The Gumshoe, the Witch, and the Virtual Corpse: Gay science fiction mystery

Keith HartmanJanuary 4, 2017

Pyramid Press

Murder, Conspiracies… and what might be black magic.

In the summer of 2035, Atlanta is a city on the verge of panic. A killer is stalking her people, leaving behind eerily beautiful crime scenes painted with occult symbols. Is he an insane artist, carving his work out of flesh and blood? A satanic sorcerer, hoping to bring about the end of days? Or a political operative, trying to terrify the electorate into voting for his party?

A handful of people have the pieces to the puzzle, but they are scattered through the city’s subcultures: A black cop, trying to use high-tech forensics to solve crimes that seem to be right out of the Middle Ages. A Wiccan journalist who employs scrying spells and search engines with equal skill. A televangelist with an eye on the White House, and the Christian rock star who wants to take him down. A transgendered Cherokee shaman trying to right a wrong from the 1800’s. A street-smart gay detective hunting for his missing partner.

And Benji, the fourteen year old boy at the center of it all. Who thinks that his biggest problem is what will happen when his strict Baptist parents find out that his new girlfriend is a witch.

Together, they might be able to stop what’s coming. If they can stay alive long enough to find each other.

Winner of Two Spectrum Awards and picked as one of the “Ten Best Mysteries of the Year” by The Drood Review of Mysteries.

•Wisecracking gay PI witch magic realism near future high tech police procedural occult science fiction mystery coming of age social satire with politics and occasional sex. Read at your own risk.•

Collapse

Reviews

Review Policy

Additional Information

Publisher

Pyramid Press

Collapse

Published on

Jan 4, 2017

Collapse

Pages

532

Collapse

ISBN

9781681019208

Collapse

Features

Flowing text, Google-generated PDF

Collapse

Best For

Web, Tablet, Phone, eReader

Collapse

Language

English

Collapse

Genres

Fiction / Mystery & Detective / Private Investigators

Fiction / Science Fiction / General

Collapse

Content Protection

This content is DRM protected.

Collapse

Read Aloud

Available on Android devices

Collapse

Eligible for Family Library

Learn More

Report

Flag as inappropriate

Reading information

Smartphones and Tablets

Install the Google Play Books app for Android and iPad/iPhone. It syncs automatically with your account and allows you to read online or offline wherever you are.

Laptops and Computers

You can read books purchased on Google Play using your computer's web browser.

eReaders and other devices

To read on e-ink devices like the Sony eReader or Barnes & Noble Nook, you'll need to download a file and transfer it to your device. Please follow the detailed Help center instructions to transfer the files to supported eReaders.

More featuring private investigators

Beyond Blue

Austin Camacho

This novel is about a privately funded detective agency whose only purpose is to help police officers in trouble. The story follows four of the agency's cases, which overlap and intersect. There is an undercover officer in danger of being drawn into a life of crime, a crooked lawyer who is destroying police careers by making arresting officers appear to have violated criminals' rights, a cop's wife who accuses him of abusing their daughter, and a retired police detective who is now in charge of airport security and could lose his job because of a drug smuggling incident. Pursuing these cases is a team of unique and intriguing detectives. The agency's director, the enigmatic Paul Gorman, sits at the center of the action, pulling the strings and directing the team and to solve each troubling case.

Feet of Clay

Ruth Birmingham

Her personal life may be a mess. And no one said her family was sane. But as lead detective at Atlanta's Peachtree Investigations, hard-nosed, fast-talking PI Sunny Childs is always up for cracking a case.
And now in Feet of Clay, her sixth mystery, Sunny is in thick. When her cousin Lee-Lee, a documentary filmmaker who's interviewing convicted murderer and rapist Dale Weedlow, invites Sunny along for the ride, Sunny knows her very presence will probably convince her flighty cousin that the sicko's been framed. But Sunny ends up going, and to her surprise, things are, indeed, not as they seem.
Evidence of a cover-up looms behind the gentility of the local politics, business, and law enforcement, and as usual, Sunny finds herself deep into the original murder case. But with the locals closing their doors in her face and the time before the convict's execution running short, Sunny has to hurry if she's going to get to the bottom of the six-year-old murders of two girls whose feet had sunk deep into the Southern clay.

Praise for Ruth Birmingham and Ace Atlanta PI Sunny Childs
"Witty, irreverent."--Harlan Coben, author of Fade Away
"Top-notch . . . The further adventures of Sunny Childs will be most welcome."--Booklist
"A terrific series."--Midwest Book Review
"Birmingham has established herself as the Queen of Atlanta crime fiction. Read and enjoy."--Fred Willard, author of Down on Ponce
"Gets better with each installment."--Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel
"Sunny Childs is a wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am great read."--J. A. Jance, author of Name Withheld

The Maya Stone Murders

Book 1

Micah Dunn investigates a murderous plot to discredit an archaeologist

In steamy downtown New Orleans, Gregory Thorpe is presenting an exhibition that could rewrite the history of the ancient Mayans. But when fake artifacts begin appearing alongside the authentic ones, Thorpe’s reputation is thrown into jeopardy. To trace the fraud, Thorpe hires Micah Dunn, a world-weary private detective whose tour in Vietnam cost him the use of one of his arms and provided fodder for decades of nightmares. PI work is boring, repetitive, and safe, but clearing Thorpe’s name will expose Dunn to the kind of danger he thought he left behind in the jungle.

Dunn has experience working with archaeology, and he knows the field is cutthroat. Thorpe is not well liked on the Tulane campus, and any of his colleagues or grad students could be responsible for the fraud. When one of the suspects turns up dead, Dunn realizes that someone in New Orleans will kill to keep the Mayan past buried.

Angel's Cove: A Harry Rice Mystery

Allan Pedrazas

In his second book, following The Harry Chronicles, which won the 1995 PWA/St. Martin's First Private Eye Novel Contest, Allan Pedrazas brings back the wise-cracking Florida private eye Harry Rice in Angel's Cove.

Harry is enjoying a state of semi-retirement and a moment of serenity as the owner of the tropical beachside pub the Sand Bar when a frantic phone call from his regular day bartender, Carla, interrupts his reverie.

Carla's father's unexpected death has led her back to the small coastal town of Angel's Cove. There she discovers that the time of his death doesn't correspond with when she last spoke to him. Then a threat in the form of a dead kitten warns her to back off.

Enlisting Harry's help, she sets out with him to learn what is behind her father's death, encountering much hostility from the locals, who make it clear that Carla's father was not welcome in Angel's Cove.

Like the frosty tropical beverages Harry whips up for his customers, Pedrazas blends the perfect mix of humor and intrigue to take his readers on another memorable and suspenseful adventure.

Ghost Dancer

Robert Westbrook

A Native American working on his Ph.D.

A cop blinded in the line of duty.

A chic resort's only hope to stop a killer cold in his tracks.

GHOST DANCER

A Howard Moon Deer Mystery

Once a land of Pueblo dwellers, the town of San Geronimo Peak, New Mexico, is prime ski country. P.I. Howard Moon Deer and ex-cop Jack Wilder are headed there to meet their first client—a former U.S. senator and the ski slope's owner. Instead, they find his body—and a murder case to solve.

Overrun with pleasure seekers, plunderers, and fanatics, San Geronimo has no shortage of suspects. But investigating the senator's two very different daughters, his political enemies, and his complex business dealings leads only to false clues. Then the senator's granddaughter is kidnapped—and the new detectives are plunged into a dangerous race for a little girl's life...and for their own.

"Terrific…I couldn’t put it down."—Margaret Truman, author of Murder at the Watergate

"A clever, sexy, modern mystery. Imagine Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin in contemporary New Mexico. I look forward to more adventures for this engaging team." —Tom Savage, author of The Inheritance

Similar ebooks

The Buried Sky: Post Apocalyptic Coming of Age Mystery

Keith Hartman

Trapped in a small town...

Calvin has grown up in a town with no phones. No televisions. No windows. A town that no stranger ever visits. And a town where no one under the age of twenty-one has ever seen the open sky.

There's not much work available, but the citizens have found ways to pass the time. Some bury themselves in books. Some become religious fanatics. And some play ever more complicated games of sex and manipulation.

And one of them has murdered Calvin's father.

Calvin needs to find out who and why. And he'd better do it fast. Because right now, he's the only suspect.

They're coming for him. And there's nowhere to run.

•Post apocalyptic young adult dystopian science fiction amateur sleuth noir mystery with occasional sex loosely based on Plato’s Allegory of the Cave•

Swamp Santa

Jana DeLeon

It’s Christmas in Sinful and Fortune is set to participate in all the local hoopla. A Christmas gala, caroling, and a sleigh ride are on the agenda. Murder is not. But when someone bumps off Santa, Fortune is aware a killer is lurking among the holiday cheer. But with no client and no reason to interfere with a police investigation, it looks as if Fortune, Ida Belle, and Gertie will have to sit this one out.

Big and Little Hebert might be criminals, but they prefer no competition in their territory, especially someone brazen enough to kill a man at the Christmas gala. When they hire Fortune to investigate the man’s death, she gets her Christmas wish and Swamp Team 3 sets out to solve their final case of the year.

Slow River: A Novel

Nicola Griffith

Nicola Griffith, winner of the Tiptree Award and the Lambda Award for her widely acclaimed first novel Ammonite, now turns her attention closer to the present in Slow River, the dark and intensely involving story of a young woman's struggle for survival and independence on the gritty underside of a near-future Europe.
She awoke in an alley to the splash of rain. She was naked, a foot-long gash in her back was still bleeding, and her identity implant was gone. Lore Van de Oest was the daughter of one of the world's most powerful families...and now she was nobody.
Then out of the rain walked Spanner, an expert data pirate who took her in, cared for her wounds, and gave her the freedom to reinvent herself again and again. No one could find Lore if she didn't want to be found: not the police, not her family, and not the kidnappers who had left her in that alley to die. She had escaped...but she paid for her newfound freedom in crime, deception, and degradation--over and over again.
Lore had a choice: She could stay in the shadows, stay with Spanner...and risk losing herself forever. Or she could leave Spanner and find herself again by becoming someone else: stealing the identity implant of a dead woman, taking over her life, and inventing her future.
But to start again, Lore required Spanner's talents--Spanner, who needed her and hated her, and who always had a price. And even as Lore agreed to play Spanner's games one final time, she found that there was still the price of being a Van de Oest to be paid. Only by confronting her past, her family, and her own demons could Lore meld together who she had once been, who she had become, and the person she intended to be....
In Slow River, Nicola Griffith skillfully takes us deep into the mind and heart of her complex protagonist, where the past must be reconciled with the present if the future is ever to offer solid ground. Slow River poses a question we all hope never to need to answer: Who are you when you have nothing left?

Grave Peril

Book 3

Wizard for hire Harry Dresden gets mixed-up with the dead in this “haunting, fantastical novel”(Publishers Weekly) in the #1 New York Times bestselling series.

Harry Dresden’s faced some pretty terrifying foes during his career. Giant scorpions. Oversexed vampires. Psychotic werewolves. It comes with the territory, when you’re the only professional wizard in the Chicago area phone book.

But in all Harry’s years of supernatural sleuthing, he’s never faced anything like this: the spirit world’s gone postal. All over Chicago, ghosts are causing trouble—and not just of the door-slamming, boo-shouting variety. These ghosts are tormented, violent, and deadly. Someone—or something—is purposely stirring them up to wreak unearthly havoc. But why? And why do so many of the victims have ties to Harry? If Harry doesn’t figure it out soon, he could wind up a ghost himself...

Fool Moon

Book 2

“One of the most enjoyable marriages of the fantasy and mystery genres on the shelves,”(Cinescape) the Dresden Files have become synonymous with action-packed urban fantasy and nonstop fun. Fool Moon continues the adventures of Jim Butcher’s most famous—and infamous—reluctant hero…

You’d think there’d be a little more action for the only professional wizard listed in the Chicago phone book. But lately, Harry Dresden hasn’t been able to dredge up any kind of work: magical, mundane, or menial.

Just when it looks like he can’t afford his next meal, a murder comes along that requires his particular brand of supernatural expertise. There’s a brutally mutilated corpse, and monstrous animal markings at the scene. Not to mention that the killing took place on the night of a full moon. Harry knows exactly where this case is headed. Take three guesses—and the first two don’t count...

By purchasing this item, you are transacting with Google Payments and agreeing to the Google Payments Terms of Service and Privacy Notice.