About The Vacillating Vigilante
There's a vigilante on the loose. He's killing people who have escaped justice or are in the process of committing heinous crimes. Former Denver detective Mark MacFarland thinks the police are going after the wrong suspects, but he is as much in the dark as they are.
He is more interested in finding out who robbed a local bank and killed an innocent bystander when the robber attempted to escape.
His interest in the case is piqued, however, when a former detective, Wally McCabe, asks MacFarland to find the killer of the innocent bystander. "She was a friend," says Wally. "I want justice for her."
But when the bank robber is captured, he claims that the Vigilante Killer caught up with him, but for some strange reason, allowed him to live.
Now it's time for MacFarland to find out who the Vigilante Killer really is.
About The Waster Womanizer
When Defense Lawyer Jerry Baker asked former Police Detective Mark MacFarland to help defend Anita Faraday, the wife of Tom Faraday, MacFarland thought proving her innocent would be a piece of cake. Tom had been the head of a polyamorous family, and the killer was probably a disgruntled member of the family. While it was usually the spouse, as Detective Lockwood kept telling him, in this case, there were a lot of other potential spouses.
Tom Faraday had been poisoned. The poison was unusual. It was a toxin secreted by a species of newt not found in Colorado. Solving this murder should be easier than most. All he had to do was find the person who could put newt poison into a bottle of wine.
While MacFarland had several potential suspects, nothing tied them to the weapon used to kill Faraday.
This was clearly one of those times when MacFarland, in order to solve this case, would have to think out of the box.
About The Xanthic Xena
Nothing on the Internet is what it seems. The person, known on social media as @XanthicXena is not really a warrior princess, but is really Jacob Gold, a graduate student at the University of Colorado. He, along with a group of other graduate students, creates social media havoc, just so they can track information flow, social influences, and other variables of interest to their professor, Dr. Phillip Zovskii.
However, Dr. Zovskii's research studies come to an end when his star troller, @XanthicXena, is found dead in a car, the victim of an apparent suicide.
Jacob Gold's parents don't believe their son took his own life. They hire Mark MacFarland, part-time hot dog vendor and part-time detective, to investigate the real cause of their son's death.
MacFarland finds himself immersed in the complicated lives of a dozen graduate students, all of whom spend their days lying to people on the Internet… and probably to both the police and to MacFarland.