Vietnam veteran Dominick Candiotti has been long estranged from his family. His late parents were close to the ruling mob clan in Youngstown, his sister was a bad-tempered and dissatisfied nag, and his middle brother was a corruptible police lieutenant. But in 1985, their oldest brother Richard Candiotti---beloved by every Italian Catholic in Youngstown as "Father Candy"---dies, and Dominick returns home for the funeral. Dominick is greatly disturbed by Richard's death, which has been ruled a suicide. Dissatisfied with this answer, he sets out to find the truth, revealing secrets and coming face-to-face with brutality and violence. Award-winning author Les Roberts pens a riveting and moving tale about walking the fragile tightrope between love and hatred.

The people of Queenstown, Ohio, don’t take kindly to strangers. But they have no choice in the matter after a man’s body is found in a local park, pants unzipped and stabbed through the heart—and a second man’s body turns up days later, his head bashed in. Local law enforcement needs help with the town’s first-ever murder investigation. Private investigator Milan Jacovich (pronounced MY-lan YOCK-ovitch) tags along when his main squeeze, Cleveland homicide detective Tobe Blaine, is dispatched to rural Ashtabula County to handle the case. Word travels fast in the small town, and the mixed-race couple receives a cold welcome. The motel manager doesn’t like their looks, the coroner conveniently forgets key details, and patrons at the local watering hole flaunt their disrespect for Tobe’s out-of-town badge and her skin color. Milan enlists his young assistant, Kevin “K.O.” O’Bannion, to glean information from the town’s teens, who tell tales of their parents’ fervent devotion to their local pastor, an outspoken bigot. Did homophobia factor in the murders? Looming over the case is nearby Conneaut prison—privately run, overcrowded, and rumored to employ some questionable methods (as well as many local residents). Inside its walls, a powerful convict known as “The Prophet” just might have the information Tobe and Milan need to solve the case—if they can get him to talk. Queenstown might only be an hour’s drive from Cleveland, but Milan, Tobe, and K.O. find themselves strangers in a strange land. They also soon find themselves neck-deep in serious trouble.

Dominick Candiotti is a paid assassin for the shadowy Brownstone Agency, but he wants out. His anonymous boss turns the tables and assigns fellow agents to eliminate him. On the run, Candiotti tries to stay a step ahead of deadly pursuers while tracking down his nemesis boss and uncovering secrets from his own past. A gripping cat-and-mouse tale.

Former Irish mafia hitman Brock Sheehan lives quietly on a boat fifty miles from Cleveland. His “retirement” angered the mob boss and his former job caused the Sheehan family to disown him. But when his long-lost nephew, Linus Callahan, tracks him down and asks him for assistance, he agrees to help. A few days earlier, the nephew got into a push-and-shove bar argument with a multimillion-dollar basketball player just released from prison for running a high-level dog-fighting ring. Then the athlete is murdered, and Linus becomes the Cleveland police department’s “person of interest.” So while Brock Sheehan asks questions regarding the illegal dogfight community, the athlete’s crazed fans subject him and his live-in girlfriend to a beating, and rapes one of his co-workers at the local animal shelter. In his travels all over NE Ohio, Brock finds himself in Youngstown where he discovers the woman he’s loved all his life, Arizona Skye, who walked out on him years ago and disappeared because of his violent profession. Now she works as a TV news reporter in Youngstown and he hopes to somehow rekindle that love from ten years ago. Investigating the athlete’s former dogfight ring, Brock gets most unpleasant with the remaining partner—and winds up with a pit bull of his own, which he names Conor, after an Irish saint. And eventually, with Conor’s instincts, he discovers and turns over to the police the real killer of the dog-killer turned sports legend.

Slovenian-American Jericho Paich finds himself under arrest by snarling Cleveland police cop Keenan Mayo and forced to be a non-paid confidential informant, setting up friends and strangers to be hauled in for illegal drug use. He turns for help to his mother’s live-in lover, ex-marine officer Laird Janiver. The two have never gotten along, but Jerry has nowhere else to turn. Janiver, a studious African American major who recalls how to kill, decides to help. That brings the two men into contact with a cruelly efficient albino drug lord, the suicidal memory of a lovely young college girl at OSU, and a beautiful woman with what might be a very dangerous past.

Russell Reinhart, a well-known author of private eye novels, is released from the Illinois State Prison in Joliet after serving seven years for the involuntary manslaughter of his wife. He returns to Chicago, welcomed home by his top-flight attorney who tucked away all his millions so no one could get hold of them while he was incarcerated, and rented him an elegant apartment in the Near North neighborhood, half a block from Lake Michigan. Reinert was an only child, adopted when an infant, and now he has no one to whom he can turn. His release from prison is reported by the local papers, and he’s contacted by a man he’s never heard of named Cole Cabot. A few years earlier, Cabot had married Reinert’s extra-curricular girlfriend, Aubrey, who has suddenly gone missing. Russ pleads he’s no private eye but just writes fiction about them, but worries his ex-lover has disappeared, so agrees to take on the case. He learns Aubrey was also the mistress of one of the world’s richest men in America, Gaylord Ogilvie, at the same time she was with him. Having investigative trouble, he is helped by the young son of a man who met while he was in prison, a huge, half-illiterate black man named Denver Tolliver, who saved his life behind bars several times. Denver was locked up for life after killing a police officer, but his college-student son is brilliant loyal, intelligent and wise. Butting heads with Ogilvie and his minions, Russ also falls heads-over-heels in love with Cassidy Hammond, who he met while taking a Michigan Avenue Beach run for the first time in seven years. His adjustment to new freedom makes life more difficult than he’d ever imagined. When he runs into danger that might turn permanent, he hadn’t forgotten how Denver Tolliver had taught him to prison-fight, and he eventually learns he’s not that much alone as he thought he was. The first words of this book are identical to the last words in the book, too: “I am an only child…”

While incarcerated in the Atlanta federal penitentiary in 1924 for larceny, conspiracy and some 100 violations of the Prohibition Act, Gaston B. Means, a former Harding Administration official and private investigator, met May Dixon Thacker, the sister of novelist Thomas Dixon, whose The Clansman (1905) had been transformed by D. W. Griffith into The Birth of a Nation for the big screen in 1915. Mrs. Thacker, the author of True Confessions, promised to help Means tell his story. After his release, Means spent day after day dictating to her. The resulting publication, The Strange Death of President Harding, raises some interesting points surrounding the circumstances of the President’s death during a nationwide speaking tour, and went on to become one of the bestselling books of 1930.