Karen S. Gordon

Karen S. Gordon was born in Burbank, California, to a psychoanalyst-father and a runway-model, the fourth of five children, and the only girl. Her debut novel, The Mutiny Girl, has been widely acclaimed, earning double Finalist honors by the IAN 'Book of the Year' awards for both the Thriller/Suspense and Action/Adventure categories.

Her fascination with the twenty-six black and white symbols began when she embarked on her first major writing project at age three: to copy the entire Los Angeles phone directory into her older brothers' school notebooks.
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She's led an eclectic life. Karen got her first job at age twelve as a groom for a top polo player in Los Angeles. She was shipped off to a private boarding school in Scottsdale, and later worked as a dough-roller at a major pizza parlor chain while attending the University of Arizona. Later she moved to Coconut Grove, Florida to be closer to her father.

That's where he helped her get a job when she unwittingly went to work at the Hotel Mutiny. The Mutiny Girl is inspired by her experiences working inside the hotel's luxury private club while it doubled as the epicenter of Miami’s multi-billion dollar cocaine trade.

Since 1982 Karen has made a living in the commercial film/video production business, including two decades in professional motorsports television, as an award-winning producer, writer, and editor.
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The Mutiny Girl, was released in January 2019, is the first installment of the Gold & Courage Series. The next installment, Killer Deal, was published January 2020.
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She lives in Texas with her rescue poodle-mashup, Dexter, and is an avid equestrian.

The Mutiny Girl

Thriller
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​Vance Courage knows all too well the Hotel Mutiny was once the secret enclave for Miami's notorious Cocaine Cowboys. Law enforcement, drug lords, and lots of shady operatives lived it up inside the Mutiny's high security private club.

Outside the hotel, Miami was a war zone. The coroner stored murder victims in rented refrigerated trucks. Witnesses and jurors disappeared. A federal judge was gunned down outside his home.

But that was a different era. Or was it?

Courage is a lawyer now and his practice is on the skids. When a fugitive sneaks into Miami from Cuba, it unleashes demons from the past. Characters from the Cocaine Cowboy days are cropping up — including an enticing woman he meets on a dating app. With his life going nowhere fast, he wonders what they want with him. And why now?

Killer Deal

Thriller
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​Lauren Gold and Vance Courage jump at the chance to buy a luxury West Texas guest ranch. They've been looking for ways to launder a few million bucks and this deal seems perfect.

After settling in as the new owners, tragedy strikes. A body is found in one of the buildings. The ranch manager—a holdover—pressures them not to immediately report it. Meanwhile, rumors swirl that the Supreme Court Justice who died of natural causes at the ranch before they bought it might actually be an unsolved murder. Suspecting the killer might be among them, they begin to dig for clues.

What they unearth is chilling. The resort is ground zero for a secret society of global power brokers with a shocking agenda that stretches from Silicon Valley . . . to Frankfurt . . . all the way to Capitol Hill.

Starting out two steps behind, Gold and Courage must play catch-up. Or risk becoming the next victims.

Express Intent

Thriller

Ex-cop Vance Courage is holed-up at a luxury ranch when 15-year-old Caitlin Fleming goes for an early morning run and vanishes in the desert. His partner Lauren Gold fears the teenager was taken by the cartels operating on the US-Mexico border. But Vance is baffled by the crime scene: Why do the girl's footprints suddenly stop and why are there no tire tracks or signs of a struggle?

Vance thinks he saw a UFO at the time the teen disappeared. But that's crazy. Or is it? Southwest Texas is, after all, a hotbed for the private aerospace industry.

When Native American tracker Daryl Flood arrives to help with the search and hints that an experimental aircraft was stolen from a nearby high-security R&D facility, Vance wonders if his theory isn't so outlandish. After the fitness tracker Caitlin is wearing pings on a cell tower in Alabama, he begins to suspect her abductor might be headed to Florida.

As more arrows point to the Sunshine State, Vance hops a flight to Miami—and when Lauren discovers Daryl is headed there, too, she slyly follows him. As more go missing, including Vance's elderly mother, he fears the worst. With only each other to trust, Gold and Courage are back on their old turf, facing an evil nemesis from their past, racing the clock before time runs out for the hostages.

Sick Money

Ex-cop Vance Courage is heading off for an island vacation when HIPP Corp’s CEO Sherry Rogers jets into Miami for a surprise meeting. An oncologist using her company’s electronic medical records software lost a patient during a routine chemotherapy infusion and the family is threatening to sue. Worried the business will be named in the lawsuit, she insists he go to Indianapolis to investigate. He can’t very well say no. He and his partner Lauren Gold recently invested 5-million of their own dirty dollars to save her company from bankruptcy.

The duo travel to Indy and attend a medical sales gala hoping the free flowing booze will loosen lips. But before dinner is served, Rogers tells him another doctor-client in Chicago lost a cancer patient in almost the exact same way. Could the link be a bad batch of drugs? Or something more nefarious?

With a freak late April snowstorm looming, they detour to the Windy City, shocked to discover the clinic is a front for a patient-dumping scheme. While Vance focuses on the Chicago doc treating low-income patients, Lauren heads off to meet with Rogers—and vanishes. When the sixth patient dies and the Chicago oncologist is arrested for murder, every cell in Vance’s body tells him he has a lot more to lose than money.