Welcome to the Black Triangle, New Yorks decadent district of opium dens, gambling casinos, drunken sailors, gaudy hookers, and back room abortions. The queen of this unsavory neighborhood is Black Lena Shanks, whose family leads a ring of female criminals-women skilled in the art of cruelty.



Only a few blocks away, amidst the elegant mansions and lily-white reputations of Gramercy Park and Washington Square, lives Judge James Stallworth. On a crusade to crush Lenas evil empire, the judge has sentenced three of her family members to death. And now she wants revenge.



One...

DEATH IN THE FAMILY
BUT COME BACK SOON, the sign said. Obviously it was a lie. The people in the grocery store just wanted to make sure he couldn't buy the spice he needed to make the recipe he'd selected for that night (recipes must be followed exactly). Obviously they wanted him to eat out ... to meet the waitress, Marta, ... to see her horrible, unspeakable, unbearable ugliness. It was obvious to him: her maimed, twisted face was the living desire to be dead. He had to help Marta be dead.
His teeth are perfectly white. He can't see colors. He keeps a combination lock on his door...

Seducing a proper Bostonian was easy. Making him die of a heart attack a week after the wedding was hardly any trouble at all. Now she has money, social status, everything she has cunningly schemed to get since she was a poor little girl. Everything except the Brookline mansion and the multi-million dollar trust fund left to the three children.
But what wicked stepmother couldn't get rid of three children?
Jonathan, too smart for his own good and suspicious about his father's death, has to be the first to go. Then there's pretty, spoiled Verity, hooked on cocaine and perpetually...

BLOOD RUBIES



It would bring bad luck, they said. But she split her pair of ruby earrings and gave one to each of her beautiful twin babies. Within hours she was burned to death in a fire. The twins lived.



KATHERINE



Raised by a poor, childless couple, Katherine was shy and withdrawn, except in her love for the Sisters of the Immaculate Conception. In her heart, Katherine had found God. In her fathers heart, they found a butcher knife.



ANDREA



She grew up with all that money could buy. She was pretty and popular and went to the...