"Vigilante"
In the last novel by acclaimed producer and New York Times bestselling author Stephen J. Cannell, LAPD detective Shane Scully and his partner Sumner Hitchens investigate a crime with ties to the sometimes violent world of reality TV
Lita Mendez was a thorn in the LAPD's side. An aggressive police critic and gang activist, she'd filed countless complaints against the department. So when she's found dead in her home, Detective Scully and his partner Hitchens fear the worst: that there's a killer in their ranks.
Lita Mendez was a thorn in the LAPD's side. An aggressive police critic and gang activist, she'd filed countless complaints against the department. So when she's found dead in her home, Detective Scully and his partner Hitchens fear the worst: that there's a killer in their ranks.
Outside the crime scene, Nixon Nash and his television crew have set up shop. Nash is the charismatic host of a hit reality show called "Vigilante TV," dedicated to beating the cops at their own game: solving murders before they can. Now he has the murder of Lita Mendez in his sights. He presents the detectives with a choice: either join his team, or prepare for a public takedown.
“The Pallbearers”
Shane Scully revisits his troubled past as a foster child in bestseller Cannell's slightly more plausible than usual ninth novel to feature the LAPD detective (after On the Grind).
Scully and his attractive wife, Alexa, the acting commander of the LAPD's detective division, are looking forward to a two-week vacation in Hawaii.
Then Scully hears the shocking news that Walter Dix, the head of Huntington House Group Home, where the policeman spent time in his youth, has blown his head off with a shotgun.
Since Scully hadn't kept in touch with his former mentor, he's surprised to learn Dix left a note designating him a pallbearer.
The other pallbearers at Dix's funeral, fellow alums of Huntington House, also doubt the official suicide verdict and join Scully in an effort to find the truth.
“Vertical Coffin”
First, a sheriff’s deputy, a friend of Shane’s, is gunned down while serving a routine search warrant. His fellow deputies blame the incident on the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, whom they angrily accuse of failing to warn them that the suspect had a huge arsenal of illegal weapons in his house.
Soon thereafter, a member of the ATF Situation Response Team is shot to death, followed by the sniper murder of a member of the Sheriff’s Special Enforcement Bureau.
At the request of the Mayor, the LAPD—an uninvolved and unbiased agency—assigns Shane to investigate. He is given an impossible deadline to find a solution before these two elite and deadly SWAT Teams kill each other off amid a hurricane of horrible publicity.
Stephen Cannell is one of television’s most prolific and recognized producers. His Shane Scully series has been gaining a growing audience since the publication of The Tin Collectors, and Vertical Coffin is his best outing yet.
Throughout his TV career, Cannell scripted more than 450 episodes and produced more than 1,500 episodes. This staggering number is even more amazing as Cannell was born with dyslexia and held back several grades in school. And yet, his favorite subject was English, he listed “author” as his future career in his high school yearbook and he graduated from the University of Oregon with a degree in journalism.
Throughout his life, Stephen J. Cannell defied the odds and excelled far above what anyone could have imagined. After college, he worked for his father’s business during the day and wrote every night, churning out television spec scripts.
After five years of unwavering persistence, he sold a story to Mission Impossible, a script to It Takes a Thief and landed his first staff job as the story editor of Adam-12. By age 29, he had become one of the youngest executive producers at Universal Studios, working under his mentor Roy Huggins.
