A Predator’s Game
Manhattan, 1896. When the author, Arthur Conan Doyle meets Nikola Tesla, he finds a tall, thin genius with a photographic memory and a keen eye, and recognizes in the eccentric inventor the embodiment of his creation, Sherlock.
Together, they team up to take on a different, evil Holmes. Multi-murderer Dr. Henry H. Holmes has escaped execution and is unleashing a reign of terror upon the metropolis. Set in the late nineteenth century in a world of modern marvels, danger, and invention, Conan Doyle, Tesla, and the madman engage in a deadly game of wits. (Read more)
Never Kill A Friend
A suspense/police mystery, the story follows six-foot-four, Shelley Krieg. She’s the giantess of DC Metro–a tough cop who’s paid her dues on her long path to becoming a detective in the city she loves. She can get a confession out of anyone. And she always plays by the rules. But when Rafael Hooks is arrested for killing his brother, all the rules change. (Read more)
Where did the idea for this book come from? Martin Hill explains. “The genesis of the idea for the story came from a variation on the locked-room mystery. Instead of not being able to explain a murder in a locked room, there is one seemingly irrefutable explanation: the person who was locked in the room with the victim must have been the perpetrator. This is enough to put the suspect in jail. However, the same crime happens again, this time with the detective being the only possible culprit.” (Read the interview)
“Martin Hill writes with an awareness that brings emotional depth to the interactions of his characters in this well-told mystery.” Foreword Reviews.
The work has the urban grittiness of George Pelecanos and The Wire. Never Kill A Friend is available for purchase in hard cover format and as an ebook.
Dead Man’s Trail
Dead Man’s Trail is a western thriller novella now available in soft cover edition from Seven Archons Press.
“Aces” Powell prospected in the Gila Mountains until he nearly went mad. Knowing the terrain, he is recruited by the sheriff to join a posse to hunt down the merciless killer, Coffin Jack. When Aces catches up with the posse he finds them all hanging from a tree.
Thus begins a cat-and-mouse thriller between Aces and a savage killer set against a backdrop of the lawless west, where peace balances on a knife’s edge and where vengeance takes on a life of its own.
“Martin Hill Ortiz has written an unnerving and irresistible novella of vengeance and justice in the Old West. This is a writer who knows how to wield the weapon of suspense. Dead Man’s Trail will remind you of the work of Larry McMurtry and Cormac McCarthy and will remind you as well of just why you started reading stories in the first place: to be transported to a world more vivid than the one you’re living in. –John Dufresne, No Regrets, Coyote
Buy Dead Man’s Trail as a soft cover paperback from Amazon.
Dead Man’s Trail (read the first two chapters here) is set against a backdrop of the Apache Wars (background info here).
A Predatory Mind
Eight intelligent people are locked in an abandoned library. One is a murderer. They believe they can identify the killer using reason.
They believe if they don’t take risks, they will be safe. They are wrong. In the 1890’s, Nikola Tesla created an invention that let him inside the mind of the psychotic killer known as Henry H. Holmes.
To his horror, Tesla not only read Holmes’s thoughts, he received part of his personality. More than a century later, unprincipled scientist Dr. Gordon Rickert is recruited to replicate Tesla’s research.
Before long, Rickert and his colleagues unwittingly resurrect a long dead evil. To undo the damage, they agree to lock themselves in together. As they are picked off, one by one, the investigators must determine who among them is harboring a predatory mind. —Goodreads review