Tony Boudreaux Mystery series by Kent Conwell (1-2, 4, 6-9, 12-15)
Requirements: epub reader, 8.4 MB
Overview: Kent Conwell grew up in the Texas Panhandle in the town of Wheeler, population 848. A quest for adventure had been woven into his life by his grandfather, who had run away from his Tennessee home when he was 14. After moving to Fort Worth, Kent earned a B.S. and began teaching. Later, he moved to Port Neches where he acquired a M.Ed. and Ph.D. A successful educator, his love for writing about the West and its enigmas, a period in history unique to America, has never waned. After twenty-two westerns, he wrote his first mystery. He has won awards for short stories, screenplays, mysteries, and westerns.
Genre: Mystery
1. Galveston (2003)
They say being forewarned is forearmed. Perhaps, but given a second choice, Tony Boudreaux would never have pulled off I-10 to visit his old friend, Detective Ben Howard, in Galveston. Instead, he would have continued his journey to his home base in Austin, Texas. But on impulse, the newly licensed PI headed for the island city where within hours, he is accused of shooting his friend and murdering a cop he had once threatened. In his efforts to clear himself, he stumbles into the middle of a diamond smuggling caper on the Galveston docks. The players involved are some of the most powerful bosses in the underworld. From Houston to Philadelphia, word goes out to stop him. He only has hours to prove his innocence before he is measured for a new pair of concrete boots.
2. Skeletons of the Atchafalaya (2003)
Tony Boudreaux’s family had a saying that "good things happen in threes." However, instead of three days of rich Cajun food, dancing, and laughing over old times at his family reunion at Whiskey Bend in the middle of the Atchafalaya Swamp, Tony Boudreaux faces trouble. Tony and his family find themselves not only cut off from the rest of the world by Belle, a Category Three hurricane, but also confronted with voodoo wangas, an angry family trying to lynch one of its own and a psychotic killer who has decided to double the Boudreaux and Thibodeaux populations in the family cemetery—and by the most unique methods. This means Tony has to work quickly—before the hurricane strikes and before the murderer kills again.
4. Vicksburg (2005)
When Private Investigator Tony Boudreaux agreed to drive an injured Jack Edney five hundred miles to Vicksburg, Mississippi, for his father’s funeral, Tony had no way of knowing that he would go through the nine lives of a cat before his visit to the historic city ended. When Jack asked Tony to look into his father’s alleged accident, Tony found himself caught up in a devious scheme to defraud the dead man’s family of $12 million. Faced with a medical examiner’s report that wouldn’t have passed the scrutiny of a second-grader and a bizarre family that epitomizes dysfunction, Tony quickly realizes that the elder Edney had indeed been murdered. After a falling bag of cement narrowly misses him, Tony assumes the near fatal incident was just an accident, but when several more "accidents" jeopardize his life, he realizes that someone either wants him off the case or to be a guest at his own funeral. Can Tony find the killer before his own nine lives are up?
6. Extracurricular Murder (2006)
In order to secure an $8 million insurance claim for Frances Holderman, all Tony Boudreaux had to do was prove to Universal Life Insurance Company that his client was not responsible for the death of her husband, a local school district superintendent. What should have been a simple matter of confirming her alibi exploded in his face, leading Tony into a maze of suspects, each of which had his own reasons for murdering the superintendent: a tangle of faculty indiscretions and the hidden world of high school drugs. To further complicate the investigation, Tony’s nephew, Stewart Thibodeaux, breezed into Austin with lofty dreams of becoming a drug lord, only to wind up on the wrong end of an executioner’s bullet.
7. The Swamps of Bayou Teche (2007)
Even as a child listening to the hushed, fearful stories told around dying fires of the loup garous that prowled the Louisiana prairies and ghosted through dark swamps, Tony Boudreaux always viewed them with the skepticism of an enlightened individual. Cauchemars turning living creatures, both human and animal, into supernatural beings was the fodder of middle age ignorance. But when the body of a prominent banker is discovered in the belly of a 16-foot alligator and Tony agrees to look into the incident, death latches onto his scent like a cottonmouth water moccasin stalking a wounded swamp rabbit. Deep in the dark bayou, surrounded by bellowing alligators, Tony learns the truth he hated to admit while trying to unravel the mystery of the banker’s murder.
8. Death in the French Quarter (2007)
A Melungeon beauty, the sister of an old boyhood chum, comes to private eye Tony Boudreaux, hoping he can help clear her brother’s name. Tony takes the case out of a sense of loyalty but has no idea that the trail will lead to the underbelly of smuggling and drugs in the seamy intrigue of New Orleans’s gangland and to the man responsible for the professional execution of his young cousin several months earlier. Forced to go undercover, Tony fashions a cover story that will usher him into the confidence of Bones Guilbeaux, the cold-eyed leader of a diabolical band of smugglers who kill without compunction. His pursuit of the killer leads him through a labyrinth of dark halls, hidden courtyards, secret rooms, and narrow passages where he frantically tries to stay one step ahead of those he pursues.
9. The Crystal Skull Murders (2008)
After a few harrowing months of stumbling through catacombs beneath a New Orleans cemetery, evading alligators at Bayou Teche, and dodging a band of fanatics searching for a crystal skull and torching rap clubs, Tony Boudreaux figures he deserves a rest. So when a San Antonio client offers a $10,000 retainer to find a priceless map hidden in his deceased father’s den, Tony takes the job. He enjoys the ambience of the city and the exotic venue of the River Walk. To his dismay, the simple task of finding a hidden map explodes into a series of attempts on his life and two murders with over a half dozen suspects, all of whom stood to gain from the map rumored to have been ancient even in the time of Alexander the Great.
12. Murder Among Friends (2011)
When Tony Boudreaux agrees to help his ex-girlfriend Debbie Edwards Reeves find her father, he gets more than he bargained for. Reeves has vanished after being accused of masterminding a half-million dollar armored car heist, and Boudreaux’s search leads him through the shadowy back alleys of Austin and up to the snow-covered peaks of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, north of Santa Fe. To make matters worse, right in the middle of his investigation involving the convoluted world of psychics, illegal gambling, and grand theft, his troubles are compounded when his old man is arrested for the murder of a back alley wino. In the midst of it all, Janice Coffman-Morrison, Tony’s significant other, wants to talk marriage. Will there be enough in Tony Boudreaux to solve the predicaments of everyone around him and still have something left to help himself?
13. The Diamonds of Ghost Bayou (2011)
When Jack Edney is assaulted and hospitalized in Priouxville on the banks of Ghost Bayou near Bayou Teche in Louisiana, Tony Boudreaux foregoes his long anticipated vacation to aid his best friend. He is surprised to learn that Jack’s unknown assailants were searching for hidden diamonds, but the jewels turned out to be the least of his worries. In his efforts to uncover who attacked Jack, he stumbles onto three murders the locals attributed to the mythical Loup Garou, a shape-changing creature roaming the swamps. The deeper he pries into the mystery of the diamonds, the more he becomes a target himself. His hunt for the stolen gems and those responsible for Jack’s assault takes him into the chilling eighteenth century culture of backwater swamps, the unholy mysteries of New Orleans, and the furtive backroom schemes of local politics.
14. Murder in a Casbah of Cats (2012)
It should’ve been an easy job for a private investigator—house-sit some cats for a couple weeks and rake in a few thousand bucks thanks to their eccentric owner’s bottomless bank account—practically a vacation. At least, that’s what Tony Boudreaux figures until he finds himself trying to herd a veritable horde of cats, navigate a sprawling mansion with hidden tunnels, and deal with an eccentric staff who all harbor their own secrets. And that’s before the murder! After witnessing a homicide on his first night on the job, Tony soon finds himself fending off attempts on his own life, unraveling a massive drug-dealing ring, and dealing with the not-entirely-unwanted attentions of a spoiled heiress—all while keeping the mansion’s many feline inhabitants alive and well. Now Tony must dig up clues on a 15-year-old murder mystery and determine what it has to do with the recent death. And the cats themselves may be his only chance of getting out of this deadly predicament alive.
15. The Mona Lisa Murders (2013)
Taking a well-deserved fishing vacation after a frantic two weeks of herding twenty cats while stepping over dead bodies, Tony Boudreaux finds himself neck deep in the proverbial quicksand when a stubborn and sassy black woman who claims to be his cousin pleads for his help to deliver a package containing the cremated remains of Lisa Gherardini, the alleged model for the Mona Lisa, to a ranch in Texas. The only problem is that three international cartels are after the package. They pursue Tony and Latasha through a flooded New Orleans with its alligators and snakes and across Louisiana and Texas, coming to a startling climax on the Brazos River when Tony learns the package actually contains the world’s largest uncut diamond.
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Books 3,5,10-11 here: viewtopic.php?f=1294&t=1211265&hilit=Kent+Conwell
