Stephen Fox may be a moron, but he may also be America’s next president. The dimwitted legislator is just smart enough to know when to smile for the camera. But two women stand in the way of his campaign: his mistress and his wife, who has never recovered from the death of their daughter, a pain she manages by devoting herself to fundraising for children with Down syndrome. During a weekend-long charity extravaganza on Long Island Sound, Fox’s candidacy goes off the rails in a spectacularly bloody fashion. Ex-FBI investigator Gregor Demarkian is the first on the scene. Fox’s entourage of political handlers may lie for a living, but Demarkian has a way of ferreting out the truth, and he will nab the killer before the last firework sounds.

In Waldorf Pines, ostentation and pretension are the order of the day. But even by local standards, Martha Heydrich is a stone cold pain. She’s the stay-at-home wife of a very rich husband, into everybody’s business and rumored to be having an affair with a local teenager, Michael Platte. One morning she seemingly vanishes, and that night her husband returns home to find the pool house ablaze. Once the fire is extinguished, police discover two bodies – one is Michael Platte and the other is presumed to be Martha. But then the DNA results come back and the second body is an unknown man. With Martha nowhere to be found, the police to turn to ex-FBI Gregor Demarkian to unravel this most puzzling of cases.

Gregor Demarkian grew up in the Armenian-American enclave in Philadelphia known as Cavanaugh Street. Even though he left to go to college, and then went on to a storied career, he eventually returned to Cavanaugh Street after an early retirement. There he still retains some of the friends. Among them is Father Tibor Kasparian, probably the most genuinely gentle soul that Demarkian has ever met. When Father Tibor is then arrested on murder charges, it tears at the very foundation of Demarkian’s world. While Gregor has very strict rules about for whom and under what conditions he will consult, all those rules go by the wayside. Demarkian is now a man possessed, and his one goal is to find out what really happened and who is really responsible for the murder Father Tibor is charged with.

Twelve years ago, Chester Morton disappeared from his hometown in New York, leaving no trace and never to be heard from again. For the past twelve years, his mother has kept the search for her son alive by hounding every law enforcement agency she can get to listen. Now, Chester’s body is finally found – hanging from the very billboard that has been advertising his disappearance. Chester’s corpse, however, is recent. Under pressure and with limited resources, the local police turn to Gregor Demarkian – a former FBI agent and a frequent consultant on such cases – to try and unravel the truth buried within this very complex and tragic case and find out once and for all what really happened all those years ago.

Alwych is the stereotypical old money Connecticut beach town…and Chapin Waring is the worst thing that ever happened to it. She was from one of the richest families in Alwych until thirty years ago when the young debutante was revealed to a bank robber and a murderer. She disappeared, but Alwych has never forgotten her, or let her friends and family forget. So when, after being spotted around town, Chapin turns up dead – stabbed to death in her family’s old home – it’s baffling. Gregor Demarkian, retired profiler for the FBI, is brought in to finally solve the mysteries surrounding Chapin Waring. Not just how and why she died where she did, but where she’d been and what happened that night thirty years ago that set everything in motion.

A mysterious black van is spotted by several people at various times in the area around Cavanaugh Street, Philadelphia’s Armenian-American enclave. Presumed by some to be related to the increasing ICE raids around the area, the mystery deepens one night when a body falls out of the back of the van when speeding through the neighborhood. Marta Warkowski, a reclusive older woman, is found bound up in a garbage bag after it falls out of the van. In a coma, Warkowski is unable to tell police how she ended up as she did. When they go to search her apartment, the police find the dead body of her building’s super, a man with whom she has a history of conflict. How did she end up in a garbage bag in the back of a mysterious van? How did he end up dead in her locked apartment? What does all of this have to do with the real estate holdings of infamous local developer, Cary Alder? Gregor Demarkian, former FBI agent and consultant, is ready to retire. He and his wife Bennis have agreed to foster a child, Javier, with a mysterious past and limited language skills. But he is pulled in once again, for a final case, to uncover the truth about the murder–and attempted murder–on Cavanaugh Street.

Since Father Tibor Kasparian escaped the Soviet Union, he has done his best to keep his philosophy to himself-not out of fear, but because he knows that few people could stomach an honest account of life under Stalinism. When he gets an invitation to spend a semester teaching philosophy at Independence College, Kasparian hesitates, but his friend Gregor Demarkian, a former FBI investigator, convinces him to accept. They will both wish he had decided to stay away. But on Halloween when the hated professor Donegal Steele vanishes and his secretary turns up dead, Demarkian will have to do his homework to ensure Kasparian isn’t the next victim.