Summary

First Place Winner, Private Eye/Noir Category, Chanticleer Reviews CLUE Awards, 2014.

Sam Dyke is back! The private investigator who never gives up until the bad guys are caught—or worse.

For Sam, taking this particular case is not promising. His client is a secretary who’s watching her boss fall apart, and she can’t bear it. The case requires subtlety and finesse and so isn’t his usual kind of job. But he likes her and takes it anyway.

And he soon discovers that it’s not the pressures of work that are getting to her boss. It’s his colleagues, a group of cultish scientists. Their leader is a hyper-intelligent seer/visionary who has a personal philosophy that is taking him towards one final act—to produce a calamitous event that will destroy the lives of hundreds of people. Or more.

Dyke sets himself on a course to prevent this madman from achieving his ends. A course that endangers him, his new partner and it seems anyone else who gets in the way of this doomsday plan ...

So much pace it ended too soon. Another little gem from Keith Dixon - already ordering the most recent Dyke
Allan Redfern

Extract

+++I took another sip of my drink, then put it down. Greif carried with him such a sense of corruptibility that it was almost palpable. His haunches and backside squatted on my furniture with elephantine certainty, immovable, as though nothing I could say had sufficient weight to contradict him. To him, I was literally a lightweight.
+++I said, ‘Last night wasn’t a clever ploy, you know. It might have seemed like it, but it hasn’t worked.’
+++His expression didn’t change. ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’
+++‘Of course you don’t. I didn’t expect you to. I’m talking to entertain myself. But my colleague and I aren’t giving up so easily, if that’s what you thought would happen. We have clients as well as you do.’
+++‘I’m very happy for you. It’s good to have a job. Just practise it elsewhere from now on.’
+++‘Or what?’
+++‘Or I’ll be unhappy. And so will George and Spike.’
+++I almost laughed. ‘Spike? More like Beanpole. And tell Mr Bones that the next time I see his red hair in reach I’m going to grab a handful of it and put it through a wringer.’
+++‘That’s very colourful language. Did that bump on your head make you talk as though you’d swallowed a thesaurus?’