Deuce Mora

Deuce Mora's one tough cookie: a female sleuth with a conscience and an attitude; fiery, tough, athletic, a dirty fighter when she has to be. In Jean Heller's first mystery featuring the scrappy newspaper columnist, Deuce finds out in short order that if you mess with organized crime, you have to be tough-and you'd better be as much detective as reporter. When she walks into a seedy neighborhood bar in a suburb of Chicago-all six feet of her, topped with auburn curls, she's searching for a human-interest story. What she finds is Vinnie Colangelo, an aging mobster living on bad beer, cheap bourbon, and regret for the life he wasted. Vinnie hints at secrets much bigger than his rap sheet should entitle him to, and Deuce immediately discovers that somebody's willing to kill to keep those secrets buried. She uncovers a series of crimes committed over nearly six decades, and, as her human interest story morphs into a hard-boiled, action-packed mystery, she finds herself dead center in a storm of threats and reprisals from the mob. It's not enough that the mob's after her, and corrupt government is concealing the evidence that would explain why, even her own editors, frightened of lawsuits and losing subscribers, want her off the story. Fortunately, she has many allies: a network of loyal co-workers and contacts, even an ardent new admirer. But which ones can she trust? At least one of them, she suspects, is hiding a secret-corruption? Murder? The veteran reporter knows: if you're talking Chicago crime scene-it's probably both.

The grisly discovery of a human bone while Deuce is out for a hike leads to the unearthing of a vast burial field, a human trafficking ring, and international intrigue. Deuce Mora-a pulls-no-punches columnist and meticulous detective-keeps turning up information, bit by bit, only to find some Fed in her face, at her door, emerging from the shadows, always guarding the edges of the story, insisting it will not be told. Yes, the Feds are aware of the trafficking ring. Yes, they have a plan to move on it. No, Deuce can't be told about the plan, and under no circumstances can she write about its existence. This is the story of a lifetime-bigger than the Vinnie Colangelo story, which earned Deuce and the Journal a Pulitzer-and, for once, she has the support of her editor, but the Journal's lawyer appears bringing warnings about "national security." What could be a greater matter of national security than the safety of the city's children who are being kidnapped and murdered? While Deuce is racing to break the case wide open, her life and her career are threatened on all sides. But break wide open it does, racing to an outrageous surprise ending, and Deuce learns first-hand the lesson that sometimes the only way to accomplish a great good is to commit unthinkable evil-and learn to live with the consequences.

It's already been a rough year for first-rate journalistic sleuth, Deuce Mora. After two agonizing investigations, one of which won her a Pulitzer, the other of which forced her to kill a man, she claims she's sworn off action-packed chases that cause nightmares. Still... from the moment she hears the earliest details of the first fire, her detective, instincts say the pieces don't fit, and every other instinct tells her she can't walk away from the story, even though she knows she'll regret it. As a series of deadly fires destroys landmarks first, then occupied structures, the body count rises by scores and the city is gripped by terror at Christmastime, adding lost revenue to property damage in the hundreds of millions. Whole blocks of Chicago real estate are falling to an arsonist, but no one knows why and everyone suspects the worst-terrorism. After the initial tip from the lead arson investigator (aka her boyfriend), Deuce is on her own to solve the mystery. Their relationship could endanger his reputation and his job if he's even suspected of leaking information to her, so they've called a temporary halt. But she's not exactly lacking for company-her old adversary, FBI agent Colter, has a tail on her, and Colter himself keeps popping out of the shadows. His presence at the crime scene and that of an NSA agent point to the suspicion of jihadist terrorism. But no terrorist group has claimed the mayhem.

Hard-hitting veteran reporter Deuce Mora is awakened in the pre-dawn hours and called to the scene of a gruesome hanging to identify the body of a dear friend, an FBI agent on the verge of taking down one of Chicago's biggest Mob operations. Deuce knows it's murder, but the authorities have no choice but to call it a suicide, the scene was triple-locked from the inside. The ill wind sweeping the Windy City has also whipped up two more unexplainable deaths-of perfectly healthy, able-bodied young mobsters, key witnesses about to flip on the leaders of the Mob operation. Neither the Chicago police nor the FBI can come up with a cause of death, but our meticulous investigator fits together a couple of impossible puzzle pieces. The downside is that the mob figures out who their greatest threat is, and Deuce becomes their new target. Enter a Washington reporter who has been following the organized crime investigation for months at its source, in D.C. He and Deuce share a dark secret and he knows exactly where to apply pressure on her demons to keep her on the trail of her friend's murderers. But as the Windy City begins to look more and more like the Chicago of Al Capone days, with bodies turning up in the river and shoot-outs in public places, Deuce discovers she couldn't walk away even if she wanted to. Whoever is at the top will stop at nothing to shut down this investigation.

You Don’t Have to Be up to Your Neck in Alligators-One’s Enough. Scrappy investigative reporter Deuce Mora is certainly no stranger to dangerous situations, or to getting her clock cleaned, for that matter, but waking up in a swamp next to a plane crash with no memory of how she got there is a whole other order of magnitude. It's a measure of her desperation that she considers placing her trust in the mysterious swamp hermit with a marginally familiar face who says he needs to hide her in his cabin to protect her from the search helicopters circling above. Talk about a rock and a hard place! The helicopters belong to the agents of what passes for law and order in Joe Pye County, all of whom are rottener than last Easter's undiscovered eggs and under the thumb of an unimaginably sadistic, corrupt sheriff. And whatever is going on, it's bigger than one off-the-rails sheriff in Joe Pye County, maybe as big as the highest Illinois officials, and it leaks over into Kentucky. If Deuce ever gets out of this alive, she'll have a lot to answer for to both her editor at the paper (who, it turns out, pointedly instructed her not to go to Joe Pye County) and her fiancé, Mark, who did not sign on for Deuce's daredevil shenanigans. They're both near the end of their respective ropes. Deuce, however, hasn't got the story yet. And it's not merely that the case matters to her-a lot-as a reporter, but also, the more she pursues it, the more she discovers links to an earlier story she thought was dead and buried, a case that was deeply personal. But will her commitment to putting the story to rest cost her both her job and her hopes of having a family? A perfect fit for those who love tough-minded sleuths who're good in a fight, Deuce is a must-listen for admirers of get-the-story-or-die reporters like Hank Philippi Ryan's Jane Ryland and Kelly Lange's Maxi Poole. Odds are she could hold her own with kick-ass female detective protagonists like Marcia Muller's Sharon McCone and Laura Lippman's Tess Monaghan. Fans of Chicago private investigators VI Warshawski and Libby Hellman's Georgia Davis will feel right at home on Deuce's home turf.