Carl Houseman Series

CODE 61: maintain radio silence. someone may be listening.

Investigating the apparent suicide of a colleague’s niece, Iowa Deputy Sheriff Carl Houseman is startled to uncover a group that transforms the dark fantasies of vampire legend into grisly reality: they ritualistically drink small amounts of one another’s blood. As Carl is drawn deeper into this unnerving world, it becomes clear that the dead woman may have been the victim of a twenty-first-century Dracula.

The prime suspect, Dan Peale, is a sinister presence within the group–a man some say drinks blood and never, ever dies. It’s an outlandish, heinous theory, but then suspicions are bolstered by rumors of a card-carrying vampire hunter who is also pursuing Peale. All too soon, Houseman finds himself scrambling to track a vampire–before he kills again.

A killer is placing his cross hairs over the American heartland….

The pair of frozen corpses were found under a tarp in the machine shed of an empty farmhouse. Two males — brothers — both killed by bullets from a Russian automatic fired at close range. The cops have a suspect: a man Deputy Sheriff Carl Houseman busted five years earlier and the county’s lead suspect in a series of recent robberies.

Houseman knows they have the wrong guy. He also knows they’ve got something bigger than a burglary gone bad … especially when the FBI starts showing up in Maitland. The brutal double homicide is just the tip of the iceberg in a case where a killer’s trail keeps disappearing like footprints in freshly fallen snow, and where one bad break can send a good cop into a deep freeze.

In the American heartland, someone is killing cops.

The ambush exploded in an Iowa marijuana field. The weapons were high caliber. The pot was high grade. And the reporters said afterward: "We have two known dead…."

Deputy Sheriff Carl Houseman knew the dead all right: One was a small-time doper, the other a good cop. But Houseman doesn’t know why they died, or who cut them down in a blaze of automatic rifle fire. Now, as the Feds descend on Nation County, Houseman and his fellow cops are suddenly walking point–searching for answers amidst the violence, treachery, and evil in their own backyard….

Donald Harstad’s Eleven Days was called "a hell of a first novel" by Michael Connelly and "truly frightening" by the San Francisco Chronicle. In his electrifying new novel Harstad captures with nerve-shattering power an Iowa police department’s harrowing search through a killing storm–to know the truth about the dead and the living alike….

In a mesmerizing debut, cop-turned-author Donald Harstad uses real-life events to paint a jarring picture of crime in America’s heartland–where two-stoplight towns no longer offer refuge from modern-day brutality.

Life in Maitland, Iowa, is usually predictable, even for a cop. But all that changes the day Deputy Sheriff Carl Houseman’s dispatcher receives the terrifying 911 call. The day cops find the mutilated bodies at a remote farmhouse. The first of eleven days Carl will never forget.

As hotshot investigators fly in from New York, Carl and his fellow cops use old-fashioned detective work to piece together clues. But to turn suspicions into suspects, Carl must search among his closest friends to find a killer who has shocked and bewildered cops who’d thought they’d seen it all. And before it’s over, Carl will be forced into an unrelenting spiral of chaos, coming face-to-face with evil he never dreamed could exist in Maitland…or anywhere else.