Missing: Presumed Dead

by Tom Swinson

Former Detective Ellsworth Street has a reason to hate missing person cases, especially when they involve young women. He was fired from the Washington, D.C., police force because of one. Now a P.I. with an antiquated detective agency, he’s faced with another. He knows right off that it’s going to go bad. Street doesn’t need more female complications in his life. He’s already in trouble with his girlfriend, Lt. Claudia Carstairs, who rightly presumes that Holly Hodges, the young and attractive daughter of Street’s boss is making a pass at him. But, complications pile up big time when Street is assigned the case of Chantal Lafleur, the runaway adopted daughter of one of the mafia’s leading venerables in Baton Rouge. Even worse, Chantal is not above using her beauty and her brains to team up with Street’s old nemesis, Arnold Jefferson, the pimp who got him fired from the police force. There’s a secret reason why Chantal picks Arnold Jefferson, but Street won’t find that out until too late. Street is behind the curve on a lot of other facts that place him in seemingly constant a speeding SUV that nearly plows through him; Chantal’s gangster father inexplicably shot to death in a locked suite at the Ritz Carlton; a hastily arranged meeting at the National Zoo where the exotic Chantal is wearing an open coyote fur coat and nothing else distracting Street to the point where he nearly becomes the evening meal for a pair of lions. Last and worst, is when he finds out that his girlfriend Claudia has been kidnapped and is being held in a slum area ‘ice’ lab that proves much easier to get into than get out of.

228 pages, Kindle Edition

Published December 28, 2014