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Emerson Ward Mysteries

 

Chicago freelance writer Emerson Ward can't resist damsels in distress or doing favors for friends, but every time he goes tilting at windmills he gets more than he bargained for. 

Someone was in the market for murder...

 

Emerson Ward is in love. The kind of old-timey, old-fashioned love that makes him want to carve “E.W. Loves J.P.” on a tree. He’s known Jessica Pearson for a long time, and they almost made it work once, but Jessica wasn’t ready. Now she’s back—ready for love, ready for Emerson, ready to settle down. But just as suddenly she’s gone again, only this time she’s dead, accidentally killed by a stray bullet that comes bursting through Emerson’s living room window. Or is it murder?

 

“Option includes all the hallmarks of the McGee series ...the next John D. MacDonald.”

―Chicago Tribune

 

“Tautly written, full of muscular action, and suspenseful ...”  —Chicago Sun-Times

On this campus, if you know too much you die.

 

Everyone at the small upstate New York college where Chicago freelance writer Emerson Ward is guest-teaching for a semester is shocked when the body of a student is found hanging from a tree in the nearby woods. Just days before he died, Bob Marter tried to tell Emerson about something evil going on at the school, but backed down before he went any further. Now Emerson is convinced that this was no suicide—someone wanted Bob dead.

            Nosing around gets Emerson more than he bargained for, sucking him into a renegade student group’s bizarre and dangerous scheme to commit nuclear blackmail, a plot he grows desperate to stop. As the body count rises, he finds himself one step behind Bob’s killer…and one step away from becoming the next victim.

 

"Equally adept at describing physical action and cerebral action, there are true moments of grace in his writing."  —Drood Review

When you’ve hit rock bottom, there’s only one place left to go.

 

Emerson Ward finds out one steamy August morning when the phone starts ringing too early to be anything but bad news. Before the day is over he learns that a good friend has gone missing, another is hospitalized after a brutal beating, his phone is tapped, and the woman he loves is leaving him.

 

When his girlfriend dies of an apparent overdose, Emerson nearly loses his mind. To keep busy, he picks up the cold trail of his missing friend. As it leads him first to Florida, and then to Mexico, always one step behind both his friend and a killer stalking him, the realization slowly sinks in that all the bad things happening around him are leading back to one man and a vast international web of drug and arms smuggling.

 

"Action that moves lickety-split from first page to last." —Chicago Sun-Times

 

"Death Came Dressed In White weaves a tight and irresistable spell. Sherer is a top-notch talent."  —John Lutz, author of SWF Seeks Same and Hot

 

“Emerson Ward is a modern-day knight errant ...a rousing adventure.”  —Barbara D’Amato, author of Hardball

 

Sometimes, family skeletons are better left in the closet.

 

Emerson Ward’s old friend Brady “Puppy” Barnes pulls him way from a party to ask for help in finding out who stole a client’s priceless gem collection from his commercial photography studio. When Brady is subsequently shot in an apparently random attack, Emerson looks into every corner of his friend’s life to learn who wanted him dead. He begins finding skeletons rattling around in the Barnes family closet, and uncovers a vengeful pattern of blackmail and greed involving members of the Barnes clan, dirty Chicago politicians, and a killer who will stop at nothing to keep those secrets safe.

 

With the help of Nell Reilly, Brady’s studio manager, Ward is at the top of his form as a reluctant but quixotic hero—a sleuth of the new breed, with weaknesses and vulnerabilities of his own, and the courage to unmask a killer.

 

“A slick narrative, quirky suspects, a fast-moving plot, and likable protagonist combine in this winner for series fans.” —Library Journal

 

“It’s by-the-numbers genre fare … capably written and perfectly enjoyable.” —Booklist

 

Having a baby can be a killer decision.

 

Emerson Ward is minding his own business one sweltering July day when Larry Forrester shows up at the door of his Chicago brownstone, accuses of seducing his teenage daughter Ellen and tries to kill him.

 

A week later, when Larry’s ex-wife tells Emerson that Ellen has gone missing and asks him to find her, Emerson also learns that his girlfriend Nell Reilly is pregnant. While Nell and Emerson confront the difficult decision of whether or not to keep their baby, Emerson discovers Ellen may have been facing the same dilemma.

 

A girl fitting Ellen’s description turns up dead 250 miles away, the victim of a hit-and-run, and Emerson drops everything to find out what happened before he can face his own conflicted feelings. Suspecting the worst, Emerson adopts an alternate identity and leaves Chicago behind, unsure if he’ll live to return.

 

The twisted and deadly trail leads him through the heated and sometimes violent debate over abortion and the sex scandals rocking the Catholic Church, culminating in a final confrontation with evil where he least expects it.

There’s no place like home—if you want to die.

 

After years of bachelorhood, true love and a two-year-old have Emerson thinking twice about tilting at windmills. He even turns down Brandt’s pleas to look into the murder of a banker they both knew. But when Emerson’s girlfriend Nell leaves with their daughter to care for her ailing mother, he sees no reason not to help a childhood friend look into her brother’s suicide. It means going back to the small town where he grew up and swore he’d never return, and asking questions that can’t be answered. Soon he’s up to his eyeballs in a high-stakes commercial real estate scam and a decades-old family secret that threaten everything he holds dear. The deeper he digs, the less he likes what he learns, about his old hometown, the people in it, and even himself. When he links the dead banker to the real estate scam and a group of fundamentalist Muslim businessmen raising funds for terrorists, the FBI steps in to let him know he stands to lose even more—his life. 

 

“Think Travis McGee in Chicago with an Alfa Romeo coupe instead of a moored houseboat, and you have a terrific series.” Jeremiah Healy, author of Rescue, Spiral and The Only Good Lawyer

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