Showing results by author "William Bayer" in All Categories

Circling high over Rockefeller Center is a peregrine falcon, the most awesome of the flying predators. She awaits a signal from her falconer. It is given: The bird attacks, plummeting from the sky at nearly 200 miles an hour, striking a young woman and killing her instantly. By chance, newscaster Pamela Barrett witnesses the slaying. Her impassioned account of it on television that evening thrills the falconer - a brilliant madman who identifies with his deadly bird and, through her, seeks catharsis. He becomes fascinated with Pam and enmeshes her in a bizarre and deadly scheme.

A woman who sees what others cannot see seeks the murderer of a young street hustler, a man she had befriended in photographing San Francisco's dark, sexually charged netherworld. The colors of Kay Farrow's landscape are black, white, and shades of gray. An achromat suffering from total color blindness, Kay possesses a vision that informs her world and sharpens her skills as a talented photographer. When Tim Lovsey, a handsome prostitute, is brutally slain, he becomes much more than Kay's subject. She makes it her mission to find his killer, even though the police would prefer to quietly let the case drop.

Detective Frank Janek investigates a bizarre double murder in which the killer had decapitated the victims - a call girl and a teacher - at an exclusive private school - and switched their heads.

Kay Farrow, a color-blind photographer who sees the world in black, white, and shades of gray, probes the mysterious death of her beloved mentor on a quest that takes her to the darkest intersections of San Francisco's Mission District. When distinguished photojournalist Maddy Yamada is struck by a motorcyclist at two in the morning in a seedy area far from her Marina apartment, Kay Farrow's grief is tempered by suspicion. What could have drawn the reclusive Maddy so far from home at such an hour?

Geoffrey Barnett is a photographer. Due to a mysterious trauma in his past, he has, for many years, been unable to photograph people. When Kimberly Yates suddenly enters his life, Geoffrey's world is turned upside down. She nurtures him back to life - emotionally, mentally, and sexually. Eventually he is able to photograph her. Then she disappears, like a puff of smoke, as if she were just a dream, a vision that Geoffrey has conjured up.

It begins in Bar Harbor, Maine, summer playground of the rich. Shy and sensitive Penny Berring watches as her beautiful sister, Suzie, puts on a bizarre display- flaunting her transgressions beneath her parent's windows. Her behavior is strange and compelling, and then...a scream in the night, and Suzie is murdered. There is a sensational, inconclusive trial. And an enigma: What really happened? Who killed Suzie, and why? Three years pass. Penny is now living a quiet life in New York. Then it all starts again. She finds Suzie's secret diary. It propels her on a strange, surreal oddyssey of her own, and on toward a horrifying secret.

One hot summer afternoon a quarter century ago, a wealthy socialite and her young lover, a private school teacher, were gunned down in a cheap hotel room on the outskirts of the Midwestern city of Calista. Now, forensic sketch artist David Weiss has returned to his hometown to cover a routine celebrity murder trial for ABC. For someone who has earned a reputation for cracking high-profile cases with his portraits of suspects based on eyewtiness accounts, chruning out courtroom sketches is merely pedestrian work.

A beautiful young woman meets her latest "pickup" in a Manhattan hotel bar and goes back with him to his room, where she drugs him, robs him, and humiliates him. Several hours later, the "mark" is found dead, the mysterious young woman is wanted for the murder, and Janek and his team of detectives are assigned to the case. Simultaneously, Janek becomes involved in the reopening of a grisly society-murder investigation that has plagued Internal Affairs for nine years.

Tangier, a sweeping novel of romance and intrigue set in a fabled North African resort, may remind readers of the Alexandria Quartet. In this book Tangier is more than just a place; it is a city of unholy loves. Titled Europeans, Moroccan hustlers, aging former Nazis, decadents of every sort play out their rituals, competing for stunning lovers and social power. Their schemes and passions are a subject of fascination to the hero of the book, a brilliant young police inspector.

When his own goddaughter becomes the latest victim of a serial killer wielding an ice pick, New York City Detective Frank Janek knows he must get inside the mind of a serial killer to locate this monster.

It begins when the strangely marked body of a young prostitute is found just outside the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem. A similarly disfigured corpse of an American nun turns up. Then an Arab boy. As the list of victims grows, their only apparent connection is the bizarre markings on their bodies, it appears that Israel is facing its first serial murder case.

Hiding in the Weave, written from the perspective of 18-year-old Joel Barlev, a senior at Delamere, a school geared to talented young artists, plays off themes typically found in classic boarding-school novels - requited and unrequited romantic relationships, alienation, rebellion, sexuality, troubled home lives, moral dilemmas, epiphanies, and acquiring maturity. But there is more here...much more.... 

In 1903, a tall woman with flashing Tartar eyes was the talk of military circles, newspaper offices, and salons. Her name was Isabelle Eberhardt, and the life she actually led made her justifiably the object of the most scandalous gossip in Paris as well as in North Africa. This compelling novel, a fictionalized biography, tells her story - the story of a brave, self-destructive and sensual being with an irrepressible rage to live. Isabelle came to Tunis when she was 17, longing for fame as an author and discovering that her life could be the inspiration for her art.