Meet David Mapstone, a recently unemployed history professor who has just returned to Phoenix, Arizona a town now brimming over--much to Mapstone's dismay -- with rich retirees. To fill his time, Mapstone takes a temporary job with friend Maricopa County Chief Deputy Mike Peralta: Mapstone needs to look into old open cases and try to close them. But when an old flame comes to Mapstone about her missing sister, he is soon dragged deep into a forty-year-old...

The past is never past on the mean streets of Phoenix, especially when the mercury hits a hundred and it's only April. Half a century after the unsolved murder of an FBI agent, the missing badge is found on the body of a dead transient. The case seems a perfect fit for David Mapstone, history professor turned Maricopa County deputy sheriff. That is, if he can get past a forced partnership with rival cold-case expert Sgt. Kate Vare and the FBI's strange...

In Phoenix, it's the sweet season and Christmas and the new millennium are only weeks away. But history professor David Mapstone, just hired by the Sheriff's Office, still finds trouble, chasing a robber into an abandoned warehouse and discovering a gruesome crime from six decades ago. Mapstone begins an investigation into a Depression-era kidnapping that transfixed Arizona and the nation: the disappearance of a cattle baron's grandsons, their bodies...

The private-detective business starts out badly for former Phoenix Deputy David Mapstone and his old friend Sheriff Mike Peralta. Mapstone and Peralta are hired to investigate the suspicious death of a young Arizona woman who fell from a condo tower in San Diego. The police call Grace Hunter's death a suicide, but the client, who is shot after hiring them and is found with multiple driver's licenses, doesn't agree. In San Diego, Mapstone finds Grace's...