A safe place for dying by Jack Fredrickson fiction
Shamus Award Nominee for BEST FIRST NOVEL! (2006)
Hardcover: 304 pages
Publisher: A Thomas Dunne book for
St. Martin's Minotaur
(November 14, 2006)
Language: English
ISBN: 0312351682
A strange letter arrives at Crystal Waters, one of Chicago's wealthiest gated communities. It reads likes extortion, but threatens nothing specific, gives no instructions, demands only that $50,000 be gotten ready -- chump change for an enclave where the cheapest house is worth three million. It's easy to see it as the sort of rant that sometimes shows up in the mail of rich people -- harmless, a note from a nut.
But then a mansion explodes.
The homeowners panic, want it hushed. If word gets out that a bomb-planting extortionist is targeting Crystal Waters, their homes will become worthless overnight, sure catastrophe to people who've borrowed too heavily to live the good life. Publicly, they pass the explosions off as a gas leak. Privately, they instruct the Bohemian, their shadowy retainer, to hire Dek Elstrom to investigate. Dek Elstrom used to soar high, lived with his multi-millionaire wife at Crystal Waters. That was before his reputation got trashed and his business got ruined. And before his wife threw him out. Now bankrupt of everything but attitude and a lingering love for his ex-wife, he's living in a gamy tank town just west of the city, trying to rehab a stone turret. And his life.He takes the case, quickly learns that the letter is old, written decades before. Learns that the explosives were old, too, last manufactured for use in Vietnam. He probes deeper, discovers something else that's old: Secrets, long buried by the homeowners at Crystal Waters.Another bomb goes off. As Dek races to stop the explosions, the profile of the bomber becomes clear: An angry man. A ruined man, with nothing to lose. A man who intimately knows Crystal Waters. Motive, means, opportunity.
Dek Elstrom is his own best suspect.
A Safe Place for Dying novel cover