The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron

Former detective turned noted author and dog trainer, Carol Lea Benjamin, returns with her celebrated dark and edgy suspense series featuring smart and compelling private investigator Rachel Alexander – a new addition to the Morrow/Avon list.

A New York City police officer nearing retirement dies "accidentally," while cleaning his service revolver in the bathroom of his Greenwich Village apartment. Private investigator, Rachel Alexander, is stunned to learn she's been named the executor to his will––after all, they'd only met when she was doing pet therapy with her pit bull, Dashiell. A member of Rachel's 9/11 survivors group, the officer never spoke at meetings––a really hard case. But then there was the one time he took Dash for a walk around the block. When Dash returned, the fur on his head was soaked with tears....

Was this death really a suicide? And why would the deceased have chosen a near stranger to perform such an intimate task––especially when he's survived by a brother and sister? As Rachel sets about her work, she soon discovers a mystery from the deceased's childhood that may have led to this terrible tragedy....

When an elaborate practical joke is played out at Milton's funeral by his son, Ted, Detective Inspector Carol Ashton must act quickly to find out if Ted is indeed his father's killer-- or if he is simply being set up as yet another "fall guy"...

Jim Fisher, criminal justice professor and former FBI agent, reveals how he uncovered the framing of two boys in a pair of unrelated murders committed in 1956 and 1958.

In the first of the cases, eleven-year-old Charlie Zubryd confessed that at the age of eight, he had murdered his widowed mother by driving a hatchet into her skull. The crime was committed in the basement of the modest Zubryd home in a rural section of Sewickley Township in western Pennsylvania, an area not far from Pittsburgh. Following intense police questioning, young Zubryd confessed to the crime in March 1959, a full twenty-eight months after the bloody murder of his mother.

Too young to prosecute, Charlie Zubryd was adopted after his confession and a brief stay in a mental ward. A childless couple gave Zubryd a new name and identity. It would be twenty years before Charlie Zubryd—now going by the name Chuck Duffy—would have any contact with his biological family.

When Zubryd/Duffy made an effort to get his real family back, he was rejected because his relatives still believed he had murdered his mother. In fact, until Fisher began to investigate the case in 1989, Chuck Duffy himself was not sure he had not killed his mother during some kind of mental blackout.

The second murder occurred in 1958, two years after the Zubryd case. Thirteen-year-old Jerry Pacek endured forty-one hours of police grilling before he confessed to raping and killing fifty-year-old Lillian Steveck as she walked home one evening from a bus stop in Breckenridge, Pennsylvania. Pacek told the same Allegheny County homicide detective who had framed Charlie Zubryd that he had killed the woman with a variety of blunt objects, none of which were ever found. The thirteen-year-old boy was tried and convicted of the murder the following spring. He was sent to Camp Hill Prison, where he remained incarcerated for ten years.

Fisher’s investigation cleared the names of both the wrongfully accused boys. Because of his investigation, the Zubryd case was reopened, which led to the identification of a vicious killer. In 1991, Fisher’s investigative efforts convinced the governor of Pennsylvania to grant a full pardon to Jerry Pacek, who as a teenager had served ten years in an adult prison for a murder he had not committed.

Jim Fisher and the Zubryd and Pacek stories have been featured on a number of nationally broadcast television programs.