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Synopsis
On the run from trumped-up murder charges, Alex Dawson and his boyfriend Sev settle in a small town in Vermont on the recommendation of Sev’s mob-boss cousin Bella. Chickadee is so tiny that it has only one major employer in the depths of the Great Depression: Trask & Co. Maple Sugar Mill. It’s a quiet place. That is, until Walter Trask is found in his own maple grove with his head smashed in.
Alex doesn’t want to have anything to do with the death, but things get much more personal when Bella is falsely arrested. Determined to free her and even the scales, Alex scours the town for clues as to what really happened. He quickly learns that small towns have big secrets that people may be willing to kill for. And if that weren’t bad enough, Alex and Sev’s once-sweet relationship is turning bitter under the combined pressures of isolation, anxiety, and jealousy. Alex needs to find the true murderer quickly before Bella is turned over to the feds, or worse, Sev walks out of his life forever.
Excerpt
him, he’d mentioned exotic places like India and Australia, warm countries far
away from the seedy city we were living in. It had sounded romantic and
wonderful, and when we finally left—well, fled—I had hopes of going somewhere
like that. Instead, we ended up in Chickadee, Vermont.
half-hour drive from the Canadian border and about a six-hour drive from our
old home in Connecticut. In all my twenty-three years, I’d never set foot in
the countryside, and now there was all this empty space. Blue sky. Trees. Cows.
as I gaped at the maple forest flashing by the car window. “It’s so…rustic.”
his faint Italian accent tinged with unease as he guided the rickety borrowed
Oldsmobile over bumps on the dirt road, “it’s better than the alternatives,
yes?”
and arrested for murder, he was right. Less than a month ago, I’d been living
my dull life, writing during the day and serving as a bodyguard for the mayor
in the evenings, and then all hell broke loose. Now nine people were dead,
including my friends Martin and Donnie, and the corrupt cops wouldn’t even
think of hearing my side of the story. Targeting the big guy with a chip on his
shoulder the size of New England was almost too easy for them.
the back.
the edge of the seat, her already-large eyes expanded in wonder. Her cat,
Daisy, sulked in a metal cage next to her. I still wasn’t sure it’d been the
brightest idea to take a six-year-old on the lam with us, but it was too late
now. At least she seemed to be enjoying the trip. And why wouldn’t she? She
wasn’t the one running from murder charges.
asked, careful to keep my voice cheerful for her.
the trees.
she didn’t seem to share my unease.
take?”
windshield. We were coming up on an intersection, if a split of one dirt track
into two could be called that. I scrambled to unfold the map I’d crumpled in my
distraction. Sev’s cousin Bella—the most notorious gangster in Westwick—had
given us these directions and all our fake identification papers first thing
that morning.
us from the cops was a mystery. She hadn’t given me a straight answer when I
asked, only that she had friends there and Sev would be working with one of
them. Most likely the location had something to do with the rum-running routes
she’d controlled until about six months ago. While the end of Prohibition had
cut the bottom out from under her main moneymaker, there were many other ways
to make an illegal living, and why leave when she already had a foot in the
door?
line with my finger. “Looks like another mile and we reach town.”
car turned in a wide arc around yet more trees. Both sides of the road were
obscured by underbrush and shadow. Sev swore under his breath in Italian and
slowed even more.
“Someone’s going to get hit one day.”
“There’s no one out he—”
darted from between the trunks. I jolted forward and got the wind knocked out
of me as I smacked into the dashboard. Pearl screamed, tumbling into the back
of my seat. The rattle of the cat cage almost drowned out Daisy’s yowls.
“Everyone okay?” I gasped.
he said.
objections of my bruised ribs. She huddled in the space between the back bench
and the front seat, clutching her wrist. My already-pitching stomach dropped.
I’d brought her with us to get her away from all the pain in her past, and now
here was more. I scrambled out the door and around the back to get her.
mumbled in an effort to convince myself my assurance was true. “Can I see?”
Already her wrist was red and swelling. I held back the curses bubbling in my
mind. In a flash of anger, I whipped around to see what jackass had done this.
straddling a sturdy bike. She was maybe sixteen or seventeen, wearing men’s
dungarees and a gingham shirt. Freckles were splattered across her face, and
ash-blonde braids draped down her back. She gnawed on her lip, her eyes huge
with fear.
almost never anyone out here—”
I looked at the driver’s side door. He had gotten out and had one hand curled
around the lower half of his face while the other scrambled in a pocket. “I
think I might have been mistaken when I said I was fine.” He pulled out a handkerchief,
and I saw both his nose and his upper lip were bleeding.
tangled up in my mind, freezing my mouth in one slack-jawed position, keeping
me mute.
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Don’t miss Book #1 in the Caro Mysteries series, No Good Men, available from NineStar Press
pay the rent, and Alex Dawson is no exception. To support his writing habit, he
moonlights with his mentor Donnie as a bodyguard for the mayor. It’s dull work,
until the night a handsome, golden-eyed stranger catches his eye–and both his
boss and his mentor are killed when his back is turned.
vows to find the murderer before the corrupt police can pin the blame on him.
But he soon discovers he’s in over his head. The golden-eyed stranger turns out
to be a mob boss’s cousin, and a suspicious stack of money in Donnie’s dresser
leads Alex to discover that his mentor and the mayor were involved in something
more crooked than fundraising dinners and campaign speeches. As the death count
rises amid corruption, mob politics, and anarchist plots, Alex realizes that
the murders aren’t political or even business. This is the work of a spree
killer, and Alex and his new boyfriend are the only ones who can stop them.
Meet the Author
Thea McAlistair is the pseudonym of an otherwise terribly boring office worker from New Jersey. She studied archaeology, anthropology, history, architecture, and public policy, but none of those panned out, so she decided to go back to an early love – writing. She can often be found muttering to herself about her latest draft at completely inappropriate times.
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