Liars, Cheaters, & Thieves — L.J. Sellers

Outside a local bar, a man is drugged and slashed to death with a scalpel. Inside a local bank, a woman suffers a fatal heart attack after learning her life savings have been plundered.

The crimes are as different as the night and day they occur. The vicious murder is a case for Eugene's Violent Crimes Division, but the more Detective Wade Jackson and his homicide team probe into the death of Rafel Mazari -- an Iraq War veteran with disturbing secrets -- the more it appears that one crime's victim may be the other's perpetrator.

While there's damning evidence that Mazari died at the hands of his cheating wife, a phantom internet veterans' charity -- the same one that wiped out the heart attack victim's bank account -- keeps cropping up at every turn of Jackson's investigation. And when Mazari's best friend turns up murdered in identical fashion, Jackson suspects a motive that's deeper, darker, and more devastating than broken vows and love turned lethal.