Category: The Liam Campbell Novels

Introducing the crime.

  Liam rifled through the various statements he’d taken at the airport the day before.  Nobody saw nobody doing nothing, he reflected sadly.  At a conservative estimate, culled from Gruber’s statement, at the time of Bill DeCreft’s death there had been at least ten small planes in the act of landing or taking off, one…

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Introducing Moses.

The Old Fart was a foot shorter than the trooper, which he rectified by hoisting himself up on a stool. He turned to Liam and stuck out a hand. “Moses Alakuyak, shaman.” His beer and Liam’s single malt arrived. Moses held out his bottle of beer and Liam clinked his glass against it. “To women,”…

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Introducing Bill.

It hadn’t taken them long, once they got him inside; the man who had been separated from the rifle was seated in a chair and immobilized with enough bright yellow polypropylene line to restrain King Kong. He was maybe thirty years old, five-eight, thickset, with matted brown hair and terrified brown eyes that stared at…

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A stranger comes to town.

…he went in the door of the bar, from which he promptly came staggering out backward, falling down the stairs and and landing with a thump on the pavement, fanny-first. “What the hell?” He looked up just in time to see a tangle of bodies roll down the steps and right over the top of…

Read more A stranger comes to town.

“Even then, if you did get lucky, three months later your luck went south again.”

When the phone rang he’d been curled up on his warm, wide couch, submitting happily to an enthusiastic and comprehensive ravishment by Alice Sampson, a pert young barista of nineteen, to whom Larry had given some thought to proposing. In this small town on stilts twenty-five miles north of the Arctic Circle the ratio of…

Read more “Even then, if you did get lucky, three months later your luck went south again.”

Boots on the Ground Research

[Luncheon speech for the Poisoned Pen Conference, July 13, 2012] Sometimes research is easy. When I lived in Anchorage my house was right under the traffic pattern to the seaplane base of Lake Hood. One day my father was helping me with something in my back yard and a Cessna 206 was taking off with…

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