The Captain José Da Silva Mysteries Series

Edgar Award winner: A Holocaust survivor fights a Nazi conspiracy in the jungles of Brazil In 1939 Erick Von Roesler was spreading Hitler’s gospel in Brazil when duty to the Reich called him home. He distinguished himself during the war, organizing slave labor camps, overseeing executions, and manning the gas chambers of Buchenwald, but in 1945 he felt it necessary to leave the land of his birth. His enthusiasm for the German cause undimmed, he returned to South America to remake the continent in the image of the fallen Reich. For help, he calls on Hans Busch, a master propagandist who comes south from New York with $2 million earmarked for the Nazi revival. But this squat, unkempt little man is not the Nazi he claims to be. Hans Busch is merely a nom de guerre for Holocaust survivor Ari Schoenberg, who has come to take his revenge. With the help of Interpol’s José Da Silva, he will dismantle the new Reich from the inside out.

Captain José Da Silva has the daunting task of finding a murderer. Hired by the Brazilian Foreign Office, Da Silva sets out to end these jungle killings, but doesn’t quite have all the facts. When Agent Wilson shows him one of the victims—-not all of him, just his shrunken head—-Da Silva realizes that this murder case isn’t as open-and-shut as it seems. Now he must investigate, evading the powerful magic and numerous mysteries of the Amazon jungle. 

At an international summit, Da Silva searches for an assassin Off the coast of Rio de Janeiro, a freighter battles the waves. The steward has been stricken with appendicitis, but the sea is too rough for the ship to dock. A coast guard helicopter brings him to shore, where he is put in an ambulance and rushed the hospital. But when the ambulance arrives, the patient has disappeared. He was never sick, and he is not a sailor. He is an assassin, and he’s vanished into thin air. The Organization of American States is holding a summit in Rio, and Argentinian representative Juan Dorcas is planning an incendiary speech. When Interpol liaison José Da Silva hears whispers that Dorcas will be assassinated before he has a chance to speak, his thoughts turn to the sailor who jumped ship, to commit a murder that will rock a hemisphere.

A gang of assassins draw Da Silva into Brazil’s rugged interior George Chaney may have been raised in the roughest neighborhoods of the United States, but he’s never been anywhere quite as dangerous as Paraíso. Although booming with petrodollars, this rugged city in the Brazilian wastelands is still a frontier town at heart. On the run from the mob, Chaney comes here in search of sanctuary. He will find that though the city’s name means paradise, its reality is much closer to hell. Chaney is found gunned down execution style, with a tag around his neck that reads Esquadrão de Morte—death squad. He’s the fourth victim of this gang of killers, and his death attracts the attention of Captain José Da Silva, an Interpol detective who knows that life is cheap on the Brazilian frontier, and death comes in many forms.

In search of a missing treasure, Da Silva returns to an old case Off the island of Barbados, the crew of a Brazilian ocean liner strains to hear the sounds of Carnival coming from shore. A small boat pulls alongside, and a band of steel drummers offer to play for them. As they make their rounds on the ship, the bandleader slips away. He pistol whips one of the crew, forcing him to open the ship’s safe, and escapes before the song has ended, taking half a million dollars in gems with him. The Brazilian police send young detective José Da Silva to investigate the robbery. He captures the thieves but never recovers the jewels. Fifteen years later, three of the gang’s members have died in prison, and the fourth is due for release. Da Silva follows him back to Barbados, hoping the thief will lead him to the long-forgotten treasure—and a final solution to the case that started his career.

A search for an American’s missing brother draws Da Silva into the jungle In a blighted stretch of the Amazon, three men have come to blow up a bridge. Just before they complete their mission, one of them turns on the others, gunning one down and burying the other with the force of the explosion. He is stepping into his getaway plane when he notices that the first man’s body is gone. It doesn’t matter, he thinks. An injured man could not last a day in the jungle. When a daffy young American comes to Rio de Janeiro in search of her missing brother, Captain José Da Silva does his best to stay out of it. But when her search draws her into the mystery of the bridge that went nowhere, Da Silva will have to risk a jungle expedition of his own to save her life.

A quartet of kidnappers make the mistake of hiring Da Silva as their driver Chico Xavier needs cash. His father has cut off his allowance, and for a university student with expensive taste—and an even more expensive girlfriend—this is a death sentence. And so he and his friends arrange to kidnap one of their school chums: a fellow dilettante who lets himself be taken in exchange for a cut of the ransom. Two days of criminal behavior, Chico thinks, and they’ll all live happily ever after—or die in the Rio sand. To store the victim of their faked kidnapping, Chico’s girlfriend pays a taxi driver for the use of his house. But the driver is no ordinary cabbie—he is Captain José Da Silva of Interpol. He can’t tell if Chico’s scheme will turn out to be tragedy or farce, and so he plays along, hoping to save the kidnappers from themselves.

A traveler is murdered in Rio for the sake of a stuffed snake The man in white has money to fly, but he boards a bus instead. It takes hours for the rickety old bus to snake down the Brazilian coast, and the man arrives in Rio de Janeiro well after midnight. He is on his way to make his fortune when he spots the killers following him and knows is life is through. A few hours after dawn, the man in white is brought to the city morgue—another anonymous corpse to be inspected by Captain José Da Silva, liaison between Interpol and the Brazilian police. Da Silva knows he is on to something when he opens the package the man left at his hotel just before the killers caught up to him. In it is a stuffed coral snake, a bizarre sight that does not faze the detective. Da Silva knows that on a late night in Rio, even dead snakes can kill.

A fraud case leads Da Silva on a wild search across Brazil It’s snowing in New York, and Jimmy Martin is pleading for his life. He owes a loan shark $100,000, but he knows he will make his fortune if he can just hop a plane to Brazil. The lender gives him a thirty-day extension, and Jimmy is on his way. But he will find Brazil a better place in which to end a life than to save one. Interpol detective José Da Silva has seen many schemers undone by Brazil. Jimmy Martin leaves the United States clutching a fistful of bearer bonds—some of which belong to the Brazilian government—and Da Silva is waiting with handcuffs when his plane arrives. But there’s no sign of Martin. He slipped off in Recife, disappearing into the country’s vast interior. If he is lucky, Da Silva will find him before the jungle takes its toll.

A peculiar diamond sale pits Captain José Da Silva against his cousin It is an ancient scam: Offer a wealthy American a massive diamond for a bargain price, have a jeweler confirm the stone is genuine, and swap it for a fake as soon as the money changes hands. At first, Captain José Da Silva assumes Senator Hastings has been taken in by an ordinary conman, but the diamond is all too real. There is a more elaborate con in progress here, and only one man in Rio would be daring enough to execute it. He is Da Silva’s cousin Nestor, and he is a true genius of crime.   According to Nestor’s scheme, the senator was supposed to sail that afternoon on the Bolivar, along with three other targets of the plot. But Senator Hastings deviated from the plan and left the boat at the last minute, which means Da Silva still has a chance to set things right—assuming he’s quick enough to outwit his own flesh and blood.