panthera press

Ex-Special Forces soldier turned private investigator Eddie Daley is up to his eyeballs in a murder mystery and a romance with a pair of sisters who couldn’t be more different. Either solving the crime or dodging the romance is liable to get him killed.

Cruising through a grimy Oklahoma town, Eddie meets motel owner and retired Marine Mina Good Crow, his toughest puzzle yet. After one thunderous night with her, he finds himself swept up an ever-widening and increasingly dangerous mystery in Brooklyn, New York. At the center of it is Mina’s sister, Kari, whose husband and son died in a mysterious car crash. There’s just one problem: The bodies weren’t identifiable and Kari doesn’t believe her son is dead. There’s a second problem too. Eddie is as attracted to Kari as he is to Mina, and it’s mutual.

Eddie’s a charming, fearless, and straight-arrow guy with a unique voice and a penchant for drawing trouble to himself. He fancies himself a hard-boiled detective, but the ladies know different. He’s got a soft center beneath those battle scars. Two-parts noir investigator and one-part crime caper, The Brooklyn Trace has something for everyone.

＂I’d been driving all day, sucking in western Oklahoma road dust, and I wasn’t in the mood for any more damned mysteries. Nevertheless here I was, at the intersection of a brown field the size of Africa and some grit and gravel road to infinity. According to the signs I was on highway 56, or 385, or 412, or 64. The hell if I could tell which; they all pointed to the road I was on. None of them told me what this endless cross street was. The Camaro was down to her last quarter tank, and I was running even lower than that. So here I sat, looking up at thunderclouds gathering in the distant purple sky, wondering if I should turn around, and shaking the crap out of my useless GPS unit. All it could tell me is I was halfway between Cimarron and West Butthole counties, and this dinkhole of a pockmarked town I was searching for was nowhere in sight. I was just about to chuck the damned thing out over the convertible top and into the field when a cloud of rick-rackety, noisy dust came clombering down the clotted gravel road, right in my direction. I swear to God the thing appeared out of nowhere, like kids from a Stephen King cornfield. Just for safety I reached into the glove box, pulled out my best friend, and laid her under my seat. She was fully loaded and always in a bad mood.＂