The Last Case
Stanford Bell is a private detective known to the world as "Taco." He is also very dead. His friend, police Lieutenant Hanrahan, finds his body in Taco's office on the floor behind his desk, and sets out to discover how he became dead, who killed him and why. Through his own narrative, Taco introduces us to a tall, beautiful former athlete with amber eyes who hires him to find a missing object. With help from a newspaper reporter, Taco and his client follow a seemingly random string of numbers and letters they believe will lead them to the stolen property. It's a classic whodunnit (and why-they-dunnit) in the style of Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett that will leave readers guessing until the end.
An Empty Seat on the Ferry
Former journalists Rob and Jennie Covington have moved to Martha's Vineyard to relax, recharge and raise their three-year-old daughter Annie while living off the royalties from the best-selling book, Murder on April Fool's, which they wrote after solving a time capsule mystery back in Maryland. They are also looking for a new mystery they can solve and then turn into their next true crime book. Rob is intrigued by the story of a high school student who disappeared 20 years earlier during a school trip to the Vineyard. The girl, a loner with no friends, is widely believed to have jumped or fallen from a ferry and drowned. Jennie wants to look into the case of an overworked single mother of three who disappeared without a trace after leaving home for work one night. They decide to work together to search for clues that could lead to one or both of the missing women, who most people assume have died.
Blue Light Night
The Covingtons are at home in their Victorian cottage on a sunny Sunday morning, watching their daughter Annie play with a ball in the back yard, when a strange little girl shows up outside their picket fence. The girl, who appears to be younger than Annie, is dirty and disheveled with tangled blonde hair and wearing a ratty, faded yellow dress. She refuses to talk but accepts a sandwich and goes inside for a slice of chocolate cake. Finally, she tells them her name is Kaitlin and she needs help to "find her mommy." Jennie sets out to learn who she is, where she came from and what happened to her mother, while Rob gets sidetracked investigating a serial killer whose bizarre methods are leaving female victims all around the greater Boston area. Eventually, their paths converge in a way that neither of them could have seen coming.
Look for the next Shields novel coming early in 2020. Meanwhile, signed copies of Time Capsule are available for sale by sending your name and mailing address to ShieldsBooks2018@gmail.com.
Happy reading!
