Category: Mystery/Suspense Publisher: Kindle Direct Publishing
ISBN-10: BOBRHDK369
Type: Fiction
Pages: 232
Copyright: Jan 2, 2023
ISBN-13: 9798218112332
Suspected of a brutal murder there is only one way Early Times can prove his innocence. Solve the crime. If he survives.
Early Times never meant to become a private investigator. He escapes his San Francisco past and its romantic complication by fleeing to New Orleans. James Lee Burke's Dave Robicheaux would warn Early about taking that drink at Bourbon Street's Smuggler's Den. Tony Dunbar's Tubby Dubonnet would buy the round. Drink it Early does. One "Micky." Straight up. Fantasia and gin.
Good times roll until a severed head lands on Early's front porch, leaking on his morning Times Picayune.
Tarot cards appear in his mailbox. On his kitchen bulletin board. Under a windshield wiper. Neighbor Angelique Role leads Early through the mysteries of Caribbean occult, serving up gore and ritual with the hush puppies.
Early fights his personal ghosts while finding new ones. Bounty hunters from his San Francisco past seek him out. He carries a price on his head as he tracks a brutal killer who wields a wicked blade. New Orleans provides the backdrop. The French Quarter lends its color to this murder mystery set in the 1980s.
Excerpt
Early Times follows a still populated Bourbon Street. It's a long walk across the breadth of the French Quarter, for here time and distance meld. As the crowd thins, his misty caution returns. He knows this place can mimic a sleek cat, outstretched, purring for a belly rub, with tooth and claw ready to strike.
Soon the chromatic collision of neon and the flare of flambeaux dim as the street loses the brazenness of the barker, the tinny sound of a garage-band, and gives way to front stoops, a corner grocery, a laundromat, and a club where the gay crowd can gather in fellowship. In the soul of the Quarter rests a collection of the odd. A congregation of the special.
Believers claim ghosts inhabit Smuggler's Den. They do, but that's not as fantastic as it might be in a visitor's hometown. A receptive person can't walk fifty feet on these streets and not sense a spirit. Most specters find tranquility after they've mellowed a century or two.
