Twice the Trouble
A Novel
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- $25.99
Publisher Description
2025 SHAMUS AWARD WINNER, BEST FIRST P.I. NOVEL!
2025 EDGAR BEST FIRST NOVEL AWARD NOMINEE!
A private investigator follows a trail of blood and bodies to find his latest target–or die trying–in this riveting thriller perfect for fans of Jeffery Deaver and Mick Herron.
Noland Twice, a star athlete turned private investigator, can find anyone, no matter how far they run or how well they hide. He works the Orlando-Tampa corridor, a bizarre land where theme parks and tourists coexist with drug deals and crooked businessmen. When a shady local executive, Valkenburg, goes missing, Noland is the only man for the job.
Within hours of taking the case, Noland realizes nothing about this case is going to be easy, and he recruits his friend Kiril to help him with the dirty work when he finds a dead body. But the corpse isn’t the missing man–it’s the body of one of the partners of his construction firm. There’s only one clue as to Valkenburg’s whereabouts: a set of strange numbers hastily scrawled on the dead man’s arm.
When Noland discovers that the numbers are a set of GPS coordinates, he follows the trail to a construction site. At the exact location inscribed on the body, there’s a box buried in the dirt. Inside, he finds a handwritten journal–and a woman’s severed head.
Propulsive and unpredictable, this gritty P.I. thrill ride races through a criminal world where nothing is ever as it seems.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
When Noland Twice, the protagonist of Clifton's accomplished PI thriller debut, was 19, he was a star safety with the University of Florida's football team. After college, he excelled as a cop, and at one point boasted the best arrest record in Florida. Then a vengeful meth dealer framed Twice for drug possession. He swiftly lost his job and wound up spending two years in prison. Following his exoneration, Twice reinvented himself as a Central Florida gumshoe. Now, attorney Faith Carlton has retained him to trace Arthur Valkenberg, a partner in a massive Florida construction firm and suspected embezzler who's gone missing. Carlton hopes that tracking down Valkenberg might help exonerate her client, Frank Bisby, a partner at the firm who's been charged with fraud. Shortly after Twice starts investigating, he stumbles on a corpse in Valkenburg's apartment, transforming the missing persons case into something much more complex. Twice is a rough-but-lovable lead, neither too squeaky-clean nor too nasty to root for, and Clifton takes the central mystery in surprising and satisfying directions. Fans of Michael Kortya's Lincoln Perry series will be eager to spend more time with this memorable sleuth.
