Since he got fired from his newspaper job last year, former investigative reporter Liam Mulligan has been piecing together a new life for himself—one that straddles both sides of the law. He’s getting some part-time work with his friend McCracken’s detective agency. He’s picking up beer money by freelancing for a local news website. And he’s looking after his semi-retired mobster-friend’s bookmaking business. But Mulligan still manages to find trouble—when it isn’t finding him. He’s feuding with a serial-killer cat that leaves its kills on his porch. He’s so obsessed with a baffling jewelry robbery that he can’t let it go. And he’s enraged that someone in town is torturing animals. All of this distracts him from a big case that needs his full attention. The New England Patriots, shaken by murder charges against one of their players, have hired Mulligan and McCracken to investigate the background of a college star they’re thinking of drafting. At first, the job seems routine, but when they begin asking questions, they get push-back. The player has something to hide—and someone is willing to kill to make sure it remains secret.

To solve Rhode Island’s budget crisis, the governor wants to legalize sports gambling, but her plan has unexpected consequences. Organized crime, professional sports leagues, and others who have a lot to lose—or gain—if gambling is made legal flood the state with money to buy the votes of state legislators. Liam Mulligan, investigative reporter for the Providence Dispatch, wants to investigate, but the bottom-feeding corporate bosses at the dying newspaper have no interest in serious reporting. So Mulligan goes rogue to dig into the story. But when a state legislator turns up dead, an out-of-state bagman gets shot, and his cash-stuffed briefcase goes missing, Mulligan finds himself the target of shadowy forces who seek to derail his investigation by destroying his career, his reputation, and even his life. A Scourge of Vipers, the fourth novel in the Edgar Award-winning Mulligan series, is at once a suspenseful crime thriller and a serious exploration of the hypocrisy surrounding sports gambling and the corrupting influence of big money on politics.

Providence Rag finds Liam Mulligan, an investigative reporter at a dying Rhode Island newspaper, at an ethical crossroads. The youngest serial killer in U.S. history was supposed to be released from prison on a technicality at age 21, but for years, the authorities have been fabricating new charges to keep him locked up. Mulligan knows that if authorities can get away with framing the killer, they could do the same thing to anybody. But he also knows the killer is much too dangerous to be set free. The dilemma pits Mulligan and his colleagues at the paper against one another in a high-stakes struggle over which matters most--protecting public safety or reporting the truth. And in the end, it embroils the entire state in an angry confrontation over where justice truly lies. Providence Rag is the third novel in Bruce DeSilva’s Edgar Award-winning Mulligan series—and the first to be inspired by a true story.