If you love CSI or NCIS, you’ll love the mysteries of Noreen Ayres. This Edgar Award finalist was writing memorable and compelling crime fiction with a focus on forensics long before those shows emerged on the scene. She broke new ground in the crime fiction genre with The Juan Doe Murders and her two prior suspense novels featuring Smokey Brandon, an ex-Las-Vegas-stripper-and-police-officer-turned forensic criminalist. Smokey finds herself involved cases that cut a little too close to home – and Ayres’ plucky heroine is as sunny and complex as the Southern California world where she solves crimes.
In addition to her novels, Ayres is also an acclaimed short-story writer. Her stories have been featuring in many mystery and suspense anthologies and earned her an Edgar Award nomination for “Delta Double Deal,” her contribution to the collection The Night Awakens. For gritty police procedurals with a fun and sexy twist, Noreen Ayres’ Smokey Brandon series can’t be beat.
Forensic criminalist Smokey Brandon is an ex-cop and former stripper who investigates the mysterious deaths of illegal immigrants and reveals the horrifying secrets hidden behind the Southern California sunshine in Noreen Ayres’ pulse-pounding crime novel.
One of the freshest voices to hit hardboiled fiction in the last few years…Ayres tells a damned fine story
She’s sometimes funny, sometimes spooky, and always perfectly fluent in the language of dread. There’s a wonderful freshness here, a curiosity and hunger to know that sets it apart
She is one of our finest crime writers.