William Bayer

It begins when the strangely marked body of a young prostitute is found just outside the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem. A similarly disfigured corpse of an American nun turns up. Then an Arab boy. As the list of victims grows, their only apparent connection is the bizarre markings on their bodies, it appears that Israel is facing its first serial murder case.David Bar-Lev, chief of the Pattern Crimes Unit of the Jerusalem police, is not so sure....

"He spent hours drawing sketches of how she might be killed. And the more work he put into them the more exciting the idea became. And then he started following her and then he was caught up. And the more caught up he was the more definitely she was doomed, for once an idea took hold in him he felt compelled to carry it out. It was the Switch that made his crime a work of art... "At first the two killings seem unrelated. The lonely call girl murdered...

A secret hall of mirrors, a labyrinth of fear; Janek returns in a hypnotic thriller...Nobody writes better psychological thrillers than William Bayer. And no character in contemporary crime fiction is as compelling or complex as Lieutenant Frank Janek of the N.Y.P.D. Now Bayer and Janek are back-in a brilliant novel of terror and excitement.A beautiful young woman meets her latest "pickup" in a Manhattan hotel bar and goes back with him to his room,...

Punish Me with Kisses is the story of two sisters and the Mysterious Dark Man to whom both are helplessly drawn.It begins in Bar Harbor, Maine, summer playground of the rich. Shy and sensitive Penny Berring watches as her beautiful sister Suzie puts on a bizarre display- flaunting her transgressions beneath her parent's windows. Her behavior is bizarre, and compelling, and then...a scream in the night, Suzie is murdered. There is a sensational inconclusive...

This novel won the Mystery Writers of American Edgar Award for Best Novel.Circling high over Rockefeller Center is a peregrine falcon, the most awesome of the flying predators. She awaits a signal from her falconer. It is given: the bird attacks, plummeting from the sky at nearly 200 miles an hour, striking a young woman and killing her instantly.By chance, newscaster Pamela Barrett witnesses the slaying. Her impassioned account of it on television...

A woman who sees what others cannot see seeks the murderer of a young street hustler, a man she had befriended in photographing San Francisco's dark, sexually charged netherworld.The colors of Kay Farrow's landscape are black, white, and shades of gray. An achromat suffering from total color blindness, Kay possesses a vision that informs her world and sharpens her skills as a talented photographer. When Tim Lovsey, a handsome prostitute, is brutally...

CITY OF KNIVES is a psychological thriller set in one of the world's most fascinating cities. The destinies of four main characters, each pursuing his/her own agenda, intersect in Buenos Aires.MARTA ABECASIS, homicide detective, known as La Incorrupta ("the incorruptible one") is assigned to investigate the murder of a prostitute. As her investigation unfolds she uncovers a political conspiracy involving powerful people who will stop at nothing to...

In this fascinating psychological neo-noir mystery, a notorious late 19th-century photograph provides the key to a contemporary murder. In 1882, the young Lou Andreas-Salome, writer, psychoanalyst and femme fatale, appears with Friedrich Nietzche and another man in a bizarre photograph taken in Luzern, Switzerland. Over thirty years later, an intense art student in Freud's Vienna presents Lou Salome with his own drawing based on the infamous photograph....