Novels by Larry Maness
Nantucket Revenge, the first of Larry Maness’s books featuring private investigator Jake Eaton (Presidio Press, 1997) describes a strange visitor to Nantucket who is threatening revenge on the people of the island in general and on marina manager Gloria Gorham in particular. The stranger begins with small acts of sabotage but raises the ante by murdering a banker and leaving his body pinned to a dock piling with a harpoon. That’s enough for Gloria, who calls in PI Jake Eaton and his faithful dog, Watson. As the killing spree continues, Eaton searches Nantucket’s rich nautical history for some clue to the perpetrator’s motivation, finding it in an 18th-century dispute. The speed picks up as the novel moves from crime to inevitably larger crime, ending with the entire harbor town of Nantucket in danger of going up in flames.
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The adventures of PI Jake Eaton continue in this second mystery by Larry Maness (Presidio Press, 1999) as Eaton and his faithful Watson travel to rural New Hampshire, where Mildreth Gibbon Preston, widow of a Nobel Prize-winning environmentalist, hires the investigator to locate Colin Owens, who vanished while surveying 20,000 acres of mountainous forest land that Preston plans to give to the state. Jake finds local sheriff Myron Sellers shot to death, then learns that Owens and Sellers shared a $400,000 bank account and some nasty secrets. The unexplained money may have come from a waste-disposal tycoon. A strong supporting cast and keenly observed New England settings thicken the eerie environmental scenario. A Once Perfect Place was chosen by Duke University for its Literature of Social Change Collection.
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In this third in the series on Jake Eaton (Presidio Press, 2000), the Boston private investigator wonders why the Boston police have taken over a Cambridge murder case involving rape and strangulation. Eaton quickly discovers a possible connection to the infamous Boston strangler: the victim worked for a woman hoping to publish her theory that the real Boston strangler escaped because of police connivance. This novel raises doubts that the real Boston strangler was ever captured.
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Tormented by the death of his son that resulted in his divorce, Lino Cardosa returns home to Provincetown to care for his ailing mother. Not long after his arrival, the local Catholic church burns to the ground and its priest, Father Jeremiah Dunn, disappears. Lino, a former insurance fraud investigator, is persuaded to look into what happened to the priest after he learns that Father Dunn may have information explaining why Lino’s son took his own life.
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This novel brings together an infamous Italian art collector, the German officer responsible for looting prized World War II collections, and Theo Perdoux, who’s searching for the Rembrandt stolen from his family. Their pasts bring all three together in a tiny hilltown near the Italian Riviera. What follows rips apart one family and brings together another.
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After the success of The Last Perdoux, Maness is back with a second Theo R. Perdoux mystery. Based on the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum robbery, the novel recreates the heist and goes on to connect it to a famous Italian family living in Rome. As he did in his previous Boston-based novel, Strangler, Maness again weaves history and fiction into a satisfying read.
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All novels written by Larry Maness are available for purchase, in print or eBook versions, from Speaking Volumes as well as from Amazon US, Apple Books, Barnes & Noble, and Google Play. Read excerpt from The Voice of God
Chapter 1
When the church caught fire, rumors spread like so many sparks in the night sky: Father Jerry set it himself. Hadn’t faulty wiring popped up in one sermon after another over the past months? He could build a sermon around anything, but he chose old wires and imperfect circuits to prepare the congregation for what was coming. It’s clear as a spring morning now—Father Jerry wasn’t raising more money to fix what ailed the hundred-year-old building. No, he was raising money for his own personal use once he caught the Provincetown bus to Boston, then onto Logan Airport where two tickets to Rome waited for him. He burned the church to destroy evidence that would lead to his conviction.
But, the tickets were never picked up, and Alitalia’s Flight 725 left without Father Jerry and his companion. Where they got to, no one knows. Who Father Jerry was traveling with, no one is telling.
The silence only fueled the rumors: The airplane tickets were a hoax, a planted diversion designed to perplex. Father Jerry was as Irish as a Dublin pub; he wouldn’t run to Italy. He’d go back home and disappear among all the Dublin Dunns. Or, maybe South America. How long could you live in Argentina on three hundred thousand dollars? If, indeed, that was the correct amount stolen from the church. Father Jerry didn’t keep all the money in the bank and what records he did keep burned in the fire. Gossipers started out at eighty thousand stolen and like bids shouted out at an auction, stopped at half a million before people came to their senses. Where would Father Jeremiah Dunn, the parish priest of St. Peter the Apostle in Provincetown, Massachusetts, lay his hands on that kind of money? It couldn’t have come only from the congregation. They gave small amounts weekly and willingly but nothing close to three hundred thousand in the six years Father Jerry urged their generosity.
Maybe it wasn’t money that drove him to overload the wiring, feel the walls heat until flames shot through the roof, making sure the old wooden church could not be saved before he called the fire department. Maybe at fifty he’d fallen in love with someone other than God. Maybe a woman captured his kind heart. Or, maybe the suspicions about his sexual preference were true, and he gave in to a man. Or, maybe, like the tickets to Rome, that second seat on the airplane was also meant to cloud clarity. There was no one else. There was only Father Jerry who had vanished with the money like the smoke mixing with the sparks that rose into the night’s sky.
