ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mysteries are literary puzzles with people.
In the second grade, my teacher told me I had a gift for stories. She was right, and — depending on the angle — sometimes a little too right. Later in life, a good story talked me and my friends out of more than one night in a county holding cell. The cops, I think, just wanted to hear how it ended.
I've always read the way some people eat. Several books a week, since before I could reach the top shelf at the library. Somewhere along the way I stopped only reading mysteries and started writing them — the kind I always hunted for and couldn't quite find.
Today I live in Salt Lake City, run Superbrand Publishing, and write the Lindsay Carter thrillers. This site is the fiction side of the work — the Juliet Dillon Clark lane. Grab a chair. There's coffee, and there's a body on page one.
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WHERE LINDSAY CAME FROM
One of my closest friends was an L.A. County sheriff — and drop-dead gorgeous. She could have been a model. Instead, she was out there taking down bad guys.
She worked the Malibu patrol, and she told me stories — the kind that don't make the local paper. Ordinary geography, extraordinary trouble. I filed them away the way writers do, and years later, when I needed a detective who could walk into any room and out of most of them, I knew where to look.
Lindsay Carter is hers, partly. The stillness. The humor she uses like a scalpel. The way she stands at a scene and sees three things the rest of us miss.
I come by the investigator instinct honestly. I've always loved puzzles — logic games, audit trails, the seam where a story stops matching itself. When my son was scammed last year, I tracked the scammer down before the police did. Not because I was brave. Because I was curious, and I don't like loose threads.
Some of what ends up in the Lindsay Carter books is invented. Some of it isn't. I'll let you guess which.
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THE SERIES
The Lindsay Carter Thrillers
Lindsay Carter spent sixteen years as a Los Angeles County homicide detective before the job broke her in places she is still finding. She left the badge and opened a small private investigation shingle in a coastal town. She told herself it would be small signs and small cases. It hasn't worked out that way.
Boyd Parker is the partner she didn't plan on. A retired character actor with a collector's knowledge of firearms, forensic history, and the bureaucratic backwaters of American crime. He reads like a Stanford professor and closes a room like a Broadway lead.
Together, Carter and Parker take the cases nobody else will work — cold files, police blind spots, the ones where the victim can't afford a lawyer and the killer had every reason to believe he was safe.
WHY THRILLERS
"Mysteries are literary puzzles with people."
Most puzzles are cardboard, or thought experiments you can solve in a recliner. Mysteries are puzzles with people in them, which means they are unpredictable, which means the solution is always a little messier than the math. That is the part I love. The math and the mess, together. A good crime novel earns every turn — the turn of a page, the turn of a character, and the turn of a mind.
A FEW THINGS ABOUT JULIET, size and more.
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Off the Page.
Lives in Salt Lake City.
-Writes at sunrise, fueled by Diet Dr. Pepper.
-Black belt in Tae Kwon Do.
-Founder of Superbrand Publishing.
-Painter — after the same second-grade teacher told her she wasn't good at art. Has sold a few landscapes. Ha! Take that Mrs. Bailey.
-Plotter, never a pantser. Fall is the only acceptable season.
-Great at hiking. Terrible at golf. Unashamed of both.
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Farmhouse Forgotten
When a slaughtered family becomes a closed file, someone has to go back to the house they all tried to forget.
A quiet farmhouse. A slaughtered couple. Two missing little girls — and a baby left crying in his crib.
In 1977, a remote Central California farm becomes the scene of a brutal attack that shocks a small town and hardens into local legend: a drug hit gone wrong, the children presumed dead, the case boxed and forgotten.
Nearly thirty years later, that baby is Jeremy, a man with more questions than memories. When he discovers that one sister was never found — no body, no answers — he becomes obsessed with the idea that she may still be alive under another name. His search leads straight to Tracy McCarthy, a world-famous beach volleyball star with the right age, the right face, and an unsettling resemblance to the sister he lost.
Terrified by Jeremy's letters and sudden appearance at a tournament, Tracy hires private investigator Lindsay Carter, a former homicide cop juggling motherhood with a restless need to be back in the game. Lindsay expects a simple stalker case. Instead, she's pulled into a cold double murder with missing children, a burned-out farmhouse soaked in old blood, and a powerful farm clan determined to keep the past buried.
The deeper Lindsay digs, the more she finds sloppy assumptions, missing evidence, and a conviction that may have put the wrong man behind bars while the real conspirators walked free. Old witnesses start to talk — and then start to die.
To uncover what really happened in that farmhouse, Lindsay must link a blood-soaked night in the country to the glittering world of celebrity sports, before someone decides this case needs to stay forgotten for good.
Bad Lie
He won the Masters. Someone still wants him dead.
Pro golfer Davis Stansbury III has the swing every kid dreams about — and the gambling habit no sponsor can ever see.
When a smoky back-room poker game leaves him owing six figures to a man named Rizzo, Davis thinks a win at the Masters will buy his way out.
He wins. He pays. Someone still wants him dead.
In Calabasas, sports-agent-turned-fixer Jeff Carter spots a dangerous overlap: his golden-boy client, a ruthless back-room bookie, and a billion-dollar cloud company called NimbusCore, built on "trust" and other people's secrets. When an internal whistleblower at NimbusCore turns up dead in an apparent suicide, Jeff calls the only investigator he trusts more than his own instincts — his wife, PI Lindsay Carter.
With her research partner Boyd Parker, a retired character actor and gun collector, Lindsay steps into a world where high-stakes golf, shadowy gambling rooms, and a powerful tech founder all share the same off-books enforcer.
To save Davis's life and stop a killer, Lindsay and Boyd will have to follow the money through the rough, outplay a man who treats murder like damage control, and decide how far they're willing to go when "playing it as it lies" could get them buried.
