Dead Hero

by David Reichart

News of a murder hadn’t spread through Mobile so fast since the day President Kennedy was shot. Adam Becker, a hometown baseball star who had recently signed a six-million-dollar contract and was soon to make his major league debut, is found shot in the head in a car parked near his apartment.Nine months later, the case remains unsolved. Frustrated by the lack of progress, Becker’s family hires Jesse Yates to watch over Adam’s sister, Cheryl, as she sets out to contact a wide circle of her brother’s acquaintances, searching for any nugget of useful information that the police failed to dig up.It’s a long shot, and yet the strategy quickly pays off. A former girlfriend remembers that Adam once refused to go into a tavern when he saw a certain individual inside. Identification and surveillance of that person by Palm Court detectives leads further to an enigmatic multi-millionaire—new in town—who seems to have no past, no shortage of money and a handful of dangerous houseguests in his spectacular riverside estate. Palm Court detective Jack Lundy takes a trip to Indiana to find out who this guy who calls William Johnson really is. By the time Lundy gets the disturbing details, Yates has already gotten himself hired as a bodyguard for the paranoid mystery man and finds himself poking around the edges of a treacherous conspiracy.A link to the hometown hero’s murder begins to seem within reach, but to find out who killed Adam Becker and why, Jesse Yates will have to get in so deep that getting out will be a crapshoot, requiring the former Navy SEAL to fall back, once again, on his extreme training and lethal skills.

191 pages, Paperback

Published April 9, 2018

About the author

My writing career included several years in the newspaper business as a reporter, copy editor and managing editor and five years as a freelance copywriter. While trying to make a living in the traditional sense, I managed to do a lot of writing in my spare time--work I wanted to do, things I wanted to write, things I never got paid for.

Eventually, my spare-time creative writing began to pay off. I signed with an agent in Los Angeles and later one in New York, and I managed to option my screenplay, Big Sandy, to a Hollywood producer and make some money.

I mention those close calls and moral victories because I think there are thousands of people with those kinds of experiences--writers who have studied their craft and paid their dues and who will now provide material for the exploding digital publishing revolution. I’m talking about writers who didn’t have the time, contacts, opportunity (okay, maybe talent) to succeed in the world of traditional publishing, but who, given the opportunity, just might find a market for their fiction.

I’ve enlisted in the Independent Publishing Revolution, and I’m a gung-ho soldier. There’s no doubt in my military mind that the best is yet to come, and I'm still dreaming about the day I'm finally proclaimed an overnight success.