STRANGE MARKINGS
by
Janet Elizabeth Lynn and Will Zeilinger
Summary
The Pacific breezes blow many things in from the ocean, this time its power, greed, and murder. At the dawn of the television age in 1955, Skylar Drake is called to identify the remains of a fellow movie stuntman found buried in a shallow grave. While there he is shown mysterious wounds and strange tattoos on two additional bodies.
A wealthy Bel Air matron sends her enticing niece to enlist Drake’s help in locating a missing nephew. The search takes him back to pre-statehood Hawaii where he stopped off on his way to the hell of the Korean War. Unexplained deaths, politics and superstitious locals turn the tropical paradise into a nightmare where nothing is what it seems and no one can be trusted.
Excerpt:
We met them at the Coroner’s office and waited for the
Medical Examiner to get back from lunch.
Casey called the hospital, Bev had gone home. He called his house, no answer. “I’m not worried,” he said. His eyes said otherwise.
I hadn’t been down here in a long time. Yep, the same frigid air, smell of alcohol
and bleach have never left my mind. The
door swung open and Dr. Harold Logue came in wiping his mouth with a paper
towel. I remember he always ate at the
most inopportune times, “Hey Drake and Dolan, LAPD’s two best detectives. Nice to see both of you.” Logue was an old
timer. We worked a lot of cases with
him. He put his arms on our shoulders,
“Sure miss working with you two geniuses.
I could never figure out how you caught all the bad guys. These youngsters they got in here now are...”
He stopped when he saw the young FBI agents standing by the wall. “Oops, sorry.
No offense,” and shook their
hands.
Agent Miller kept hold of Dr. Logue’s hand and said,
”We're here to see the remains of Ted Stone.”
“Yes sure, come this way,” Logue said.
He had the bones laid out on the table, a complete
skeleton. How was I suppose to ID the
remains of Teddy from this?
“I don’t know if this will help you,” Agent Tanner
said, “but here are the clothes we
found, his accessories and wallet.”
The clothes looked like his. I knew him as a rather classy dresser when he
wasn’t working.
“We found a hundred dollar bill hidden in the wallet.”
Miller remarked
“You can’t trace the bill?”
He shook his head, “We tried, nothing.”
I knew Teddy well enough to know he didn’t carry so much
cash around. “He was a Las Vegas
hound. We’d get paid. He’d go to Vegas and blow the wad, all of it
- then come back broke. He was a real
gambler and big with the ladies. I’m not
surprised he had that much cash, but he seldom carried it around. He either banked it or lost it.”
“And the clothes?” Agent Miller lifted his pencil from his
notepad to point at the clothing spread on a different table. Dolan and I spent time looking at what they
found. “Shirt, tie, suit, vest, socks, pants.
It was all there.”
“What about these?” Tanner asked.
When they met it was murder... like a real Hart to Hart. Authors Janet Elizabeth Lynn and her husband Will Zeilinger just released the second novel in the Skylar Drake Mystery series, Strange Markings, a Noir mystery set in 1950's. They have been writing separately for over a decade and have two more Skylar Drake Mysteries in the works
Contact information: www.janetlynnauthor.com
Thanks for telling us about your new release,
Tina
No comments:
Post a Comment