Cactus Heart (22 page)
Paying my debts: The retired Phoenix Police officers of the Big Apple breakfast club, especially Glenn Martin, provided valuable insights into law enforcement in the 1940s. The Phoenix Police Museum helped me see and touch the era. Any errors or deliberate changes in descriptions or procedures are my responsibility.
Retired Phoenix officers Steve Fotinos and Cal Lash, along with retired Mesa detective Bill Richardson, have regaled me with stories of Arizona law enforcement history, which inform this and future Mapstone novels.
Also, I'm grateful to Jana Bommersbach for her path-breaking work on the Winnie Ruth Judd case, which provides a window into the often sleazy workings of old Phoenix. Bill Stephens, a legendary Arizona lawyer, was generous in his memories of the city. Dr. Jack August, Jr., the director of the Arizona Historical Foundation, continues to inspire me with what a real-life historian can accomplish.
Finally, I give special thanks to Barbara Peters, my editor, who in no small measure made
Cactus Heart
possible.
Phoenix, a city built on the bones of its past, has just given up one of her longest-kept secrets.
Walled up in a tunnel beneath an abandoned warehouse, the skeletons of two four-year-old twins are discovered, the victims in a notorious kidnapping case from the 1940s, the grandsons of a Depression-era cattle baron. But what starts as a tying-up-loose-ends case for David Mapstone quickly becomes something far more sinister.
Though the kidnapper was caught and executed, as Mapstone delves further into the evidence, he discovers a complex web of secrets, lies, money and power and strong evidence that justice was far from done. But with a very contemporary killer on the loose, he must untangle the truth âand fastâ before they strike againâ¦
“A great read!” â
Michael Connelly
“A strong new voice in contemporary hard-boiled fiction.” â
Washington Post
“Talton has created a richly complex character in Mapstone ...a well-crafted, nuanced series.” â
Booklist
“A haunting noir story vividly rendered by Talton's white-hot prose...original...impressively unyielding.” â
New York Journal of Books
“Talton crisply evokes Phoenix's New West ambience and keeps readers guessing with unexpected plot twists.” â
Publishers Weekly
PHOENIX COLD CASES
It was back to square one for David Mapstone.
Perhaps the ex-cop was never cut out for academia: after losing his job and, with it, his home in California, he's back in Phoenix, Arizona; the desert city he left behind a lifetime ago. In the intervening decades, Phoenix has changed â the city is booming, wealthy. But behind the riches lie violence and corruption.
It's not a city that needs history professors. It needs cops.
For Mapstone, there was nothing for it but a return to law enforcement. Not that he's left his academic training behind: his return to the Sheriff's Office is a place on the cold case desk.
As a historian, Mapstone learned two things. One: the past is never past. Two: everything is connected. As a cop, he learned just one: never trust anyone.
At least he now gets to face history armed with a .357 magnum Colt Python. And its just as well â he's going to need it: the desert has its secrets and it's not about to give them up easily.
1.
Concrete Desert
A young woman's body is found dumped in the desert in circumstances identical to those of an infamous 40-year-old unsolved murder.
Concrete Desert
is available
here
.
2.
Cactus Heart
Mapstone unearths the skeletons of a pair of four-year-old twins, the victims in a notorious Depression-era kidnapping case. But what should be a matter of tying up loose ends quickly becomes something more sinister, more personal⦠and more deadly.
Cactus Heart
is available
here
.
3.
Camelback Falls
When Sheriff Peralta is shot by a sniper, Mapstone must confront his own past and the deadly consequences of a small-town shoot-out in 1979 that left Peralta and Mapstone standing over four dead bodies.
Camelback Falls
is available
here
.
4.
Dry Heat
Half a century after the unsolved murder of an FBI agent, the victim's missing badge is found on the body of a dead transient. The trail leads Mapstone into the Arizonan desert, and eventually to San Francisco, as he slowly uncovers the bloody secrets surrounding the FBI badge.
Dry Heat
is available
here
.
5.
Arizona Dreams
Mapstone receives a letter confessing to a forty-year-old murder and providing directions to the body. But things are never what they seem in Phoenix. There's a body right where the letter said it would be â but it's only weeks old, not yearsâ¦
Arizona Dreams
is available
here
.
6.
South Phoenix Rules
Phoenix, Arizona in August. It's 114 degrees in the shade but its going to get even hotter for cold case investigator David Mapstone when he starts investigating a drug cartel execution.
South Phoenix Rules
is available
here
.
Jon Talton is a fourth-generation Arizonan who grew up in the same Phoenix neighbourhood that David Mapstone calls home. A journalist of more than twenty years, he now lives in Washington state where he is the economics columnist for the
Seattle Times
and writes the
Rogue Columnist
blog.
