Boots, Dames, and Skies: The Red, White, and Blue Collection

After the Blue Skies Fall, I’ve decided to throw everything together into one big collection: Boots, Dames, and Skies: The Red, White, and Blue Collection (Cigars and Legs Book 5)

Ron Cavanaugh flew a fighter over Korea, took shrapnel, and then spent time recovering in England. He thought coming home would be a break from the violence. Until he found out that his mentor, a grizzled, cynical old gumshoe named Kate Nass, had been murdered. There were no answers forthcoming from the police. Ron looks for answers on his own…

… and discovers more than he expected. A criminal conspiracy, running deep with deeper pockets. Drugs, weapons, and sex — all for sale, all under the table, and all at the expense of the innocent citizens of Escagoula Point. And all protected from on high.

Audrey Carmen, his leggy love interest, served as an interesting distraction… or did she?

The first book in the Cigars and Legs series, The Boots Are Red introduces Ron, his companions, his city, and his enemies. Set in the 1950s, Ron has to deal with the limitations of technology as he pursues answers, and he has to deal with a police force governed by a man distrustful of him and with no interest in solving the Kate Nass Murder.

Ron also has to deal with himself: his feelings for Audrey, and his frustration at the progress and process involved in bringing the conspiracy down and the conspirators to justice.

The Boots Come Off:

“Who are you to talk about Kate that way?” I asked.
“The man who fooled him for over a decade,” he said. Then his voice hit in my memories. Then I understood.

After the events in The Boots Are Red, Ron Cavanaugh finds himself struggling to make progress in the case he’s building against the members of the crime syndicate — Salt Marsh — running rampant in his home town. He’s taken over Kate Nass’s private detective business and aims to make a mess of the plans of the syndicate that killed his friend. But he’s fighting against connected men: business leaders, politicians, and crooked cops. They’re fighting back, too, and consider nothing off-limits.

His only ally is his girlfriend, Audrey Carmen, who has a link to the syndicate that Ron doesn’t entirely understand. He works with, but isn’t entirely sure of, a set of police detectives who seem interested in breaking up the syndicate. But as Ron says, everyone is a suspect.

The Boots Come Off sees Ron find the end of the conspiracy, one way or the other. Now that he knows who killed his friend Kate Nass and who ordered the hit, Ron has to use everything available to bring them down… before the price becomes too high.

The White Dames:
They’re all attractive, dangerous, and related. They all get intertwined with Ron’s life in one way or another, and each interaction is progressively more dangerous. After dealing with the syndicate called Salt Marsh, Ron Cavanaugh has something of a slow period — interrupted by a set of Dames named White and the trouble surrounding them! Enjoy three short cases packaged as one in: The White Dames.

Blue Skies Fall:
Ron Cavanaugh is back in this collection, which finds him investigating four crimes starting with Ron finding himself up against an old, familiar face — and meeting up with his flying buddies from the war in a high stakes game he isn’t ready for, in Blue Skies.

From there he’s hired to look for two missing girls when the cops aren’t fast enough — and as it’s freezing outside and there’s an escaped mental patient on the loose, he is up against time. Time the girls don’t have, in Skies Fall.

Blue Falls puts Ron in a tight spot: he’s asked to help investigate a murder while the small-town homicide detective is out of town: several teenagers, brutally slaughtered while camping and echoes of a man from the mayor’s past — a man known as the Butcher of Biloxi.

Finally, in Blue Skies Fall, Ron’s law enforcement ties bring him in to investigate a brutal sexual assault out in the sticks — and he finds himself between two families doing their best to become the next Hatfield and McCoys!