TAHOE DEATHFALL, TAHOE BLOWUP,  TAHOE ICE GRAVE, TAHOE KILLSHOT, TAHOE SILENCE. AND TAHOE AVALANCHE, 

We have six books at Thriller Press by Lake Tahoe resident Todd Borg.

All six are mystery thrillers set in Lake Tahoe and featuring detective Owen McKenna and his Great Dane Spot.

The protagonist of the series is a Lake Tahoe detective named Owen McKenna, an ex-cop from San Francisco who, after a tragic shooting,  gave up his gun and his city and moved to the mountains to start over.

Owen’s girlfriend is Street Casey, a striking forensic entomologist who studies maggots in corpses in order to establish time of death among other clues.

Owen is an art lover who uses his favorite paintings to divine essential truths about human character and he applies them to his cases.

One of our favorite characters is Owen’s dog Spot. A Harlequin Great Dane, Spot is huge, weighs 170 pounds and plays a critical role in each novel. He is a lovable dog. Although he occasionally acts tough-as-nails, it is usually a put-on. From readers' responses, it is clear that they all love Spot!

TAHOE DEATHFALL is about a precocious fourteen-year-old, Jennifer Salazar. She wants to hire Owen McKenna to look into the death of her twin sister eight years earlier. Her sister fell off the rock slide above Emerald Bay and died on their sixth birthday. Although the death was ruled an accident, Jennifer believes it was murder. Owen reluctantly takes the case and quickly discovers that an old secret has resurfaced and people are dying as a result.

After Street studies maggots in a second corpse and provides clues that connect the death to Owen's investigation, TAHOE DEATHFALL takes Owen to San Francisco, then to a rich man's private island off the coast of Santa Barbara, then to an insane asylum in the desert north of Las Vegas.  There Owen learns of a secret that is responsible for several deaths.  Owen realizes that his client, Jennifer, is next to die.  

The climax has Owen racing back to Lake Tahoe (flying a small plane through a blizzard) in a desperate attempt to save Jennifer. The killer has her and she has only minutes left to live...

THE HUNTRESS

What if your sweet, kind husband had a criminal past that you didn't know about?  What if, in exchange for testifying against his ex-boss,  the Federal Government had put him through the Witness Relocation Program and given him a new identity before you met him?  And what if your husband's ex-boss on Wall Street believed your husband still had millions of dollars from an investment scam, tracked your family down in Los Angeles, and kidnapped your children to ransom the money?

This is the premise of Thomas Cage's exciting new thriller titled THE HUNTRESS.  

THE HUNTRESS is about Freda Rivas, an ex-wilderness guide who is married to Mario Rivas who, unknown to Freda, has a dark past.  Mario's former boss believes that Mario has millions of dollars that belong to him.  In an effort to regain the money, Mario's ex-boss kidnaps Freda's and Mario's children.  

Freda assumes the FBI will find the kidnapper. But when she uncovers evidence that points to the location of her children and the FBI ignores it, she realizes the FBI has  been compromised. Then she finds out about her husband's past as a criminal who had been given a new identity in the Witness Relocation Program. It is the money that he once stole – money that is long gone – that the kidnapper wants. 

Here is where you hang onto your hats, fellow readers. For when the mother, who is an ex-wilderness guide and expert bow and arrow hunter, figures this out, she decides to go after the kidnapper herself.  The kidnapper has a small army guarding the children in a secret location high in the Sierra Nevada mountains.   Although they think they are immune to intervention by any law enforcement, they cannot imagine what they are up against when the mother comes hunting them!

THE HUNTRESS is a frightening thriller about a woman who will stop at nothing to save her children from a brilliant psychopath.  

The novel takes you on a breathless journey from L.A. to the high Sierra to San Francisco and across the country to New York where the finale will have you chewing your nails off.

Reading THE HUNTRESS guarantees that you will lose sleep.  And be forewarned: If you have children, read it at your peril! 

The publication of THE HUNTRESS will be soon.

Robert Skaggs' new thriller features Marston Roedecker, motorcycle rider, karate aficionado and manic-
depressive.  Skaggs' new novel also features the most intriguing first two paragraphs we've seen in a thriller.  (See below.)

Mars lives in an upstairs  warehouse in Minneapolis, rides a freight elevator up from the street and parks his motorcycle in his living room.  He is financially comfortable thanks to a divorce from a woman who knew well the ways of money.  In lieu of working for a living, he tries to help out people who have been taken advantage of.  

Especially when he feels himself sliding into a black depression.  

Mars finds someone in a major jamb and directs his considerable energy and resources into the case.  The effort often produces a respite from the depression, a shifting of brain chemistry from free-fall to stability or better.

In CRUSH ME SLOWLY, Mars is called to meet a woman in trouble.  He shows up on his motorcycle and she jumps on the back urging him to drive fast. As he pulls away, she is shot dead.  The action intensifies from there and the surprises are numerous.

The dead woman turns out to have been involved with a poet who is a lunatic. When Mars investigates that relationship, the story heads west to Seattle and then to the mountains of Colorado and back to Minneapolis for a gritty climax.

As for the opening paragraphs that made it so we couldn't put Skaggs' book down?  They follow below:

The worst thing about riding at night with a dead woman on the back of my motorcycle wasn't trying to keep her from falling off. She leaned nicely with me on the corners, her arms wrapped around my torso, hands burrowed deep into the pockets of my leather jacket. Nor was it wondering if anyone besides me and the gunman knew she was dead. Her head nuzzled affectionately in the crook of my neck, and her warm body pressed against my back making us look like Grateful Dead fans trying to stave off a mid-life crisis.

TAHOE BLOWUP

The second book in the Owen McKenna series is TAHOE BLOWUP.  This novel starts with the death of a man by fire, with a forest fire growing from the same incident.  Owen McKenna is brought in by one of the local fire departments. They had received a warning note about the fire and are worried that the arsonist will set more fires.

Owen brings in a trained search and rescue dog to help Spot track the bodies as well as the killer. Just when Owen is narrowing his list of suspects, the arsonist kidnaps Owen’s girlfriend Street Casey and threatens to burn her in a fire so big that firefighters call it a BLOWUP.  

The climax of TAHOE BLOWUP is as intense as that in any book we've ever read. Not only will a large part of Tahoe burn in this monster fire, but Street is being held somewhere in the fire path.  

Trust us on this prediction: By the time you get to the climax of TAHOE BLOWUP, you won't be able to put it down! 

Read this book in the winter when it is cold and snowy and keep a wet towel nearby to breathe through!

TAHOE ICE GRAVE is about a long-lost manuscript by Mark Twain and a killer who will do anything to obtain it. 

Tahoe Ice Grave opens with a naked young man who is apparently going to commit suicide by walking into the frigid waters of Lake Tahoe in the middle of winter and succumbing to hypothermia. Before he succeeds, he is murdered. 

Owen McKenna is brought in to investigate and the puzzle soon has Owen and Street flying to the Hawaiian island of Kauai to investigate the Hawaiian side of the young man's family and a reported secret shrine hidden in a cave on the famous Na Pali cliffs.

While Owen is learning about a missing Twain manuscript, he is also dodging a vicious killer who wants the manuscript so much he will kill anyone in his way.

Owen is soon back in Tahoe where the manuscript may now be hidden, this time in another cave that is sacred to Tahoe's Washoe Indians. 

There is one person who knows where the manuscript is, but that person's identity is unknown.  Owen and Spot have to find that person before the killer does and they are running out of time as they chase the killer up a mountain in a blizzard to a secret cave and a battle to the death.

TAHOE KILLSHOT

The fourth book in the Owen McKenna series is TAHOE KILLSHOT.  On a gorgeous August morning the pop star Glory went mountain biking on the world-famous Flume Trail high above Lake Tahoe. Something caused her to ride off the cliff-hugging path and she died when she hit the rocks below.

Everyone thinks it was a terrible accident until private investigator Owen McKenna gets a call from a young woman who says she has information about Glory's death. Owen's investigation turns up lots of suspects but no good leads until he gets a taunting call from someone who speaks with a synthetic voice. 

While Owen can't figure out why a sick killer with a robotic voice is killing people in exotic ways, he know it has something to do with a huge money-making scam. 

Owen needs Spot and search-and-rescue dog Natasha to literally sniff out the killer because the bodies are piling up, and Owen's name is at the top of the killer's list...

FEVER by Thomas Cage (due out in another year) has as its bad guy an especially evil psychopath named Fever. When Fever was a boy, he lost his baby brother in a botched abortion that he was forced to witness.  Scarred by the experience and forever linking the problems of his life with that singular event, Fever has tried to fill the aching void in a particularly sickening way.  When things don't go his way, the huge weight-lifter destroys whatever and whomever he perceives to be in the way of his path to happiness.

The novel's protagonist is Andee MacIntyre, an ex-Hollywood stuntwoman whose career was cut short by an accident.  When she crosses Fever's path, her life is suddenly changed forever.

Without giving away the details, we can say that Andee ends up on the run from Fever, a killer whose method of murder is so gruesome that it is beyond description on this website.

At the climax of FEVER, readers will be desperately hoping that Andee can summon every stunt skill she ever had if she is to survive... 

EXCERPTS

To read excerpts from the books on this page, visit the excerpts page.

Mr. Borg lives with his wife in Tahoe.  To learn more about Todd Borg and his mystery thrillers featuring Owen, Street and Spot, please visit his website toddborg.com.  

Please order Borg's Tahoe mysteries at your favorite independent bookstore. These books have gotten rave reviews and we think you’ll love them as much as we do. All of the ordering information is on the ordering page.

In addition to:

TAHOE DEATHFALL, TAHOE BLOWUP, TAHOE ICE GRAVE,  TAHOE KILLSHOT, TAHOE SILENCE, AND TAHOE AVALANCHE, (Borg)

We will eventually be publishingTHE HUNTRESS by Cage, CRUSH ME SLOWLY by Skaggs, and FEVER by Cage.

Thriller Press has other books in development.

Thomas Cage is working on the outline for THE HUNTRESS RETURNS.  This is a reprise role for Freda Rivas who is approached by a desperate mother whose child is missing and believed kidnapped in the mountains of Northern New Mexico.

Cage is also blocking out NOT DEAD YET, the story of a group of aging World War Two vets who decide to take on the young thugs who are robbing elderly people in gated retirement communities. Cage showed us the beginning chapters and we are very intrigued, to say the least. His elderly protagonist Fletcher Quinn looks to be the toughest old guy who will ever win your heart. 

And Robert Skaggs reports he has completed outlines for the next two Marston Roedecker novels.

Thriller Press also has a new author in the works, a woman whose thriller will be a surprise.