Crime and Cacti: The David Mapstone Mysteries by Jon Talton

After losing his job as a history professor, David Mapstone returns to his childhood home of Phoenix, Arizona to find it overrun by wealthy retirees and West Coast vacationers.

Some vestiges of his boyhood remain, though, like his old friend Mike Peralta, Maricopa County Chief Deputy, who offers Mapstone a temporary job investigating the police department’s cold cases. 

At the same time, Mapstone picks up a decades-old unsolved murder in the desert, and his college sweetheart’s sister dies under identical circumstances.

It’s up to Mapstone to connect these two murders, deeply intertwined with his own past and Arizona’s ever-changing present. 

Days after becoming Maricopa County Sheriff, Mike Peralta is shot by a sniper and sent into a coma.

To deputy David Mapstone’s surprise, the powers-that-be appoint him to fill in for his friend, as Mapstone is the only one far enough removed from department politics to hold the position without angering officers who want the position permanently. 

When Mapstone discovers a cryptic note Peralta left on his desk, embarks on a dangerous journey into his own past to find out who shot Mike, and why.

Most importantly: Is Mapstone next?

Half a century after the unsolved murder of an FBI agent, their missing badge is found on a dead body in the Phoenix suburbs. David Mapstone is on the case, but not before the FBI can send in their own cold-case expert, Sgt. Kate Vare, who is strangely secretive about the case around Maptsone. 

When David’s wife, Lindsey, star of the Cybercrimes Bureau, earns the wrath of the Russian mafia, Peralta sends the couple to a safe house.

The lives of Mapstone and his wife are in danger, but that won’t stop him from solving the cold case—if he can only stay alive long enough to do it.

When a former student shows up at Mapstone’s office, the last thing he expects her to present him is a letter from her deceased father confessing to a 40-year-old murder and giving directions to the body.

But in this desert city where everyone has a dark past to escape, nothing is as it seems. 

No one knows this better than Mapstone’s wife Deputy Lindsey Mapstone, who has just run into her estranged half-sister at the site of a brutal and unusual murder.

It’s nice to see Robin after all these years, but one thought burns at the back of Lindsey’s mind: Why is she here?

Cactus Heart takes us back to December 1999, when retired history professor David Mapstone was first hired by the Maricopa County sheriff’s office to solve cold cases.

While on the job, he discovers the remains of a Depression-era crime involving the kidnapping of a cattle baron’s grandsons, whose bodies were never found. 

The kidnapper was caught and executed, and the baron’s remaining heirs now run a Fortune 500 company, but when one of them turns up dead, it’s clear this case was never truly closed.

A handsome young professor from New York turns up dead while conducting research for his new book in Phoenix, and police think the cartel has something to do with it.

This wouldn’t normally be a case for Mapstone, if it weren’t for the fact that the victim was dating Mapstone’s sister-in-law, Robin, and that she may now be in danger, too. 

With Lindsey away on a special cyber-terror assignment in Washington, it’s up to David to protect Robin. Up until now, David’s cases have been long buried.

Can he take on gangsters that have outgunned Maricopa’s own police? Or will the modern underbelly of Phoenix swallow him whole. 

Phoenix Deputy David Mapstone and his old friend Sheriff Mike Peralta are out of the force and have started a private detective business. Their first case is the suspicious death of an Arizona woman who fell from a tower in San Diego. 

The police have ruled it suicide, but her brother doesn’t buy it, and hires the PI duo to investigate. When their client is gunned down several days later, and multiple ID cards are found on his person, Mapstone and Peralta realize he isn’t who they thought he was. 

The dead woman’s boyfriend, who also suspects foul play, hires Mapstone and Peralta to pick up where they left off, and the pair soon discover he’s right.

What they don’t realize is just how far into the lux world of San Diego’s dubious elite this case goes.

When former Sheriff Mike Peralta is suspected of stealing a cache of diamonds, he disappears into the mountains of Arizona, leaving David Mapstone with a tough choice: cooperate with the FBI or search for Peralta himself to find out what really happened. 

The recession has exposed the darker side of Phoenix, and as Mapstone searches for answers, trailed by a stranger who clearly wants to kill him, he wonders how much he knows beloved city, or his partner, after all. 

It’s David Mapstone’s toughest case yet: Forty years ago, a Phoenix reporter was killed by a car bomb. Three people were convicted, but even the country’s top lawyers and journalists can’t figure out why they did it, and who, if anyone, they were working for. 

As Mapstone digs into Phoenix’s mob-riddled past for answers, a string of new killings leaves him wondering whether history isn’t repeating itself. 

With the help of his wife Lindsey, and a PhD candidate and Black Lives Matter activist, Mapstone combs the past for clues to the present, unearthing secrets that all too many people would kill to keep buried.