Final Sprint

by Dan Wesolowski

During a party, returned Iraq war veteran and current university student, Mietek Majowski, dies in a fall from Skyview’s oceanfront eighty-foot cliffs. The police in this southern California town term it an accident. Meitek’s father, Jacek, himself a veteran of the Russian-Afghan war and a believer in vigilante justice, remains unsatisfied with the official police findings and hires part-time shamus Drake Simo. Drake Simo, ex-bicycle racer, long time resident in Skyview’s Dionysian college community, and once employed by Jacek, reconstructs Mietek’s final days. His inquiry leads to the heart of Skyview’s raucous weekend scene. Along Skyview’s broken boulevards, Drake encounters conflicting accounts of Mietek’s fall, Jacek’s promiscuous daughter, the addled producers of skin-centered Skyview TV, warring Rastafarian drug dealers, and humongous volumes of both cheap booze and expensive PCP-laced marijuana, along with tales of depleted uranium and Jacek’s AK-47 wielding building manager and war comrade, who swears September 11th was a government conspiracy. Closely shadowed by Jacek, Drake scrambles to put something together before la p¨re takes matters into his own hands.

206 pages, Paperback

First published July 3, 2006