billyburnes.com
Books
Give Them Pretty Names
Secrets don’t stay drowned forever
The first girl disappeared twenty years ago. The second was found a day after she was taken with a note that read, “I’m sorry.” Now, a third girl has vanished.
I was sent to the town of Isleton—a claustrophobic purgatory of faded storefronts and violent river gangs in the heart of the Sacramento Delta—to search for the girl and determine if the disappearances were connected. But nothing is so simple. The river holds many secrets beneath its surface, and the people of the river would do anything to keep them submerged.
My investigation took me from blues-filled crawdad festivals to seedy dive bars and Prohibition-style hotels. Along the way, it wasn’t just the monsters outside that I chased, but also those within that threatened to pull me back.
Give Them Pretty Names is a gritty, desperate search for redemption in a deceitful world. It is a noir descent into a community poisoned by secrets and long-buried sins before evolving into a high-stakes thriller.
.png)
Murder at the Blue Swan
Never turn your back on the ocean... or people you thought you could trust.
A beautiful Southern California beach town. A 1950s-style motel. A body floating face down in the pool with a sword stabbed through its back.
Not quite the scene I hoped for when I checked into the motel to escape a week of poor choices and hide from a career marred by failures. But my editor ordered me to investigate the murder, and I had no choice but to follow a trail of greed from seedy dive bars to exclusive yacht clubs and million-dollar mansions.
Little did I know the cost of ambition and misplaced trust. Little did I know that even in paradise, our weakest emotions can conquer us all.
.png)