The Mark Rollins series of mystery adventures features an ex-technology entrepreneur turned amateur sleuth. He is joined by a host of interesting supporting characters, most notably his colorful cohort Mariko Lee.
My goal as the author of the Mark Rollins' Adventures series is to write the kind of fast reading experiences I enjoyed on my frequent business trips to just about every major city in this country and several beyond its shores —waiting in airports, passing time at 30,000 feet, and before turning off the lights in hotel rooms.
The adventure series begins with Mark Rollins’ New Career & The Women’s Health Club, published in 2008. In it, Rollins investigates a missing person against the backdrop of daily life in his fitness club for socially elite, wealthy women of Nashville, Tennessee, and becomes the target of an international crime boss.
The second book deals with murder and mayhem in the law firm. In Mark Rollins & The Rainmaker someone is trying to kill a prominent Nashville attorney. Rollins and Mariko go undercover and discover that the same seeds that cause many law firms to break up can also provide a motive for murder.
Mark Rollins and the Puppeteer, the third book in the series, is another story of murder among lawyers. Mark Rollins’ friend, a prominent attorney and rising political figure, is gunned down in Nashville’s notorious Printers Alley—killed by the stray bullet of a drunken reveler’s celebratory shooting spree. They say the dead man was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. But Rollins wasn’t buying it! His search for answers yields a plethora of avenues that could have led someone to commit murder, and there is no shortage of candidates—a CPA weak on principles, a mortgage company CEO facing ruin, a law firm mole, a party-going administrator dipping into the till, an unfaithful wife, a womanizing lawyer with gambling debts, or the dead man’s longtime law firm partner. To unmask the killer, Mark Rollins must unravel the mystery’s strings, twisted and tangled by a scheming puppeteer. While the story is fiction the law firm and managment issues it deals with are real—embezzlement, compensation plans, technology, and surviving during an economic downturn.
The fourth Mark Rollins Adventure is The Claret Murders. Some call it a 500-year event. For three solid days, it rained. It rained like it had never rained before. It was a pounding, unrelenting rain—a rain that turned Nashville roads into streams and turned its rivers and creeks into raging killing zones. For the first time, Mark Rollins’ technology was failing him. He was supposed to be keeping Ann Sims safe; but, blinded by the massive storm, he couldn’t even find her when he needed to most. There was something different about Ann Sims. She was smart, a lawyer, about to inherit a fortune, married to an abusive husband that she wanted to divorce—and she had a secret. So did the old decaying mansion that she, as a lawyer, was preparing to auction off for its heirs. And then there was the wine, a wine worth killing for!
The fifth Mark Rollins adventure is Diversion, a mystery adventure with the opioid crisis as the back drop. The drug crisis is fueled by the illegal use of pain medications like Percocet and Fentanyl. Until recently, pill mills in Florida were where you went for a prescription. Now those drugs are moving to rural Middle Tennessee. In the story the bucolic area around Manchester and Tullahoma, Tennessee, had become infested with pill mills selling prescriptions for cash. That area is home to the Bonnaroo Music Festival and the propulsion test facilities at the Arnold Air Force Base that are essential to keep military drones flying in the war against terrorism. Both the Bonnaroo fans and the testing facilities are targets the country’s enemies are willing to die for. A call for help from an old family friend puts Mark Rollins and his team of crime fighters squarely in the middle of it all.
What makes Beyond Visual Range, the sixth book in the series, different is that Collins's Nashville heroines take the story into outer space. Two women drone pilots battle in outer space to defend their country. One is a former fighter pilot who, after a crash, now flies from a wheelchair. This dynamic female drone crew from Nashville, Tennessee, now based in Florida, is drafted to defend the United States from a rogue military element threatening to use force to overthrow the government. Their weapons are twenty-foot tungsten rods. A single rod dropped from orbit would strike Earth at ten times the speed of sound with the impact of a nuclear weapon. As weapons are readied, our heroines find they are Beyond Visual Range.
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For signed copies of books by Tom Collins, go to TomCollinsAuthor.com. Unsigned print ebook and audio editions are available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other online bookstores.
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