While Everyone Was Sleeping

by Donald Collins

  Books By Donald Steven Collins

  OLD WATCHDOGS – Published in October 2011

  Former NYPD Detective Tom Newberry found retirement a difficult adjustment. But when a serial killer targeted women on the streets of northern Queens who were on their way home from work, shopping or just out for a leisurely stroll, Newberry sprang into action, determined to catch the madman that was responsible. And when he tried to recruit his former partner Barry Noonan to join him in the chase, Noonan told him to let the new breed of officers handle this on. “Our days of solving crimes are behind us now. We’re not the city ‘s watchdogs anymore.”

  DIAMOND DOGS – November 2012

  The hunt is personal this time. When Noonan’s nephew Jack McGuire, a Manhattan attorney and former star pitcher for St. John’s University goes missing, Newberry and Noonan do what they do best, and soon the chase is on. After McGuire’s body is found a ghastly secret held by four members of the baseball team is revealed eight years after their championship game.

  MURDER ON THE DUNES – November 2013

  Elaine Leblanc, a Queens College student, hadn’t called home in almost a month, prompting her aunt Martha in Phoenix to call detectives in the Jackson Heights precinct. When they weren’t able to help she called the Newberry Agency. The investigation into Leblanc’s disappearance led Newberry and Noonan into the sordid life of Craigslist escorts and prostitutes and put them on the trail of a man who has a penchant for killing his rented lovers after he has his kicks.

  FINAL PUNISHMENT – June 2014

  Tom Newberry left his fledgling detective agency in the hands of Barry Noon, his former NYPD partner when he became the Police Chief in Fleming Beach, a quiet village on Long Island’s South Shore. When the Memorial Day weekend started off with a dead body found in the doorway of a gas station on Tom’s first day on the job, he assigned the case to his protégé Jeremy Demchek, a Fleming Beach detective and former beat-cop from one of New York’s West Side precincts. Meanwhile, Barry, aided by his two part-time investigators, takes on a murder case of his own when Jimmy Rizzo, a high-priced Queens’ attorney is found dead in his Forest Hills office. Caught short-handed when a Jamaica bail-bondsman calls the agency, Barry hires Harry O’Rourke, a former NYPD detective with a checkered past, and sends him to the Bronx after Ron Bibby, a former professional boxer turned burglar, and bring him back to face trial.

  STOLEN ASHES - January 2015

  Tom Newberry resigns as chief of the Fleming Beach Police Department, leaving his hand-picked replacement Jeremy Demchek in charge of the small department while he returns to head the detective agency he founded four years ago. Along with Barry Noonan, his former partner from the department’s Fugitive Warrant Squad, Tom takes on a missing husband case. Before long the case turns into a multiple-murder investigation that brings the private eyes to Hudson, a small town thirty miles from the state capital in Albany. Meanwhile, Tom’s new bride Cynthia returns from her four-month hiatus to reclaim her place in the Manhattan South Homicide Squad, and before she can put her pocketbook down and pull the lid from her tea container, she’s assigned a cop-murder on Manhattan’s west side.

  KEEPER OF THE STONES – August 2015

  Newberry and Noonan get an urgent early morning phone call from Queens’ criminal defense attorney Angelo Manetti, and head to Rikers to question Curtis Moore, an Army veteran of the Vietnam War who is accused of committing a savage murder in Far Rockaway, Queens on Christmas Eve. Meanwhile, twelve thousand miles away in Westmeath, Ireland, Brendan McCabe, a man who earned his stripes with the IRA, leaves home on his twenty-first birth day to find a new life in Londonderry, but finds he can’t escape his IRA past.

  CHASING THE MESSIAH – October 2015

  After being fired for drinking on duty, former California Detective Kenny Marquette takes a job as a security guard at a local defense plant. His life is suddenly turned upside-down when he finds a broken lock and an open door. Unarmed, he goes inside to investigate and is shot and nearly killed. He later learns that the man who broke into the plant’s “think tank” was after the blueprints for a laser device designed for the U.S. military and capable of tracking movement in the mountains of Afghanistan as well as deeply underground. Marquette vows to find the man who shot him, and while in the hospital he meets Aaron Livingston, a private investigator who was hired to find the kidnapped daughter of high-powered California attorney Malcolm Smoake. The pair takes on the Mexican mafia and the Al Qaeda when Livingston convinces Kenny they are after the same man.

  THE DOUGHBOY MURDERS – May 2016

  So that the young men from their neighborhoods who lost their lives in World War One would always be remembered, several small New York communities had the names of these men engraved on a plaque that was affixed to the base of a memorial known as a Doughboy statue. The statues depict a lone infantryman striding into battle, a rifle in one hand, a swirling American flag in the other. A century later, New York Homicide Detectives Cynthia Newberry and David Alvarez pursue a crazed gunman who uses the Doughboy statues as a backdrop for murder as he stalks American soldiers who stand reading the names of those long-forgotten heroes. Meanwhile, retired detectives Tom Newberry and Barry Noonan investigate a burglary-gone-wrong that resulted in the deaths of four men, two of them police officers.

  GIFT HORSE – November 2016

  When the gunfire stopped, private eye Kenny Marquette’s fiancé and two close detective friends lay mortally wounded on Kenny’s living room floor alongside two high-ranking members of a Mexican drug cartel. Severely wounded himself, Kenny spent two months in Ashford General Hospital. Going back to the house he had called home for the past dozen years was not an option when he was released. The place held too many bad memories. When he tells Peter Grafton, his former boss at the defense plant, that he was thinking of relocating in New York Grafton gives him the keys to his spacious Upper East Side condo and tells him to stay as long as he wants. “Treat the place like it’s your own,” were his exact words. Shortly after arriving in the Big Apple, however, Kenny is drawn into an investigation to find the man who killed Grafton’s ex-wife.

  MURDER AT HELL GATE BRIDGE – March 2017

  On a cold February morning a young woman’s naked body is found lying in a wind-blown pile of debris in Astoria Park, Queens. When Queens Homicide detectives fail to name a suspect and put the case in the inactive file, the victim’s father contacts the Newberry Agency. Newberry and Noonan soon find themselves in a world they knew existed, but had never seen up close in either of their twenty-year careers. As they chase a psychotic rapist-killer through northern Queens they run across a quirky pair of radio-car partners in the Astoria precinct who are familiar with the terrain, and a pair of lesbian cops in the Bronx who hold some of the answers.

  THE FACE IN THE BASEMENT WINDOW – November 2017

  Captured after committing a string of convenience store robberies, James Shuster tries to work out a deal for himself and his accomplice Sarah Kimball when he tips Queens Robbery Squad Detectives Steve Danski and Gregory Litchfield to the identity of the man he claims is responsible for the 2009 abduction of high-price criminal defense attorney Sidney Weinstein’s daughter Barbara the night before her thirteenth birthday. Though Barbara remains missing the case is put in the Cold Case files. Danski and Litchfield reopen the case and refuse to give up the hunt.

  A WITNESS TO MURDER – August 2018

  Her words came rushing out. “I just saw someone get murdered,” Alison Crosby told the 911 operator. “He was a big man and he had a knife. He slashed at a poor defenseless woman! She had nowhere to go. She didn’t have a chance.” But when officers from the Corona precinct arrived, she wasn’t able to tell them where the crime had taken place only that it happened on the third floor of one of the many four-story apartment buildings along Roosevelt Avenue. “I was on a moving train,” she told them. Later, after precinct detectives tried to blow her off, she called her uncle, retired NYPD Detective Tom Newberry who ran a det
ective agency with his former Fugitive Warrant Squad partner Barry Noonan.

  Copyright

  While Everyone Was Sleeping by Donald Steven Collins ©2019 All Rights Reserved

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author.