Saraband for a Runaway

Thomas Haftmann didn't recognize the word Saraband when the girl said it. He had to look it up: "a stately court dance from the eighteenth century in "slow triple time." Haftmann was a down-on-his-luck private eye with an ex-wife and debts, so he did skiptracing for a local bondsman. But then he takes an assignment to go to Florida to retrieve a runaway girl, a scholarship student named Raina Toivela. This job, I thought, will be easier than most. However, the assignment doesn't go as smoothly as he'd hoped. That's all too often the case for a private eye. Welcome to his world

Robert White grew up in Ashtabula, Ohio. He has published several Thomas Haftmann tales in various print magazines and webzines. Like his private eye, he is a full-time lapsed Catholic and part-time existentialist. He has worked in grocery and department stores, sailed as a deckhand on ore boats around the Great Lakes, worked as a mold puller in a plastics factory, and on the cleanup crew at Mexican Original, a taco factory in Fayetteville, Arkansas. He writes book reviews and does interviews for Boxing World. Although he once spent two extraordinary weeks in China about ten years ago, it’s now clear that Ashtabula is the hill he’s chosen to die on and that’s fine by him.