Harm's Way

A private investigator searches for the runaway daughter of an aspiring politician only to find that, on or off the campaign trail, honesty is the rarest commodity. As mystery descends into mayhem and murder, he confronts an unsettling truth – the innocents are always the first victims. (Descriptive version) Lee Harms, investigator-for-hire, is on the cusp of an on-and-off-again love affair with confidante and astrologer Celeste when fate serves up a witch’s brew of trouble. Start with a broth of sexual intrigue, toss in a troubled redhead, stir in two kilos of cocaine, dissolve a few pages from a psychiatrist’s notebook, and bring to a boil the fury of a crime family whose son dies in a midnight bacchanal. Money ignites the fire under this cauldron, but sex, violence and the darker forces of human nature keep it bubbling. Political hopeful Dr Reynolds has already paid $50K to suppress a videotape of his daughter Liz in a lesbian porn flick; now there’s a second blackmail demand for $250K and promise of worse revelations to come. He wants her found and put on the next plane to England where she’ll go into rehab and put her life back together before she ruins his. As Harms learns, she’s been living quite a life already – shoplifting, drug abuse, pornography, and maybe even prostitution. Everywhere he looks, he encounters the human archetypes of moral depravity, and every one of them warns him to drop the case before it gets too hot for him to handle. As dangerous as it gets, Harms must rely on his own wits to out-maneuver crack-crazed thugs, libidinous porn stars, and a deranged young woman with a troubled past. But when criminals kidnap his own ten-year-old daughter, he plunges into their underworld to rescue her from harm’s way. (80,500 words)