The Body in the Bog

What is a dead lawyer floating in a condo bog? A really good start for the Ian Decker / Death by Condo mystery series. It is Sunset-Noir at its duskiest, set in the unreal Naples East Bay Shores Village. Prematurely retired lawyer Ian Decker wades into the investigation of Detectives Gabe Hubble and Nicolina Webster of a suspicious death in the murky heart of sub-ritzy Ibis Creek Condominium. JJ Amos was a bull-headed collections lawyer for Ibis Creek. Amos dead in the bog is sad but great news for many an underwater owner. Normally, those happy folks would be called suspects, but Hubble and Webster's initial take is death by slip and sail. The case goes on death-support. Though not a fan of Amos, Decker cannot leave the case alone. Neither can Hubble and it was his call. Webster is the other side of ambivalent about any dead lawyer. Decker volunteers to be Hubble's virtual bloodhound, searching Amos' collection cases for clues that lead them to a face-to-face with an unexpected and dangerous killer.

Born in 1950, John Nicholas Datesh lived in and around Pittsburgh until 2009. At Brown University, he took writing courses as a justification for doing just that. At Boston University Law School, he learned to insert phrases like It Depends and Hereinafter.

In 2009, he moved cats Lila and Lucy Liu to a condo near the east shore of Florida’s Naples Bay, leaving behind a Pittsburgh career in law, product development and business in favor of fiction, happy hours and beach chairs, presumably in that order.

He began writing fiction with a pencil, publishing on paper and ink, novels: SF/Mystery The Nightmare Machine; Soft-boiled Detective The Janus Murder; and International Suspense The Moscow Tape.

Published in Naples are short stories The Pro Station (WWII), The Final Equation (SF) and Reruns ad Infinitum (SF/Fantasy). He concocted a satiric blog at EmptyGlassFull, a collection of which is grandly entitled The Very First Blog Posts of All Time. The author’s harrowing, wry Christmas short, You Could Call It a Christmas Story was first published as a post.

2013’s epic The Girl in the Coyote Coat burst out of its original Mystery genre and page count. No one would call it a Romance, either. With its real estate and finance backdrop, the novel exposes how love, sex, money, scams, drugs, house-breaking and -shopping and fur coats can affect the lives of intriguing characters and even kill a few.

The Girl in the Coyote Coat was rebranded in 2016 as A Need Apart, with identical content and a sedate, more Literary cover, featuring the same model and coyote, to reposition the novel as decidedly literary.

November 2016’s The Body in the Bog is the first Sunset Noir mystery novel of the planned Death by Condo series, starring prematurely retired lawyer Ian Decker.

His 2009 screenplay-turned 2016 novel The Last Three Minutes is a partly true ghost story, written partly on the beach and entirely on Naples East Bay, although it is set in Pittsburgh where its central true incident occurred.

All current covers adorning the author’s works were designed by the author. The novels are available as ebooks and trade paperbacks, with those covers. The other works, and their covers, are available as ebooks.