Kevin Kerney
3 primary works • 14 total works
Book 1
Book 2
Book 4
Given a chance to salvage his law enforcement career, Doña Ana County Sheriff’s Detective Clayton Istee catches a bizarre late-night double homicide at a Las Cruces hotel. Both victims, a man and a woman, have been scalped with their throats cut.
The murders show all the signs of a signature hit, but national and state crime databases reveal no similar profiles. Digging into the victims’ backgrounds, Clayton discovers that six months prior the couple had walked out of a nearby casino with $200,000 of a high-stakes gambler’s money.
He also learns the crime had been hushed up by an undercover federal DEA agent, who resurfaces and recruits Clayton for a dangerous mission to seize the Mexican drug lord responsible for the killings.
Thrust into the nightmare world of borderland drug wars and corrupt cops, Clayton duels with a cunning assassin poised to kill him and his family in a ferocious climax to the Kevin Kerney series that is sure to stun.
After years away on the pro rodeo circuit, Johnny Jordan struts into Santa Fe to ask his boyhood friend, Santa Fe Police Chief Kevin Kerney, to serve as a technical advisor on a contemporary Western movie to be filmed along the Mexican border. Kerney agrees and plans a working vacation on location, in a remote area of the state known as the Bootheel, with his wife, Lt. Colonel Sara Brannon, and their three-year-old son, Patrick. But, a dead man on the road near an isolated border crossing, a federal undercover investigation into immigrant smuggling, the search for a fugitive from military justice hiding somewhere in Europe, and Johnny Jordan's troublesome behavior all ensure that nothing goes as planned.
As separate investigations embroil them in circumstances that will forever change their lives, Kerney must care for Patrick while Sara plays a dangerous game of Pentagon politics. Packed with family secrets, international intrigue, and memorable characters, this is McGarrity's most ambitious and involving novel to date-- traveling an accelerating arc from Santa Fe to the desert grasslands and mountains of the Bootheel, to the most secret levels of the Pentagon, to a resort town on the coast of Ireland, and back to an adrenaline-charged climax on a desolate landing strip a few miles north of the Mexican border.
A long-unsolved missing person’s case becomes a homicide investigation when the bones of the girlfriend of now retired Santa Fe Police Chief Kevin Kerney are unearthed forty-five years after her disappearance. And he is now the main suspect.
Due to retire at the end of the month, Kerney calls upon Clayton to find the slain officer?s son, discover what triggered the killings, and give him the ammunition he needs to bring a murderer to justice.
It was opening night of the annual town rodeo six months ago when Patrolman Paul Gillespie left the calf-roping finals, headed toward the police station, and was killed by person or persons unknown. Nobody much is talking, at least not to Kerney, but Kerney suspects that one man, Robert Cordova, a schizophrenic, saw something that memorable night.
Murder and its aftermath, which are reflected on a small scale in Mountainair, play themselves out against a much glitzier backdrop in Santa Fe; to take on an old nemesis.
Serpent Gate brilliantly confirms the literary power of one of the most talked-about new voices in the crime writing arena. Both spellbinding entertainment and a deeply moving portrait of the American Southwest, the novel is sure to win author Michael McGarrity many new fans.
