To Die For

The story is not your typical murder mystery. The sleuth is not a detective, private eye, or lawyer. He's an ordinary guy with an extraordinary dog. Jacob Martin is trying to make the best of a divorce and mid-life crisis when he gets a call at two o'clock Sunday morning from his mother. His sister has been arrested for the murder of her fourth husband, and his father is near death. Thus begins an adventure that takes Jake and his golden retriever from their Colorado retreat to a backwater town in the Missouri Ozarks, where they search for cold-blooded killers, a cache of gold coins buried by Jesse James, and the love of a beautiful nurse.

Jake Martin is not your ordinary sleuth. He's an ordinary guy with an extraordinary dog. This time the story takes place in the foothills of Denver. Jake is accused of manslaughter, and he has to prove the accident was really murder. Along the way, he encounters a poaching ring and falls in love with a beautiful game warden. The characters are memorable, and the plot is multi-layered. This whodunit will keep listeners guessing until the very end.

There is a treasure high in the Colorado Rockies waiting for someone to find it. Jake Martin couldn't care less. Since the death of his wife, all Jake wants is to be left alone in his mountain cabin where he and his dog, Fred, can get on with life. But when it becomes known that the location of the treasure is encrypted in a message left by a nineteenth-century miner, people begin to die, and Jake's good friend and neighbor becomes the number one suspect. The old miner used a copy of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer as a key to his coded message, and the real murderer wants that edition so bad, he's willing to kill for it. Can the amateur sleuths decode the message and stop the murderer, or have Jake and Fred finally met their match?

Burned-out software engineer Jake Martin and his golden retriever, Fred, live in a mountain cabin far enough from Denver to escape the rat-race but not far enough to escape its crime. While remodeling an old house, he uncovers a stack of love letters that will turn his world inside out. When word of the letters gets out, people start dying, including the owner of the house Jake was remodeling. With his main source of income gone, he lets his friend and neighbor, Bonnie Jones, talk him into searching for the killer after they are offered a large retainer. The problem is, the person who hires them is the major suspect. With the help of Fred and Bonnie, Jake continues to find more evidence that his new employer is trying to create a smokescreen to divert attention from himself. Will the trio of amateur detectives be able to stop the murders, or will they become the next victims?