The first book in the Carlotta Carlyle series! Linda Barnes' A Trouble of Fools is the book that introduced readers to ex-Boston cop and PI Carlotta Carlyle, who knows trouble when she sees it like the old Irish lady offering a grand in cash to find her brother... TROUBLE… Since being bounced from the Boston police for insubordination after six years of service, Carlotta Carlyle has set up shop as a private investigator ready to deal with anything from lost pets to substantially grander larcenies. Though Carlotta, a six-foot-tall, redheaded ex cop, part-time cabbie, and neophyte private eye, works out of her home, it's rare that clients stop by unannounced. Especially clients like the genteel, reserved, elderly spinster Miss Margaret Devens. ALWAYS COMES… With cash flow problems and a caseload so light that she's taken to reading her cat's mail, Carlotta accepts the case of Miss Devens' missing brother Eugene. Oddly enough, Carlotta knew Eugene when they worked together back at Green and White Cab. As far as Carlotta sees it, this case should be a pinch—until two thugs looking for money send her client to the hospital. WHEN YOU LEAST EXPECT IT… The old lady's missing brother seems to have been involved in something much more dangerous than simply driving a cab. Carlotta is determined to do whatever it takes?work the cops, pose as a hooker, and even drive a cab again—to find Eugene before it's too late. "She is one of the most sparkling, most irresistible heroines ever to grace the pages of a whodunit." ?Chicago Sun-Times "All elements are skillfully woven together in a book that has just about everything." —Denver Post

Carlotta Carlyle, ex-cop, struggling private eye, and 6'1" of long tall redhead, takes any case that walks through the door. This time the door opens twice. First in is her old partner, Lieutenant Mooney of the Boston police, unfairly charged with brutality, suspended, and desperate. The witness who can clear him is a hooker with a snake tattoo...and she's vanished. The second client is a teenager with a missing wallet and a split lip. He's been roughed up on the Boston streets while searching for his runaway girlfriend. He's too young to be a client, and Carlotta should have turned him down. Shoulda, woulda, coulda...didn't. Both investigation send Carlotta into Boston's Combat Zone and the dark alleys of the human heart. Hookers don't disappear and kids don't take off with good reason. Now Carlotta is coming face to face with the evil that men do, and what is she going to do about it? Tackle it head on....

When a mysterious woman asks Carlotta to help locate her missing immigration card, it looks to be a pretty straightforward assignment. That is, until the lady disappears, and the card turns up in the possession of another woman...who just happens to be dead. Suddenly the case is far too intriguing for Carlotta to drop-and when her investigation indicates that her client was somehow connected to her inner-city "little sister" Paolina, Carlotta's got an even bigger stake in seeing it through. Alongside a handsome immigration agent with some secrets of his own, she follows her leads into the treacherous underground world of illegal aliens and those who mercilessly prey upon them. It's a lawless, dangerous territory: a place where the only thing Carlotta can rely on is her own wits, and where nothing-from innocence to life itself-is sacred...

They say you meet all kinds when you're driving a hack. That's certainly the case for Boston PI Carlotta Carlyle, who gets an unexpected fare while moonlighting behind the wheel. It's singer Dee Willis, Carlotta's ex-friend and former band mate, who stole Carlotta's man before clawing her way up the charts. Dee's made the leap from Southie's barrooms to the cover of People magazine, but now she's back in Carlotta's life, bringing with her a load of trouble. She hires Carlotta to track down a mutual friend who's fallen on hard times, but Carlotta soon finds that there's a far more menacing tune being played. Someone is blackmailing Dee, claiming she stole songwriting credits-and the money and fame that came with them. As the spotlight's glare turns as cold as the corpse that turns up in Dee's hotel room, Carlotta's past is about to catch up to her...with a vengeance.

Every Friday a child's snapshot arrives at the Boston office of P.I. Carlotta Carlyle. There's no note. No return address. Just pictures of the child as a newborn, as a toddler, as a preschooler. Maybe Carlotta should have tossed them all in the trash. Maybe then she wouldn't have gotten mixed up again...in murder. Discovering what happened to the child in the photos draws Carlotta into a shattered picture of private lives sadly out of focus-and big shots mixed up with deadly conspiracy that stretches from a New England hospital to the Third World. And when she finds her own "little sister" from the Boston Big Sisters program in a different kind of danger, the truth jumps out in harsh black and white. In a world filled with killers and innocence, Carlotta Carlyle may be the only avenging angel left....

In her sixth spellbinding adventure, Carlotta Carlyle, the 6'1" redheaded P.I. from Boston, takes on a case that draws her into the mysterious shadova and of computer technology, where information is cheap, and privacy may be a thing of the past. Part-time cabbie Carlotta is entering the modern age of investigation. With the help of her sometime lover, mafioso, and computer-hobbyist Sam Gianelli, she invests in her first "hardware," a cheap personal computer. And at the urging of her ex-boss, Boston Police Lt. Mooney, who decries the stopping power of her .38 S&W, she decides to upgrade her arsenal. Both types of hardware come in handy when Carlotta is hired by Gloria, owner of G&W Cab, to investigate the brutal robberies that are causing her cabbies to quit in record numbers, and the violence and unanswered questions escalate. An explosion rocks G&W, killing Gloria's brother and seriously wounding co-owner Sam Gianelli. Is someone out to bankrupt G&W to acquire its invaluable cab medallions? Is the company a pawn in a Mafia vendetta, with Sam, the underboss' son, the target? And who put that tiny microphone near G&W's bathroom? Aided by a mysterious databank expert, Carlotta learns far more than she thought possible about "private" transactions. And she finds herself digging into Sam's past, exposing secrets he's kept hidden for years—secrets that begin to pull them further apart. As the investigation reaches its climax, Carlotta realizes, almost too late, that the mob may be just a fall guy in a very intimate crime.

Twenty-four years ago, teen prodigy Thea Janis vanished from her upper crust Boston prep school. At first called a runaway, she's later named among the victims of a serial killer, a man doing life in Walpole Prison. Then a new manuscript appears in her family's mailbox. The words cry out from the printed pages, Thea's voice unmistakable even a quarter century since the girl's mysterious disappearance. A new client bearing a dead man's name turns up in the office of P.I. Carlotta Carlyle, looking for her help in finding whoever is sending the book—even if it turns out to be Thea herself. The investigation leads Carlotta to a prominent Boston family with deep connections and even deeper pockets, and which badly wants the tragic past to stay buried. But after a hit man tries to write his own ending to the saga, the cold case suddenly goes white hot—and Carlotta may be the one who ends up getting burned.

Boston PI Carlotta Carlyle thinks she's doing a friend a simple favor when she agrees to burglarproof an elderly recluse's apartment. But 24 hours later, when the woman turns up dead, with her apartment ransacked, Carlotta is left with a lot of questions. What was the old woman so desperate to protect? And just how much was the apartment worth to the greedy real estate developers who were breathing down her neck? Carlotta better find the answers fast-before an innocent woman is convicted of arson and a firestarter strikes again.

Carlotta Carlyle, the six-foot-tall redheaded private investigator, thought that working undercover searching out fraud on Boston's Big Dig would be a challenging assignment. After all, the Big Dig, the creation of a central artery tunnel running beneath crowded downtown Boston is an engineering marvel, the largest urban construction project in modern history, a fourteen billion dollar boondoggle in the eyes of protesters. Playing a mild-mannered secretary working out of a construction trailer is not quite the thrill ride she had in mind. Carlotta decides to moonlight, taking on a missing persons case, but the search for Veronica James turns up one dead end after another. So do her fraud investigations on the Dig, and soon it looks like Carlotta has dug herself one big hole. But then a break-in at Veronica's coupled with the mysterious death of a construction worker on one of the sites stirs up a storm, and soon enough Carlotta is in over her head in more ways than one. Suspenseful, unpredictable, and vivid, The Big Dig is a startling return to form for one of the masters of the crime genre.

Harvard professor Wilson Chaney's position in life is hanging by a thread; his marriage, his reputation, not to mention his tenure at Harvard are in the hands of a blackmailer, someone threatening to sell Chaney's secrets at very high prices. His enviable life could disappear into thin air should the blackmailer's evidence - proof of his affair with a young student - become public knowledge. So he hires Boston private investigator Carlotta Carlyle to track down the blackmailer and put a stop to the scheme. Can she do it? Of course, but should she? The professor doesn't inspire much loyalty-after all, he did commit adultery with one of his own students-but Carlotta agrees. Digging into the case, nosing around Harvard and the possible suspects from the rest of Dr. Chaney's life, she uncovers a suspicious death as part of the backstory to Dr. Chaney's situation. Suddenly Carlotta's sixth sense is telling her the case might be more complicated-and more dangerous-than it first seemed. Fresh from the success of The Big Dig, the masterful Linda Barnes delivers a bold and engaging novel infused with the deft touch and intricate suspense that have become her trademarks.

When private investigator Carlotta Carlyle is wakened by a late-night phone call, she discovers that her "little sister," Paolina, the child with whom she was paired years ago by a local mentoring program, is missing. Carlotta combs the Boston streets looking for Paolina, torn between anger at the thoughtless teenage runaway and anxiety that something has really happened to her. Paolina is more than a sister to Carlotta. She's the daughter she never had, or never owned up to having. She's the one constant in Carlotta's life, more reliable than Sam Gianelli, her mob boss lover, a man whose always unpredictable behavior has become increasingly mysterious. Heart of the World, Linda Barnes' most intense, personal, and suspenseful Carlotta Carlyle novel yet, follows Carlotta's trail from New England to Miami to Bogotá and beyond as she probes the connection between Paolina's disappearance and the corresponding disappearance of the Colombian drug lord father Paolina has never met. A breathless and shocking read, Heart of the World is perhaps Barnes' best.

Bestseller and multiple award winning author Linda Barnes returns with the most personal case to date for her popular Boston PI, Carlotta Carlyle. Carlotta, in unfamiliar territory working on her own behalf, finds herself in the middle of a complicated case that has as much to do with the people she loves as the backstreets of Boston, and beyond. For starters, Carlotta wants to know what her on-again, off-again boyfriend Sam Gianelli did to earn himself a secret indictment for murder that's keeping him out of the country. A man with plenty of secrets, he won't tell her anything, much less let her help, and she isn't having any more luck with her old friends at the Boston PD. Sam's exile could be connected to the mob - he is in the family- but she's not buying it. It couldn't be that simple. Nothing involving Sam ever is. It couldn't be that simple. Nothing involving Sam ever is. Faced with nothing but dead ends, Carlotta goes back to basics and takes a case for a nervous bride-to-be who wants to make sure her fiancé is being faithful. Simple enough, but when her client turns up dead, Carlotta catches the kind of break she wished she hadn't. While nothing is as it seems in Lie Down with the Devil, one thing is clear: Readers know that when they're reading Linda Barnes, they're in the hands of a maestro.