The Bo Austen Series

Forensic analyst Bo Austen picks up a job at a police department in Minnesota, his own attempt at leaving behind Kathy Baker, Dallas Silver, Jamal Pitman, and the mess that comes with the three.

Day one of the job reveals two missing girls and a dead body. No M.O. is apparent, but Bo enjoys being able to work on a case that gives him a challenge. He loves the small details, using those details to make a connection between murders and bodies, create a timeline of the kidnappings and the killings.

Working in California and alongside Detective Kathy Baker, he thinks he has seen it all. That all changes when he meets The Surgeon.

Bo Austen, forensic analyst, returns to Clinstone to help Detective Mason and Detective Lehmann solve another homicide case. Day one of the new case leaves five people dead. A mother and father, two boys, and a young girl, murdered in their own home.

Blood replaced with chemicals to keep them in place, the case is difficult to crack. No blood in the veins and no contents in the stomachs make it more than difficult for Bo to determine what killed the victims, but he is sure of one thing.

The killer is turning them into the perfect, albeit chilling, family. Perfection achieved in death is easier for the killer to create than perfection in life, and the Stone family is only the first of many to meet the perfection-based style of the Dollhouse Murderer.

Three months after forensic analyst Bo Austen killed a serial killer to save his own life, he’s still suffering from the side effects. Still unaware of how he killed the man, he’s scared of himself, scared of what he’s capable of. Although he’s had the footage from the incident for all three months since it happened, he has yet to bring himself to watch it.

A new case, however, pulls Bo’s attention from the idea that he could be capable of something so horrendous. Hunting season, a fresh kill, and a burial ground come together to reveal one thing:

Clinstone, Minnesota has a serial killer that no one ever knew about until now. Is it possible to catch a serial killer when he’s as well-hidden, intelligent, and balanced as The Hunter?

Just over eight months after the extreme trauma he was exposed to, forensic analyst Bo Austen is still trying to adjust to life. Between not speaking for himself and bowing down to take orders from Jamal Pitman, he’s more zombie than human. Living in his dead girlfriend’s home, he’s still in Los Angeles when a murderer strikes in Clinstone, Minnesota.

A victim of a stabbing, Agnes Burns is found dead in her home. No prints, no struggle. A carving in the wooden floor, filled with blood, left behind as a symbol of who the killer is, what he’s to be called.

Can Bo leave behind the emotional cripple of death and despair long enough to cut the strings he’s allowed Jamal to use to puppeteer him? Can he make it to Clinstone in time to solve the case of The Puppet Master?

A year and a half after the murder of his girlfriend, Bo Austen still hasn’t found a healthy way to cope with the loss, but between long nights of gambling and several one-night stands peppered in between, he’s found one of most unhealthy ways to deal with it all-borderline alcoholism. When a brutal homicide in Clinstone sets itself up for national news, Jacob Mason calls up the forensic analyst.

An unidentified victim’s scattered remains litter the ditches alongside U.S. Route 75. Her body, cut into small chunks with what Bo identifies as a cleaver, has been spread out over two miles of road. Shutting down the only major road that cuts straight through Clinstone draws attention from both the citizens and the media. It isn’t long before they gather at every road block.

The victim’s head is perched atop a stop sign, a single white rose held between her teeth.

Can Bo fight the urge to drink long enough to solve another violent crime in Clinstone, Minnesota? Can he go back to being himself long enough to figure out why Clinstone is the city of choice for The White Rose Butcher?

Five months into sobriety, Bo Austen returns to Clinstone, Minnesota for the first time in almost a year. Helping defense attorney Cecilia Delacroix with a case, he’s one of the first to arrive at the scene of a sulfuric acid spill.

Three forty-gallon oil drums spill their contents along West Main Street after a bad crash knocks them from the bed of a pick-up truck. A thick red, jelly-like substance covers the road. A few odd, soft bones reveal exactly one thing about the scene.

All three drums had once contained fully-formed human corpses.

Bo, sober and more mentally sound than he has been in years, accepts the case. Working within Clinstone PD again feels weird to the blonde, but he doesn’t mind. All he wants to do is figure out the madness that controls the mind of The Acid Bath Killer.

In forensics, an empty space or void within a blood spatter pattern is called shadowing or ghosting. This is the first thought forensic analyst Bo Austen has when he and Jensen Taylor step into the scene of a homicide.

Two beaten, broken corpses, skulls bashed in beyond the point of recognition. Blood splatters across the wall, the floor. A bloody trail across the living room floor points to the dragging of a bloody weapon. The neighbors can’t recall any strange persons in the area, no strange persons entering or exiting the victims’ house.

Clinstone’s newest serial killer can’t seem to be identified by any person surrounding the victims, leaving the killer as nothing more than The Ghost.

Bo Austen began interning as a forensics analyst at the age of fourteen. Over two decades later, he’s forced to relive his biggest cases through the ruthless killings of a copycat killer. The killer, unspecific in style, method, or victim, jumps between copying the killers Bo has worked in the past.

Bo spends his days without sleep, working a case during the day and taking care of Sergeant Jacob Mason’s children during the evening. Working a case so invasive of his personal life and everything he’s done in the last twenty-one years is a task that proves difficult.

With most of his enemies dead or behind bars, Bo has nowhere to look for clues. In Los Angeles, Detective Jensen Taylor is removed from the homicide case he has been working for the last four months and sent back to Clinstone to keep Bo from completely losing his sanity.

Can Bo balance a case, his family, Jacob’s children, the sergeant’s grief, and his own mental health in order to find the killer? Or will the upper hand be gained by The Copycat?

Busy planning a wedding, raising their girls, and taking care of the youngest set of the Mason twins, forensic analyst Bo Austen and Detective Jensen Taylor are caught entirely off guard as they catch wind of the latest homicide scene in Clinstone, Minnesota. On the last day of school, a headless corpse washes up on Clinstone’s baseball field.

Bo manages to identify the body as Serena Bishop. Her fingernails have all been removed, pried from her fingers with what Bo assumes was a pair of pliers. The spinal cord has been severed, the head nowhere to be found.

Usually, when a killer keeps a part of the victim’s body, it’s usually kept as a trophy of the kill and the victim, a permanent reminder of what they accomplished. Clinstone’s newest killer, however, takes the bones of their victims as a large part of their M.O..

Sergeant Jacob Mason arrives at the scene before the body’s taken back to the morgue, and by cracking a single joke, he gives the killer a name that sticks from day one: The Bonekeeper.

A presumed suicide in Clinstone, Minnesota draws Bo Austen and Jensen Taylor away from their honeymoon and back home to their daughters. A man has jumped off the roof of Clinstone Elementary, a noose around his neck, tied to the old school bell atop the roof. For Bo, it simply doesn’t add up.

If one is going to kill himself, why jump and hang yourself? Why do it at a school for children to see? Was it one last bout of gratification? One last round of sick pleasure? Or, Bo can’t help but wonder, is this a homicide?

Crime scene after crime scene pops up in Clinstone, each one dark, twisted, and gruesome. Looking at each one individually, they don’t seem connected, but looking at them together connects the dots for the forensic analyst. Clinstone has a new serial killer, and he’s The Executioner.

Celebrating the one-year anniversary of their wedding and raising their four children, Bo and Jensen Austen-Taylor choose to stay home when Clinstone dispatch sends out word of a homicide.

Gwen Tanner and Misty Archer take Bo’s place at the crime scene. The victim is a woman in her thirties. Her prints aren’t in the system, and facial recognition doesn’t connect her to a driver’s license. Unidentified, Jane Doe is taken back to the morgue for further examination. Gwen measures and notes all bruises, cuts, and scratches-offensive and defensive wounds alike. She writes down the signs of intercourse previous to the woman’s death and leaves the file for Bo to pick up in the morning.

Lieutenant Jacob Mason assigns the case to Jensen and his new partner, Ryan Jass. It isn’t long before Bo draws a conclusion they haven’t seen since the Hunter case nearly seven years prior. Their victim isn’t the killer’s first kill.

He charms women and kills them to make sure he never has to deal with them again. Cold, calculating, and clean, the killer leaves behind nothing to reveal who he is or where he could be. Is it possible to catch a man who blends in perfectly with the crowd? Or is it entirely impossible to catch a man like The Casanova?

The city of Los Angles averages three hundred homicides every year. On an early morning in April, a man is slaughtered, a single tally among hundreds. Police Chief Jamal Pitman, already bored at such an early hour, goes to the scene to see what another L.A. killer has left for his team to find.

A man lays in the middle of the road beyond the museum in Brentwood, his corpse soaking in his own blood. His chest torn open, his sternum cracked and spread apart, his heart ripped from his chest. A kill far too savage for the station’s forensics intern to handle, Jamal calls his most seasoned analyst back into town.

Bo Austen-Taylor returns to California to work his first case, beginning to end, in Los Angeles in almost a decade. Leaving his family in Clinstone while his children attend school, the blonde observes the most savage crime scene he’s laid eyes on in a long time.

A victim’s beating heart torn from his chest as the life bleeds from his body. The full moon that lit the sky that morning, the savage nature of the kill. Bo can only come up with one conclusion, but he can’t make it make sense. Why has the killer taken on the persona of The Werewolf?

Forensic analyst Bo Austen-Taylor isn’t bothered by much. He’s seen many vile human beings do even more vile things in his thirty-nine years, and it’s made him numb to most of what he sees on the job.

He isn’t prepared for the scene he’s called to one early, warm August morning.

Walking in on the week-old corpses of two teenagers and the much fresher corpses of their parents is alarming, even at first glance. Discovering what the killer did the teenage daughter is much worse. With two daughters of his own, a lust murder is one of the only cases left that causes emotion to prevail over his much stabler intellectual approach to homicide and its victims.

Can Bo push through the emotional disgust and revolt long enough to look at the scene with a clear mind? Or is it just too hard to be a family man when the case at hand is The Blackout Killer?

With less than a year before Bo Austen-Taylor is set to take over for Jamal Pitman as the LAPD’s Chief of Police, the forensic analyst is subjected to some of the hardest months of his life, a crushing weight on his shoulders he hasn’t felt since the months following his girlfriend’s death.

Preparing himself for his soon-to-come job with a vigilante on the loose, the Werewolf running free in Los Angeles, and a suicide that’s all too suspicious in Clinstone, Bo has a thought of thoughts to process and sort through. In a constant battle between the cases, the job, and his own dark, self-harming thoughts, Bo’s in a dangerous place.

Jensen Austen-Taylor fights to keep his husband afloat, but when the death in Clinstone hits too close to home and it becomes personal, how will Bo keep his head on straight enough to catch The Hacker?