, who shares his daughter’s grit and stubbornness. Too bad they can never agree on anything.

From a remote monastery in the Swiss Alps to the lawless desert of the Western Sahara, Kate, Nick, and the two men who made them who they are today must crisscross the world in a desperate scramble to stop their deadliest foe in the biggest adventure of their lives.

NB: This book was co-authored with Janet Evanovich.

Nick Mason has already spent five years inside a maximum security prison when an offer comes that will grant his release twenty years early. He accepts—but the deal comes with a terrible price.

Now, back on the streets, Nick Mason has a new house, a new car, money to burn, and a beautiful roommate. He’s returned to society, but he's still a prisoner. Whenever his cell phone rings, day or night, Nick must answer it and follow whatever order he is given. It’s the deal he made with Darius Cole, a criminal mastermind serving a double-life term who runs an empire from his prison cell.

Forced to commit increasingly more dangerous crimes, hunted by the relentless detective who put him behind bars, and desperate to go straight and rebuild his life with his daughter and ex-wife, Nick will ultimately have to risk everything—his family, his sanity, and even his life—to finally break free.

Nick Mason has been given a true mission impossible: Infiltrate WITSEC, the top-secret federal witness-protection program that has never been compromised, locate the three men who put his boss Darius Cole behind bars for life, and kill them.

But first he has to find them--they're ghost prisoners locked down around the clock in classified "deep black" locations by an battalion of heavily armed U.S. marshals charged with protecting them--and the clock is ticking. Cole is appealing his conviction, and these witnesses are either his ticket to freedom or the final nail in his coffin. If they testify, Darius Cole will never step foot in the outside world again. If they are killed, he will walk out a free man.

As he risks everything to complete his mission, Mason finds himself being hunted by the very man he replaced, the ruthless assassin who once served, then betrayed, Darius Cole. Rather than waiting to be Mason's next victim, he has escaped witness protection to hunt down and kill Mason himself.

In an action-packed journey that leads from a high-security military installation in the Appalachian Mountains to a secret underground bunker hidden far below the streets of New York City, Nick Mason will have to become, more than ever before, the lethal weapon that Darius Cole created.

Nick Mason was released from federal prison to begin a second life as an unwilling assassin, serving a major Chicago crime lord until the day he finally won his freedom. But that freedom was a lie.

Now Mason finds himself on a plane to Jakarta, his life controlled by a vast shadow organization that can cross any international border. He leaves behind everyone he's ever loved, everything he's ever known...Except for one thing: The job. When his phone rings, day or night, he has to answer it, and do whatever he's told. Mason is an exile, forced to live out a nightmare on the other side of the world and the only way home is to keep killing.

This time his target is Hashim Baya, known to his followers as the Crocodile. A phantom money man who finances countless bloody terrorist attacks across the globe, Baya is the most dangerous criminal Mason has ever faced. But Mason's not the only one hunting him. For Martin Sauvage, a tough-as-nails Interpol agent, apprehending Baya has become a personal vendetta. Sauvage wants Baya in prison.

Mason's only chance at survival is to put him in a body bag. Assassin and cop are on a collision course leading to a brutal showdown...and to the most shocking revelation of all.