Fiction of Susan B. Cogan
In the South China Sea is an island protected by nine dragons. Angie Tanaka has made one of them really, really angry.
Angie is running from the Hong Kong police and pays the captain of a fishing boat to take her … anywhere but here.
Here we go again! Angie Tanaka can't seem to stay out of trouble. She finds herself haunted by a cute little hungry ghost and a not-so-cute demon who has a special hell kept warm just for dragons.
Go to Hell.
It’s such a delicious phrase. Angie Tanaka never thought she’d want to go there herself.
A Victorian London that Never Was ... With Monsters.
In the 19th century, there were new marvels almost every year—steam engines, photography, telegraphs, trains. But after the Great Disaster, everything seems to veer off in another direction. Rumors of wireless communication and electrical energy all die out. The marvels stop. Then another disaster strikes—the assassination of elderly Queen Victoria and two of her sons. For a while, the world collapses into mad chaos. Parliament is dissolved and Queen Victoria’s grandson, Prince Albert becomes the heir apparent. The Regency Committee rules with an iron fist, but they bring peace and order back into the nation. Then, quietly at first, a third disaster. The monsters come. Miriam Walker hunts them.
Award Winning!
The Man Who Needed Killing
An Oklahoma Mystery
“The author never lets any piece fall into place too easily or illogically, never gives any character an easy out from their moral qualms, and colors details so skillfully that you feel the heat of the Oklahoma drought as surely as each little betrayal's knife wound when Joe realizes a friend has lied.” - Publisher's Weekly
It is 1935 and Joe Bennett is a straight-arrow town sheriff who must investigate the death of a man everyone is happy to be rid of.
A wandering minstrel (who in 1935 was called a hobo) has a magical ruby ring and an even more magical harmonica. This story also has lying friends, secretive townspeople, a woman of negotiable virtue and her criminal boyfriend, a beautiful angel in a cold white box, and a dead man who really, really deserved it.
This novel finished in the top 100 of the 2008 Amazon Breakout Novel Contest and won 1st place in the 2010 OWFI Conference Mystery Division
Max Archer is a private detective who doesn't like Gregory Button (“he’d raise the hair on the neck of a stone idol”) but, at least at first, he can’t quite figure out why. Max has good instincts. Gregory is a contract killer with a popular specialty. He kills people with kindness. If Aunt Hattie needs to go gently into that good night, so you can collect the insurance money, Gregory is there to provide a quiet and painless exit. Upon request, he can even make it look like death by accident or natural causes. Max complicates Gregory’s life when the Button Man is hired to kill Hart Freeman and Chou Seoul (do those sound like made up names to you?). They are a couple of con men who fleece people by offering them promises of eternal life.
Gregory teaches them just how inevitable death can be.
Murder on the Waterfront
A Lady Margaret Mystery
Lady Margaret’s quest to bring a killer to justice leads her out of her art studio to a seedy all-night cafe, a Depression-era tenement, the waterfront, and eventually to the dark underbelly of Chinatown.
Inspector Monahan, the blunt-talking son of Irish immigrants has no love for the English nobility. He takes a dim view of interfering amateur sleuths and doesn’t like being strong-armed, even by a gorgeous dame.
Together they pursue the Mandarin, a shadowy Chinese gangster who may have the answers to blackmail, smuggling, and the whereabouts of a heartless killer.
Cherie Jung reviewing for Over My Dead Body:
“It’s been quite some time since I read a book I was willing to skip lunch to continue reading, but I read straight through from page one to the end without stopping. Everything clicks. A good story, fascinating characters, and snappy dialogue.”
In 1792, Paris is in flames and the hungry guillotine waits . . . .
I started this book out as a romance. I can't write a standard grocery store romance. Sorry. So I killed off the girl's parents and sold her into sex slavery. There's still a handsome hero who has to bail her out of this mess, but there's also a bejeweled dagger, murder, revenge, a mysterious fortune teller, the French Revolution, Paris, the guillotine, bordellos, palaces, aristocrats, and whores.
This book is a nonstop ride through a violent history.
A young queen must save her kingdom from her crazy, homicidal brother and her ambitious wizard.
Her only hope of saving her people from her enemies is to find the long-lost Heart of the Tengeri, a fabled talisman that contains the strength and power of the empire.