A friend's murder takes Cuddy back to the dark days of VietnamAs military policemen, John Francis Cuddy and Al Sachs bonded while patrolling the wild streets of American-occupied Saigon. Over a decade later, Cuddy is a private detective making a living in Boston's back alleys. Awoken by a ringing phone at seven a.m., Cuddy is shocked to hear Sachs asking to meet for a drink that night. His old friend's voice reminds him of the time a Cagney movie inspired Sachs to say that, if ever captured by enemy agents, he would break his pinkie finger to signal to Cuddy that his death was not an accident. Sachs never shows for the drink, and the next morning he is found naked in a park, his body mangled and his pinkie broken.To avenge his friend, Cuddy confronts a dark military cover-up, and travels back to the war zone he thought he left behind years ago.

Cuddy travels to Maine to investigate a gruesome lakeside murderSteve always forgets to buy groceries on the way to the lake house. Every time he and his wife make a pilgrimage to Maine, his first task is to drive into town and pick up essentials. Today he leaves his wife at home with their two friends and returns from the store to find a crossbow on the lawn and arrows embedded in the chests of the three people he loves most. During a twenty-minute shopping trip, he has become the chief suspect in a triple murder.The case against him is airtight—fingerprints on the weapon, blood on his shoes—so Steve's lawyer hires Boston PI John Francis Cuddy to crack it. Steve's lakeside neighbors had no love for his yuppie pals, but did they hate the city slickers enough to frame him for murder? Cuddy learns quickly that in Maine, even the killers are awfully polite.

Cuddy looks for a brilliant missing boy whose family doesn't want him foundJohn Cuddy's heart is buried in a cemetery overlooking Boston harbor. His wife, Beth, fought her cancer for nearly a year, and when she died Cuddy gave up his morning runs in favor of nightly benders. Two months after her death, he is forced out of his job as an insurance investigator for refusing to sign his name to a phony claim. Now he is filing for unemployment, cutting back on his drinking, and attempting to become a private eye.His first real case comes in the form of Valerie Jacobs, a junior high teacher who was friends with Beth. Her star pupil, the son of a Massachusetts judge, has vanished, and the local police have no leads. To make his name as a detective, Cuddy searches for a boy who's too smart to be found, and whose father would prefer his son never return.

A reporter hires Cuddy to investigate her source's suspicious deathAccording to its daily paper, Nasharbor is an idyllic seaside hamlet. But reporter Jane Rust knows better. Investigating a raid on a child pornography ring, she uncovers a web of police corruption built to protect the sickos behind the camera. She writes a story that should blow the lid off the Nasharbor police, but her editors scrub it clean of any reference to corruption, calling her accusations unfounded. Soon after, the cop who tipped her off to the story is dead.Rust hires Boston PI John Francis Cuddy to look into the murder and the cover-up. But prodding small-town cops is like kicking a hornet's nest. By the end of his investigation, more good people will die, and Cuddy will wish he had never heard of sunny, tranquil Nasharbor.

A stint as a bodyguard sucks Cuddy into a vicious divorce caseDivorce will not be easy for Hanna Marsh. Her drug-dealing husband, Roy, is a cruel man, whose greed makes him unwilling to part with anything he owns—including his money, wife, and daughter. Hanna's lawyer is terrified of Roy, but has the sense to hire John Francis Cuddy, private detective, to protect Hanna during the negotiations. Cuddy doesn't wait to get mean with Roy, and the result of his tough talk is clear as soon as they return to Hanna's temporary residence: her daughter's kitten slaughtered on the floor.Cuddy makes Roy pay for his vile behavior, humiliating the drug pusher in an attempt to set his wife free. But when Roy takes a headfirst dive out a hotel window, leaving behind a murdered prostitute and a missing shipment of cocaine, suspicion falls on Cuddy. To save his client's life, Cuddy must put his own on the line.

Hired to protect Maisy Andrus-a vociferous supporter of the right to die-from a potential assassin, John Francis Cuddy must put his marathon training on a back burner to get involved with the Andrus case-a job that dredges up painful memories of his own wife's slow death.

A model's murder takes Cuddy into the jaws of the Boston mobShe was born Tina Danucci, but modeled as Mau Tim Dani., Her friends find the slender beauty strangled to death in her apartment, a priceless necklace of hers nowhere in sight. The police dismiss the murder as an impossible-to-solve botched robbery, so the insurance company hires John Francis Cuddy to do what the homicide detectives can't. But there's something the cops know that Cuddy doesn't: Tina's murder isn't just hard to solve, it could be deadly.Tina was the granddaughter of Tommy "the Temper" Danucci, the invisible face of the Boston mafia. She turned her back on him to become a model, but hers is the kind of family that never forgets a child. Once Danucci learns that the police have lost interest in the case, he puts the screws to Cuddy. This is one murder Cuddy has no choice but to crack.