A Vega and Middleton Mystery

When Los Angeles news photographer Lucy Vega's uncle, a formidable Hispanic businessman, is killed in a car accident in Malibu during a violent storm, Lucy and reporter-colleague Beatrice Middleton are out to prove murder. Lucy discovers secret underworld involvement by Mexican cartel members, and bent on finding answers, she travels to Mexico, where she meets a handsome, but burned out, CNN war correspondent. Trailing the cartel deep into their own territory, they soon find that corruption and brutality are rampant, and Lucy must risk all to find the truth behind her uncle's murder.

Los Angeles TV journalist Beatrice Middleton has lost her job. With a possible employment offer in Atlanta, she heads home to Savannah, Georgia, to reconnect with her contentious African-American family, arriving to find that her 15-year-old nephew has been murdered. This begins the unraveling of a cloak of family secrets surrounding another devastating crime, one that shattered Bea's world when she was a teen. The traumatic memory has been buried so deep it almost feels like it never happened - almost.

In Sue Hinkin’s award-winning thriller The Burn Patient, TV news photog, Lucy Vega, thought she’d seen her uncle’s murderer die in Guerrero. He was incinerated in a Jeep explosion while trying to put a bullet through her head. She didn’t know officials had never found the body. Now, Gary Mercer, Hollywood bad boy, drug czar and psychopathic killer, is back from the dead with a new face, literally. This time his perverted sights are set on reporter Bea Middleton’s beautiful, naïve, 13-year-old daughter, Alyssa.

Last seen heading out of Ventura Harbor with a SCUBA group bound for the Channel Islands, Santa Monica High School Marine Biology teacher, Isabelle Abbott, has vanished. Drugged, bound, and gagged, she finds herself prisoner in the dark bowels of an underground aquarium complex. Once used by the military for marine mammal research, dolphins are no longer denizens of the big tanks. Instead, a menagerie of freaky razor-toothed predators including Piscum Auratus, a genetically engineered gold shark the size of an SUV, swims in psychotic circles.

Afraid for his life, David Pine, longtime reporter with the Los Angeles Daily, drops a thumb drive in the snail mail for friend and colleague TV news correspondent Beatrice Middleton. Three hours later Pine is found murdered. At the same time Bea and partner photographer Lucy Vega cover the developing story of a military vet shot by police for throwing cement blocks off a freeway overpass, killing a young driver and injuring others. The man was supposedly off his meds. His parents swear it wasn’t true. No one believes them.

When Lucy’s life partner, war reporter Michael Burleson, suddenly leaves the U.S. to take a job re-establishing the cable news network office in Iraq, Lucy is alone with their four-year-old son Henry on her isolated Malibu Ranch. Michael’s sweet but unstable, recovering addict daughter, shows up looking to meet her baby half-brother and establish a relationship with Lucy.