The David Osborn Collection
Thrillers, engrossing mysteries, and young adult fiction from best-selling author David Osborn.
The Cape Cod Blue
by David Osborn
Chase Morse and his brother, Haydn, heirs to an auction-house empire, split their time between Manhattan and The Moorings, the idyllic family estate on Nantucket. Gabrielle, a French journalist sent to write features on the glittering New York art world, becomes entangled with the family, but when a body turns up at The Moorings and a priceless painting goes missing from inside the vault at the auction house amid tight security, family secrets get harder to keep. The police start digging, and the stakes are high—eighty million dollars, pilfered and then lost in risky Russian investments. Can an entitled one-percenter with expansive resources, enlisting the help of a wily art forger, outsmart the art cops and the old guard within the company?
The glittering, exalted world of art auctioning hides love, hate, and murder in a wealthy and socially prominent family when the forgery of an anonymous Cape Cod painting threatens to destroy them all.
“Breathless introduction to the inner workings of big business …”
The Somersville Bodies
by David Osborn
When the bodies of a retired couple in a small town are discovered six months after their deaths, the local police chief, his lead detective, and the county coroner all rule the couple a shared suicide. One young woman police officer, however, suspects murder. Her dogged pursuit of the killer or killers against orders to desist eventually leads her to evidence that the deceased couple were silenced to cover up a major scandal at the state capitol and to a terrifying shoot-out when she finally runs the killers to earth.
“A good tale of mystery and murder. Its plot twists and turns in and out of an intriguing whodunit that packs a punch at the end powerful enough to floor one.”
Jessica and the Flying Unicorns
by David Osborn
Love for a poor old plow horse sees Jessica on an exciting new adventure when pitted against malicious wheels-for-legs Wheelies, Mesozoic-era Pterodactyls, deadly stone Gargoyles, and enthroned as a Goddess Queen by fun-loving Pixies. Join her until, with Beak, a wise know-everything hummingbird, Junk Dog, an itinerant peddler, and Dinky, an exuberant little Unicorn, she wins ultimate victory over Esmeralda, the ageless evil-scientist leader of a band of mercilessly militant girls the same age as Jessica herself.
“Watch out Dorothy, here comes Jessica …”
The Lighthouse
by David Osborn
An historic lighthouse at the tiny coastal village of Shinnecock witnesses during one month both murder and espionage when the select Summer White House Oval Office is lodged in the neighboring private home, to which the U.S. president retreats on holiday with his entire family, and which this year sees a highly secret visit by a prince from Saudi Arabia, where two American scientists are held hostage.
“A good tale of mystery and murder. Its plot twists and turns in and out of an intriguing whodunit that packs a punch at the end powerful enough to floor one.”
Jessica and the Golden Swan Feather
by David Osborn
Using a medieval wishing charm to escape from a big city museum where she is mistakenly locked in for the night, Jessica, along with Annie-Mae, a homeless Rag Doll, ends up not at home but in OR, where the country’s evil Great Leader holds the charm hostage until brought a feather from a deified Golden Swan in Hoppitland, country of the Stick people. With a brief welcoming respite among friendly rats in their the canyon country of Rodentia, then a perilous trip across a great man-eating Vine Forest, Jessica brings a golden feather back to OR where, after Annie-Mae chooses to return to Rodentia, she uses the medieval charm, first in a heads-on defiant showdown with the all-powerful Great Leader of OR, then to wish herself safely back home.
“Watch out Dorothy, here comes Jessica …”
Jessica and Her Adventures in Fairyland
by David Osborn
Fiery dragons, witches, goblins, and wizards don’t stop Jessica, a little girl who lives with her mother in the poorest part of a great city, from endless adventuring in the magic of Fairyland and other faraway places.
Join her and enchanting fairyland friends in five thrilling stories. In one she overcomes pirates and ogres to defeat an evil sorceress, and in another defies monster spirits and faces down a wicked witch to free a fairy princess from savage goblins.
Be with her in a lovely fairyland refuge saving long-forgotten toys from a terrible fate, and yet again when in a battle of wits, she defeats an all-powerful wizard to restore a lost dragon child to its mother. Don’t miss a final adventure in which, ever undaunted, she braves killer trees, bedouin robbers, and a fearful yeti tyrant to rescue old fairyland friends from imminent peril in the circus of a cruel and merciless clown.
“Watch out Dorothy, here comes Jessica …”
A Cold Wind from the Andes
by David Osborn
Kelly Anders, financially successful writer of best-selling romantic fiction, lives a privileged but sterile existence in a Manhattan penthouse. Pushed into a book tour of Britain by her publisher, Kelly dreads a politically orchestrated meeting with Rachel Sommerset, the acclaimed Nobel Prize–winning novelist, her generation’s Tolstoy. The encounter, while leading to a surprising friendship between the two women, dredges up the ghosts of Kelly’s past—her unacknowledged youth with a different name in the impoverished inner city and her ambivalent feelings toward her husband, Gerald, now hidden away in her penthouse in a permanent coma, the fallout of an ugly kidnapping in Argentina of himself, the mining corporation head he worked for, along with the man’s consort, Teresa, and Jake, a renowned photographer. Their lives changed forever by their brutal captors, Jake and Teresa, in their struggle to right themselves, find their way together in the world, while unified with them through their shared experience and strengthened by the bond she’d built with Rachel, Kelly begins to reassess her career and her life in an ultimate quest for redemption.
“An exciting, highly plausible Washington thriller …”
Bones
by David Osborn
Artist Andretta Salinger awakens one day in an old stone country house she’s bought from a family ownership of six generations to find she’s been living for two years with the bones of someone murdered and buried in the floor of her cellar. When Andretta finds herself drawn willy-nilly into the small-town police investigation of a homicide committed in 1868, it’s into the scandal-ridden lives of the great railroad barons of the day and to identifying the murderer.
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Alicia’s Secret
by David Osborn
Meet three remarkable women who excelled in times when men dominated everything.
Alicia, a young American girl in England, visits an old churchyard and evokes Elvira, a sprightly, mischievous young ghost who in turn introduces her to three women from three critical moments in history, when each triumphed in a male-dominated society.
Considered the greatest English queen, Matilda of Flanders came from Normandy with William the Conqueror as the key strategist for the Conquest as well as his guiding light in the politics and culture of her era. Sofonisba Anguissola was an accomplished Renaissance artist who studied with Michelangelo and became his protégé and collaborator, and Lucie Dillon, once a lady-in-waiting to Marie Antoinette at Versailles, barely escaped the Terror and the dreaded guillotine to farm in the new United States for a time before returning to France to advise and aid Napoleon. In their own words, these ghostly women describe their widely different lives and loves, and the three periods in which they lived—the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the French Revolution.
“As commercial and exciting a novel as can be found today.… It is shocking, savage, and graphic, a cruel book that spares little in detail. There is unbearable suspense, headlong action, and ends with a final ironic twist that will leave the reader gasping. Osborn is a master storyteller and his remorseless style matches his remorseless narrative.…”
The Saugatuck Conspiracy
by David Osborn
Kelsie Gordon leads a double life: one as a ruthless and deadly undercover agent for the Treasury Department, tracing Kremlin and Russian oligarchs’ money from Moscow to leading American businessmen who are secretly supporting neo-Nazis and white nationalism, and a second as an anxious loving mom to a younger brother, while hiding from all that she is the illegitimate daughter of the U.S. vice president.
“No better example of absorbing, fast-paced intrigue. Compelling to the last punctuation mark”
Cold Case 369
by David Osborn
When two women detectives in the CID division of a large city police force, one a forty-year veteran, the other a rookie, are forcibly teamed together in an unfriendly partnership, the rookie follows the many-years-old cold case of a painting found in a stolen deposit box. As she traces its path from obscurity to potential world fame at auction, the older detective, disdaining the efforts of her younger partner, investigates the more recent and seemingly unrelated violent homicide of an important city councilman. The paths of both widely different investigations merge, however, united by evidence in the cold case, and the two detectives become as one to successfully hunt down those guilty of the homicide.
“A good tale of mystery and murder. Its plot twists and turns in and out of an intriguing whodunit that packs a punch at the end powerful enough to floor one.”
Ophelia and Her Forest Friends
by David Osborn
Ophelia is a little girl who lives deep in a far-off great forest where her widowed father is a woodcutter and her home a tiny cottage with a thatched roof and flower-filled window boxes. Blessed at birth by fairies, she is friends with all the little forest animals who live around her, and with no school or other children to fill her playtimes, she is never lonely, sharing adventures with many, like Sammy Skunk, Rory Raccoon, Oscar Owl, Betsy Bunny, Patrick Porcupine, Benjamin Beaver, and others—all joining with her in keeping their forest home peaceful and safe.
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Delta Red
by David Osborn
Kasie Sanders, a young rising-star New Orleans police detective, is busted after a bodega shootout and is working as a wedding and children’s party photographer when she is picked for a dangerous special assignment by the FBI, investigating American ties to a sex-slave ring in Malaysia and Thailand. Going undercover as a photojournalist for Great American Families magazine, Kasie joins Louisiana’s famed Warriner family, one of whom, a prominent congressman, is suspected of pedophilia, and soon encounters, in the idyllic setting of the Warriner’s historic antebellum Lonsdale House, vicious racism as well as crimes even worse than pedophilia, and herself in far more danger than she ever experienced as a police officer.
“There won’t be a better book published in America this year.… brilliantly plotted … infinite complications … as audacious as it is original …”
The Newsroom
by David Osborn
When a young scholarly student of pre-Homeric ancient Greek poetry gets a job researching neo-Nazi hate groups with a local weekly newspaper, she escapes the hail of death from a bump-stocked AR-15 that that kills six of the paper’s staff, but not the following chain of events that threatens her own life in turn.
“A sharp, taut adventure story … leads a trail through mystery and destruction that is elusive and enthralling …”
Jessica and the Witch’s Broom
by David Osborn
On yet another exciting adventure in Fairyland, now to rescue little Prince Benjamin, heir to the throne of the land of No but held hostage by the evil sorceress Lady Citronella, Jessica teams up with old friends: Greta, the fairy princess often disguised as a witch, and Sir Percival, the doughty monocled Englishman who fantasizes hunting hares with his trusty gun. Flying them about is Greta’s irrepressible witch’s broom, Sweepy, who saves the day while all the time thinking he’s the old fashioned Wabash Cannonball train made famous in country-western music.
“Watch out Dorothy, here comes Jessica …”
Eventide
by David Osborn
Abandoning a life she herself terms “thrown away,” Ana Masaryk, a Purple Heart Army vet of the Iraq war, begins anew in a small northern New England town, where she finds refuge with the gay illustrator of children’s books in an abandoned church he has transformed. A necessary job covering local social functions and writing obits for The Chronicle, the town’s newspaper, leads Ana into an impassioned whole new life of consuming work as the paper’s publisher and editor, and to her defiant defense of it, at the risk of losing everything, when the paper’s independence is threatened by a big-city news chain owned by a politically ambitious billionaire, who always gets whatever he wants through lies, distortions, and sowing dissension.
“Breathless introduction to the inner workings of big business …”
Kira and Cassandra
by David Osborn
Revelation after his death by an elderly priest of a serious crime, reported in the sanctity of the confessional, leads a police officer friend to follow from birth the strangely connected fate of two girls, one from wealth, the other from poverty, whose paths through all their growing years are unknown to each other but which cross dramatically in the arrest of one for assault and deadly arson.
“A good tale of mystery and murder. Its plot twists and turns in and out of an intriguing whodunit that packs a punch at the end powerful enough to floor one.”
The Head Hunters: A Medical Thriller
by David Osborn
Washington DC—and terror in an isolated government-sanctioned medical laboratory as the potential of medicine goes horrifyingly wrong.
When Susan, a young researcher, loses her fiancée in a terrible accident, she is seduced by Michael, a friend and the head doctor on a top-secret neurometric project backed by the White House and the famed Borg-Harrison Foundation. Joining Michael’s team, Susan is unaware of the terrible danger she faces in the high-security facility and from Katherine, the team psychologist, who will go to any lengths to protect the lab’s vital secrecy—and her own carnal desires. When Susan stumbles onto the true nature of the project, it’s to find herself in it too deep to walk away and, trapped in the worst kind of nightmare, threatened every second to becoming a ghastly medical experiment herself.
In The Head Hunters, David Osborn explores the murky boundaries between ethics and medical research, between volunteer and victim, ambition and ruthlessness, and between life and death when a team of responsible doctors plays a deadly game in which any of the players can be condemned to a purgatory more ghastly than hell.
“Breathless introduction to the inner workings of big business …”