Books
Last of the Seals
Mystery, romance and baseball in 1957 San Francisco. Sam Slater is a lifetime minor league baseball player for the San Francisco Seals. The Seals have just one more season left as San Francisco is about to become a major league city. Sam has come to the end of his baseball career and is going to join the private detective agency of his best friend.
When Sam’s partner inadvertently sees something he shouldn’t have, he is brutally murdered. Sam must go it alone and try to find out why. Along the way he is swept off of his feet by a beautiful, Elvis-obsessed TWA stewardess named Amelia Ryan. Sam and Amelia try to unravel the mystery together. On dark and foggy San Francisco nights, trouble is lurking just around the next corner.
Deadly Plunge
Private investigator Sam Slater is hired to find out why a rich, politically well-connected, San Francisco man, Arthur Bolender, suddenly ended his life by plunging off of the Golden Gate bridge. All those who know Arthur say unequivocally that he did not commit suicide. However, Bolender’s body was found floating in San Francisco Bay and, his car was abandoned in the traffic lane of the bridge. Meanwhile, Sam’s romance with glamorous TWA stewardess Amelia Ryan continues to blossom and deepen. She is now his secret fiancee. Amelia also eagerly helps Sam solve his cases when she’s in town.
The key to unraveling the mystery seems to be a strange old Victorian-style house. Bolender’s widow, a rich, seductive socialite named Maggie Bolender, was not even aware that her husband owned the house. What is really going on behind the doors of the mysterious house? Finding the answers will plunge Sam and Amelia into a dangerous world of political intrigue in the exciting sequel to “Last of the Seals.”
San Francisco Secrets (Sam Slater Mysteries Book 3)
Noted novelist and newspaper editor Edgar Watson Howe once said, “A man who can keep a secret may be wise, but he is not half as wise as a man with no secrets to keep.”
As the spring of 1958 arrives in San Francisco, it seems that baseball player turned private eye Sam Slater and his fiancée, TWA stewardess Amelia Ryan, are surrounded by people who have secrets.
A prominent doctor, John O’Dell, is being blackmailed by someone who has discovered a dark secret from his past. When the private investigator trying to catch the blackmailer is murdered, Dr. O’Dell hires Sam Slater to try to pick up the pieces. Someone is playing for keeps and will do anything to protect their own secrets.
Meanwhile, Amelia begins her new job as an international stewardess, which takes her on adventures to New York City, London, Paris, and Rome. In hot pursuit is a womanizing older pilot who has his sights set on Amelia.
Their lives get even more complicated when a mysterious woman from Sam’s past returns.
Sam and Amelia’s relationship will be tested as they work together to solve the mystery on the foggy streets of San Francisco.
Fog City Strangler (Sam Slater Mysteries)
As 1958 nears an end San Francisco is being terrorized by a man who calls himself the “Fog City Strangler,” who preys on pretty young blonde women. The strangler announces each murder by sending a note and piece of the victim’s clothing to the local newspapers.
Angst mounts as the strangler continues to claim more victims. Private eye Sam
Slater is worried that the Fog City Strangler may be eyeing his beautiful blonde wife, TWA stewardess Amelia Ryan. His anxiety is further fueled when TWA launches an advertising campaign with Amelia’s picture on a series of billboards plastered all over the city. Sam fears the billboards may attract too much attention–the wrong kind of attention.
Meanwhile, Sam and Amelia are hired to try to find the missing daughter of a
wealthy dowager who fears she has lost her only child. The missing woman went for a walk with her dog on Stinson Beach, near San Francisco, and seemingly vanished into thin air. The woman’s husband arrived at their beach house and found the dog running loose but there was no trace of his wife. The police are stumped in their investigation.
As Sam and Amelia look into the disappearance of the woman on the beach they
discover that nothing is as it seems at first glance. On a stormy night a shadowy figure sets fire to the beach house where the couple is staying–hoping to stop their
investigation.
Shadows In The Fog (Sam Slater Mysteries Book 5)
The story begins on a stormy morning in February of 1959. The front page
of the morning paper is dominated by news of the plane crash which killed rock ’n
roll stars Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper and Richie Valens.
Private Eye Sam Slater is hired to perform what he thinks is a routine two-day job
as a favor for a friend. However, it all goes terribly wrong when a young San Francisco
policeman is gunned down while sitting in a parked car with Sam.
The murder sets off a chain of events which will pull Sam and his wife and
partner, Amelia, into a dangerous web of intrigue in the dark, shadowy alleys and back
rooms of San Francisco’s Chinatown.
Cable Car Mystery (Sam Slater Mysterys Series Book 6)
On the hottest day of the year in San Francisco in 1959, Private Detectives Sam and Amelia Slater are contemplating fleeing the city for their Stinson Beach house. However, when Sam decides to take a cable car ride to run some errands on the lazy summer day, he’s suddenly thrust into the spotlight when he rescues a woman who fell onto the busy street.
Sam pulls the mysterious red-haired woman out of the path of an oncoming cable car in the nick of time. The entire incident is captured by a newspaper photographer who splashes Sam’s heroics all over the front page. Sam is troubled not only by his new status as a city hero, but by the rescued woman’s plea for help. She whispers to Sam that she didn’t fall from the cable car but was pushed. She is frightened and disappears into the crowd before Sam can get more details. A San Francisco newspaper launches a campaign to find the mystery woman, and Sam hopes to cross paths with her again.
San Francisco Nights (Sam Slater Mysteries Book 7)
The wife of a wealthy San Francisco shipping magnate leads a secret life but
someone is threatening to expose her. Private eye Sam Slater and his wife and
partner, Amelia, meet a mysterious woman wearing a large red hat during a train
trip. The woman approaches him pleading for help because she‘s receiving
anonymous notes quoting Bible verses which are becoming more and more
ominous with each passing day. Her secrets have been discovered but by
whom? What really happens behind closed doors in Room 505 in a swanky
downtown hotel?
Sam is willing to take the case but Amelia warns this woman is nothing but
trouble. What does the woman really want? She’s been watching Sam for
months and has a scheme to pull him into her world.
Find out in the latest Sam Slater Mystery “San Francisco Nights” set in the fall of
1959. It’s the seventh book in the series but is a heart pounding stand alone
whodunit.
The Illusion of Certainty
“The Illusion of Certainty” follows two parallel storylines. Marc is a successful businessman who seems to have everything-a great job, a beautiful wife, a house in an upscale neighborhood of Portland, Oregon and two great kids who are preparing for college. But something is not right. Marc is unsettled by the sudden change in his wife, Aimee, who seems distant and unhappy. What is going on with her? The second storyline involves a successful young attorney Alexandra Mattson. Alex, as she is called by her friends, meets a handsome young cop, Sean, during an unexpected crisis in her neighborhood. Sean and Alex seem made for each other and begin to merge their futures in a world of uncertainty. The only certainty in life is that we will face uncertainty. Despite all of the technology and controls available in the modern world, sometimes the only comfort comes from the human touch.
Sunbreaks
“The Illusion of Certainty” follows two parallel storylines. Marc is a successful businessman who seems to have everything-a great job, a beautiful wife, a house in an upscale neighborhood of Portland, Oregon and two great kids who are preparing for college. But something is not right. Marc is unsettled by the sudden change in his wife, Aimee, who seems distant and unhappy. What is going on with her? The second storyline involves a successful young attorney Alexandra Mattson. Alex, as she is called by her friends, meets a handsome young cop, Sean, during an unexpected crisis in her neighborhood. Sean and Alex seem made for each other and begin to merge their futures in a world of uncertainty. The only certainty in life is that we will face uncertainty. Despite all of the technology and controls available in the modern world, sometimes the only comfort comes from the human touch.
Expiation
In 1968, Dan and Katie are one of the hottest couples at Ballard High School in Seattle. He is the hero football player, and she is the beautiful cheerleader. These high school sweethearts believe theirs is a love that will never die.
Life changes when Dan leaves Washington to start college at the University of California Berkeley and pursue his dream of working for a big time newspaper in the glamorous city of San Francisco. The quest for his dream occurs against the turbulent background of Berkeley and San Francisco in the 1970s as Dan and Katie go their separate ways.
Now, thirty years later, Dan is back in his hometown of Seattle attending his mother’s funeral. He’s never stopped thinking about Katie, his long-lost love. But the two former high school sweethearts reconnect in a most unexpected way as the rest of the world grows more fearful of Y2K and the dawn of the twenty-first century. They are hoping that their love, once lost, can now be reclaimed.
Dreams That Never Were
On June 5, 1968 Senator Robert F. Kennedy, then a candidate for President, is mortally wounded by assassin Sirhan Sirhan in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Among the innocent bystanders who were also shot that night is a young idealistic reporter from San Francisco, Alex Hurley. The tragic incident changes his life as he’s swept up in the turbulent events of 1968. Alex is conflicted about the Vietnam War after spending six months there as a reporter. The war costs him his first marriage and threatens to tear his family apart. However, he meets a woman who’s love restores his hope and together they forge a new life set against the backdrop of the war, the civil rights struggle and political upheaval in the San Francisco Bay Area. Alex Hurley’s story is part political thriller and partly a romance in “Dreams That Never Were,” the latest historical fiction novel by award winning author Greg Messel. The title comes from a famous quote of Robert F. Kennedy’s “Some men see things as they are and say, ‘Why?’ I dream of things that never were and say, ‘Why not?'”