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mike thomas

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The Judge Ortega Series

1. The lost and found.

A young woman is found dead, bound in copper wire in a water tank in Southern Spain; a woman and her six-year-old daughter go missing in Barcelona; In Goa, a father is overcome with grief as his past life catches up with him; a grandmother is suspected of child abduction; two police officers are brutally attacked and Investigating Judge Jose Ramon Ortega is tasked with unravelling it all.

2. Esther’s tooth

A man is accidentally killed during the firework display on the last night of the Villanova fiestas. Everybody regards it as a tragedy until the postmortem reveals an unexpected ambiguity. A fragment of a burnt tooth is discovered in the oesophagus of the victim. The severe burns to the fragment are inconsistent with the more superficial burns to the victim's body and a DNA test later reveals a match with a fifteen-year-old girl, reported missing six month before. Investigating Judge Jose Ramon is drawn into a web of lies, deceit, murder and abuse of political power as he and his team work to establish who the victims really are.

3. See you next Tuesday club

Two forest rangers are brutally shot dead in a clearing on an empty hillside. The killer is a man so damaged that he doesn't even comprehend the difference between life and death. In his mind, the dead move around him like his own shadow on a sunny day. His brothers, Crowman and Onion-Head, blame a man called Ramiro for the damage their brother Luis suffered. They set out on their own crusade to make Ramiro pay for Luis's predicament. The resultant mayhem ends up on Judge Ortega's desk and includes an orgy of abuse, domestic violence, prison rape, murder and lots of recrimination.

4. The Trip sitter

Judge José Ramón Ortega is in his first few months of exile to the Pyrenees, after falling foul of the Valencian judiciary, when the mundane life of the mountains is shattered. Two sisters are found dead in a field across the border in France. One of the Catalan sisters, Llora, is a well-known and popular singer; the other, Ona, is a healer, who is a divisive and dominating personality, determined to bend people to her way of thinking. It's not enough that her sister loves her and shares her house. She wants them to be as one, inseparable and indivisible, married to similar husbands, with matching children. Sisters married to brothers. The Alicante team, Tom and Maria are reunited with Ortega as they start to unravel the secrets and mysteries on both sides of the Pyrenees.

5. Soul driver

He's English, living in Spain with his beautiful wife, whom he loves, never failing to call when he's away at work. He's rich, has an interesting job, great house, he's well thought of, liked by all, he's obsessed by the rain, needs to be understood and appreciated as he carries his soul around with him in the back of his car. He's a compulsive killer. He sees, he assesses, he kills at random, distributing the bodies to isolated places all over Europe. His unpredictability leaves Ortega, always one step behind, following his trail of victims from the UK to Spain, Italy and France.

6. Chorizo

A famous TV chef, Miguel Córdova, comes under suspicion following the discovery of the remains of a young girl who had gone missing many years before. Cordova is dropped from his television show, returns home to Villanova and opens a new restaurant. Judge Ortega investigates the chef's past and finds that the backstories and alibis of the chef's close friends are not as reliable as previously thought, nor, to the Judge's chagrin is the new restaurant's menu.

7. Old flames burning

Twenty-five years ago, a young woman was apparently caught up in a forest fire and died in the flames. Today old memories are jarred and doubts over the cause of the woman’s death are voiced. The main suspect is an old man now, but still employed as an enforcer for the CEO of a large and successful company. The old retainer’s style becomes an embarrassment for the company when a new investigation is opened into the death of the young woman, a quarter of a century before. The old man is sent to the Dominican Republic until things quieten down, but once abroad and unrestrained, he finds it impossible not to fall back into his old habits of using force and threats even murder to settle problems. Judge Ortega and his team are tasked with bringing the criminal dinosaur to justice for his past and present crimes.

8. Neither Here nor There

Four bodies are discovered in the foothills of the Pyrenees on Spanish territory. All four have been executed and posed in plain sight for anyone to find. When the identities of the victims are revealed to be from Alicante, over 700 kilometres away, Judge Ortega is summoned north to investigate. The deaths are linked to a turf war between rival drug gangs operating in the Alicante area. The new kids of the block are the Incognitos, young, local and gratuitously violent. Opposing them are the Irish from Marbella, monied and established, but incomers to the town. The mysterious Bolivian indigenous Runa Torres are the unknown threat in this three-sided standoff, at the centre of which stands Judge Ortega and his team.

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