Sam Kincaid Mystery

Levi Vogue, chairman of the powerful Utah Board of Pardons and Parole, is gunned down in the driveway of his home as he returns from a late evening tryst with Sue Ann Winkler, an exotic dancer at a Salt Lake City strip club. Sam Kincaid, chief of the Special Investigations Branch of the Utah Department of Corrections, is assigned to help Salt Lake City Police Department homicide detective Lieutenant Kate McConnell solve Vogue's murder. The investigation soon leads Kincaid and McConnell into the seedy world of prostitution and strip clubs. The investigation focuses on Charles “Slick” Watts, a violent ex-convict with a long criminal history and a score to settle with Vogue. Then a body is discovered at an abandoned military base in Wendover, Nevada, and the medical examiner concludes that it was a homicide elaborately staged to look like a suicide. Kincaid and McConnell are forced to turn their attention to a complex conspiracy behind the killings. Ultimately, the investigation leads Kincaid and McConnell to a small elite group known as the Commission. As the police close in, the suspects turn first on each other and then on Kincaid.

The armored-car robbery went awry, leaving two people dead, one a member of the gang believed responsible for the crime. Forty-five-year-old Walter Bradshaw is captured and charged with capital murder and aggravated robbery. Bradshaw, who leads an archconservative, antigovernment group of Mormon polygamists, now sits in a cell at the Utah State Prison awaiting trial. The rest of the Bradshaw gang remains at large. Then two days before Bradshaw's preliminary hearing, one of two witnesses to the robbery is stabbed and bludgeoned to death, and that same evening, the second witness, a young woman student of the University of Utah, narrowly escapes being kidnapped. Cops Sam Kincaid and Kate McConnell figure it's not just coincidence and must once again look beneath the obvious in an increasingly dangerous scenario.