Shane Scully Novels

Stephen J. Cannell

Latest release: December 6, 2011

Series

9

Books

The Tin Collectors: A Novel

Book 1·Apr 2010

The bestselling novelist and award-winning Hollywood producer weaves a high-tension novel of suspense around a chilling conspiracy of corruption within the LAPD, reminiscent of the classic movie "Chinatown."

Inside the department, they're called Tin Collectors: Internal Affairs Agents, the police of the police. If they catch you breaking the rules, they'll come after your badge. If they want you badly enough, they'll collect more than just your tin.

LAPD Detective Shane Scully is startled awake in the middle of the night by a call from his ex-partner's wife, who is being beaten by her abusive husband. Racing to their house to stop the fight, Scully ends up killing his ex-partner, a cop who is beloved within the department. Suddenly, Scully finds himself an outcast, shunned by his fellow cops who intend to exact vengeance no matter what the cost. Internal Affairs zeroes in on the "renegade" cop with their sharpest young prosecutor, the ice queen Alexa Hamilton, who has her own reasons for taking revenge on Scully.

Desperate to save his career, Scully starts kicking over rocks within the LAPD. What he uncovers is pure evil: a conspiracy going to the very top that ultimately threatens not just his own life but that of a young teenage boy, Chooch, entrusted to Scully's care by his mother - Sandy Sandoval. Known as the Black Widow, Sandy is a beautiful and courageous woman who also happens to be the LAPD's most important undercover informant, and Scully will do anything to keep her son safe. Stephen J. Cannell combines mystery and violence, loyalty and passion in a tale with an ending as unpredictable as LA itself.

The Viking Funeral: A Shane Scully Novel

Book 2·Apr 2010

Driving along the freeway, Shane Scully glances over and sees Jody Dean, his oldest friend and LAPD colleague, at the wheel of an adjacent car. Why is Scully so surprised? Because it's been two years since Jody committed suicide in the Rampart Division parking lot by blowing his brains out with a service revolver. Shane served as a pallbearer at the funeral.

What Scully will discover is that Jody and five other cops who are supposed to be dead are anything but; originally sent deep undercover to bust an extremely violent criminal network, they have become the LAPD's worst nightmare. Calling themselves the Vikings, they are rogue cops who know how the system works. In order to penetrate the group and set his cover, Scully is supposed to shoot his fiancée, Alexa. The setup goes awry and Shane finds himself looking down at his future wife's body. He is soon driven into the corridors of near-madness and into the bed of an extremely beautiful and utterly ruthless corporate seductress who threatens to destroy his soul.

Shane's desperate and deadly undercover journey takes him from the embrace of Alexa and his teenage son, Chooch, to the Caribbean island of Aruba--to the decadence of Columbia's opulent palaces and the desperation of its deadly streets. In Viking Funeral, an electrifying thriller from Stephen J. Cannell, Sergeant Scully is driven to the psychological brink, his life in the hands of the most dangerous killer he's ever known--his closest childhood friend.

Hollywood Tough

Book 3·Jan 2003

A Shane Scully Novel by the Bestselling Author of The Tin Collectors and The Viking Funeral

Emmy Award--winning writer-producer Stephen J. Cannell sets his next pulse-pounding thriller in the high-stakes world he knows best---Hollywood! In Hollywood Tough, organized crime attempts to take over the film craft unions.

Detective Shane Scully is back in the good graces of the department, hailed as a hero after bringing down a deadly gang of rogue cops in The Viking Funeral. At a glamorous Hollywood party with his new wife, Alexa, Shane overhears a famous producer make a suspicious remark about the strange deaths of his two ex-wives. Is he serious or merely joking around with his coterie of hangers-on? This becomes more than just police business, because the party is to celebrate the engagement of the producer to Alexa's closest friend.

Against his wife's wishes, Shane begins to look into this heavy-hitter's past. At the same time, he becomes aware of a high-profile wiseguy's attempt to control Hollywood's unions. He initiates an elaborate and expensive sting operation, actually setting up a phony production company to produce a bogus movie at LAPD expense. The plan is to draw the starstruck wiseguy into revealing his real purpose for coming to L.A. But before long the overbudgeted movie is rocketing into production. Tough, streetwise Scully, who thought he'd seen just about everything, is astounded by the distorted egos and total insanity of the movie business, and while he struggles to keep his sting operation from spinning wildly out of control, he and Alexa find themselves and Shane's teenaged son, Chooch, involved in something much bigger than they had ever imagined, something that puts all their lives on the line.

Vertical Coffin: A Shane Scully Novel

Book 4·Apr 2010

A nightmarish series of events sweeps LAPD's Sergeant Shane Scully and his wife (and boss), Alexa, into the vortex of an enormous, jurisdictional firestorm.

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 having failed 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 the Sheriff's Special Enforcement Bureau. At the request of the Mayor, LAPD, as an uninvolved and unbiased agency, assigns Shane Scully 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. Shane pursues his investigation in a direction that neither his chief nor his wife agrees with, and succeeds in putting himself, his loved ones, and his career in terrible jeopardy before he finally discovers the shocking and deadly truth.

Cold Hit: A Shane Scully Novel

Book 5·Apr 2010

What if, under the PATRIOT Act, federal bureaucrats could take murder cases away from local cops—then bury those cases so they're never investigated again?
What if government agents could bug your home, your car, your place of business—your entire life—with nothing more than spoken permission from a secret panel of judges?

What if the Department of Homeland Security could pull police officers off the street and hold them in cells indefinitely as material witnesses—because they're working on "sensitive" investigations?

They can . . .

The PATRIOT Act and the Homeland Security Act give enormous power to our nation's top federal law enforcement officials. They operate under the presumption that these officials are honest, diligent, and fair.

But what if they're not?

In THE COLD HIT, Detective Shane Scully suspects that the regional boss of the Department of Homeland Security is thwarting a major murder investigation. But why?

Robert Allen Virtue can act without oversight or accountability. There's no way to question him; there's no way to way to check up on him; there's no way to find out if he's exceeding his authority. Virtually at will, he can bug anyone he considers a threat to national security, take over criminal investigations, and jail cops. Even if he is breaking the law, there's no way to know it. There's nothing to rely on but his integrity. His professional commitment. His good name. Virtue.

That may be a very big mistake.

Shane and his partner are investigating "the Fingertip Killer," a serial murderer preying on homeless Vietnam vets in Los Angeles. A bullet taken from one victim's skull matches the bullet that killed another man ten years earlier—an unexpected ballistics match linking one unsolved case to another that police call a "cold hit." When the earlier victim turns out to have been an LAPD cop, the investigation becomes very personal for Shane. But there's a problem: Robert Allen Virtue wants him taken off it.

To solve the cop's murder, and possibly the Fingertip case, Scully must go behind the powerful bureaucrat's back and deep undercover—where he will begin unraveling a deadly far-reaching conspiracy that threatens to destroy everything he loves: his career, his freedom, and his family.

White Sister: A Shane Scully Novel

Book 6·Apr 2007

ONE IS his beloved.
Leaving L.A.'s Parker Center, Shane Scully and his wife, Alexa, agree to meet at home...but Alexa never arrives. Then Shane's called to a crime scene on Mulholland Drive, where the victim, an apparent gang member, has been executed—and left in Alexa's car. Her gun is the likely murder weapon.

THE OTHER Is his Nemesis.
As Shane desperately tries to find Alexa, his leads point to a feud between two gangsta-rap record companies, both heavily manned by Crips and Bloods. At the center of this war is a ruthless, beautiful Lady Macbeth-like white woman raised in Compton. Married to a multi-millionaire rap mogul, she is known as the White Sister.

It's his worst nightmare come true...
Shane is no stranger to big trouble, but he's never before been smeared as a "racist cop" or thrown in jail while there's a hit out on him. Much worse is the unknown fate of Alexa, and the fact that in the mysterious White Sister—who holds the clue to a sinister conspiracy—he may have met his match.

Three Shirt Deal: A Shane Scully Novel

Book 7·Jan 2008

Following the success of his bestselling novel White Sister, Stephen J. Cannell's latest blockbuster has Detective Shane Scully fighting to save a man railroaded for murder, while his wife, Alexa, has become a total stranger to him

A small-time crook is doing life in California's notoriously brutal Corcoran State Prison for the murder of his mother. He admitted to the crime, but now he claims his confession was coerced by the cops. A beautiful Internal Affairs detective, Secada "Scout" Llevar, asks Shane to help investigate, and he agrees after learning the original homicide detective was Brian Devine, a ruthless cop with whom Scully has a bad history.

What begins as a routine review quickly turns into something much more deadly. The case is abruptly shut down by an LAPD deputy chief, and Shane begins to suspect that for unknown reasons the prisoner really may have been framed by the police. But some things, once started, cannot be stopped, and the investigation spirals dangerously out of control, implicating a violent Hispanic gang, a millionaire power broker, and the front-runner in the Los Angeles mayoral race.

Meanwhile, Shane and Alexa struggle to save their marriage, which has come perilously close to disintegration since Alexa's near-fatal shooting in White Sister—just as Shane finds himself attracted to his new partner. Could the answer to their marital troubles be tied to the case he's investigating? In Cannell's latest heart-pounding thriller, Shane is tried in ways he has never been, risking his family, his job, and his life.

The Prostitutes' Ball: A Shane Scully Novel

Book 10·Oct 2010

Detective Shane Scully responds to a call in the Hollywood hills at a once-immaculate mansion, the scene of an infamous murder twenty-five years prior. He discovers the remnants of a lavish pool party. The revelers have fled, leaving three dead bodies in their wake, all shot with the same gun. One is an acclaimed film producer. The other two, a pair of gorgeous women.

With his new partner, Sumner "Hitch" Hitchens, Scully begins to investigate what looks to be an open-and-shut case: The women were hired prostitutes, and there's security video of an angry husband firing on all three. A simple case of brutal revenge. But nothing is ever as simple as it seems: There's a single spent bullet casing that doesn't match the rest.

From that single bullet emerges a story of love, murder, suicide, and one of the biggest financial frauds in L.A. history. Someone has gone to great lengths to cover up a decades-old crime, and as Scully and Hitch get closer to the answer, they find themselves in a killer's crosshairs.

Vigilante: A Shane Scully Novel

Book 11·Dec 2011

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.

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.

But Scully knows that Nash isn't the folk-hero he seems. He will do anything in the name of self-promotion. If a detective got in his way, would he be prepared to kill? In this new novel, Scully will have to risk everything save himself and the job he loves.

Bundles

Shane Scully Double Pack: Vertical Coffin and The Tin Collector: Shane Scully Novels

Stephen J. Cannell

Mystery & thrillers