EBOOK
About
Joe Tracy lives in an airplane hangar at the Santa Carmella airport, eats breakfast at Twyla Rae Moon's 1950s diner and keeps a therapist in expensive shoes. He is also a former Navy pilot, a former soap-opera detective and a private investigator with a weakness for people in trouble, even when they have earned it.
Bonita Grainger has earned it. She raised her daughter, Scarlet, to read people, find their weaknesses and make them hand things over. Now Scarlet is missing, and Bonita wants Joe to find her before Hugo Zucco does. Scarlet has taken something from Zucco, and Zucco does not forgive.
With his partner Miles King riding shotgun in a borrowed Mustang, Joe works his way from a trailer park in Chatsworth to a computer fix-it shop in Silver Lake, from the Santa Monica Pier to the Palisades Highlands. He finds a laptop, a letter from Scarlet that begins "Mom, if you're reading this, I probably screwed up," and files that frighten everyone who sees them. Annika Matthews of the Santa Monica DA's office wants to build a case. FBI agent Carmen Reyes wants Joe to stop improvising. And Hannah, a young woman trapped inside Zucco's world, may be the only witness who can bring it down, if she lives long enough.
Then the case reaches past Zucco to Victor Vale, a man who moves money, secrets and people through private airfields and the Port of Long Beach under a single code word: Mercury. To stop him, Joe has to go back to St. Maria's Orphanage and to Sister Mary Salisbury, the woman who raised him before he was sent to Kansas, where a key and a wall safe are waiting.
Joe has always known how to find other people. This time someone has been finding him.
Bonita Grainger has earned it. She raised her daughter, Scarlet, to read people, find their weaknesses and make them hand things over. Now Scarlet is missing, and Bonita wants Joe to find her before Hugo Zucco does. Scarlet has taken something from Zucco, and Zucco does not forgive.
With his partner Miles King riding shotgun in a borrowed Mustang, Joe works his way from a trailer park in Chatsworth to a computer fix-it shop in Silver Lake, from the Santa Monica Pier to the Palisades Highlands. He finds a laptop, a letter from Scarlet that begins "Mom, if you're reading this, I probably screwed up," and files that frighten everyone who sees them. Annika Matthews of the Santa Monica DA's office wants to build a case. FBI agent Carmen Reyes wants Joe to stop improvising. And Hannah, a young woman trapped inside Zucco's world, may be the only witness who can bring it down, if she lives long enough.
Then the case reaches past Zucco to Victor Vale, a man who moves money, secrets and people through private airfields and the Port of Long Beach under a single code word: Mercury. To stop him, Joe has to go back to St. Maria's Orphanage and to Sister Mary Salisbury, the woman who raised him before he was sent to Kansas, where a key and a wall safe are waiting.
Joe has always known how to find other people. This time someone has been finding him.